'Only connect!' Despite the proliferation of interactivity technologies for domestic spaces, current commercial models for the smart house remain focused on the supply of gizmos and multimedia flatscreens. What is the design potential for connectivity in the home? Mike Weinstock asks how interactive technologies might achieve a new level of topographical and environmental change and enhance the spaces in which we live. The coupling of space, technology and domesticity is part of our architectural legacy, an unregarded inheritance that extends beyond the machine a habiter of Le Corbusier. It includes the spatial differentiation of the Raumplan of Loos, the continuous connectivity of space of Mies, the transformable space of Rietveld's Schroder House, and the source of Modernist theory, the traditional Japanese House. These concepts are persistent, but rarely considered to be relevant today, and the slow reduction of the phenomenal complexity of the Modernist spatial agenda in favour of a simplified goal of efficiency of means and functions has brought us to a condition in which the union of interactivity and the idea of a home are seen as unlikely collaborators.
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