Looking back, the major documents that describe the features of architectural responses are those written by Nicholas Negroponte. Negroponte's work, the most important parts of which are published in his books called, "The Architecture Machine", 1970; "The Soft Architecture Machine", 1975; and his multiple papers entitled "The Semantics of Architecture Machines", of 1970; comprise the first significant attempts to define and produce a responsive architecture. Within his work, Negroponte proposes that responsive architecture is the natural product of the integration of computing power into built spaces and structures. He also extends this belief to include the concepts of recognition, intention, contextual variation, and meaning into computed responses and their successful and ubiquitous integration into architecture. This cross-fertilization of ideas lasted for about eight years.

This paper results from the struggle that this author has had to develop a current model of responsive architecture that extends Negroponte's original work with recent developments. It will propose a very simple model of architecture, designed to separate the components of buildings into two main classes of parts - the serviced spaces that we occupy and the external shells that shelter us. It will then propose how each of these parts may be controlled, focusing upon the examples of a responsive building envelope (or structure) and a responsive internal partition system. The proposed control model, will inform a framework upon which a variety of mechanisms suitable to controlling responsive architectures, in intelligent ways, may hang. Finally, the paper will also propose how several responsive buildings may be networked together to produce intelligent clusters of buildings that solve larger responsive problems.