The term “responsive environment” captures a vast territory of design dating from the 1970s. It is not a neologism invented to explain a trend in this period, but, as Larry D. Busbea shows, it was a recurrent concern of the protagonists collected in his book, who used either that exact formulation or some variation of it. The term calls upon cybernetic thinking from the time, a by-product of managerial techniques developed for industry around midcentury. Cyberneticians who had focused on the flow of information to control production appropriated that thinking also to describe the behavior of organisms through feedback loops. An organism’s action was a response to changes in its surroundings, they explained, but when the surroundings were altered by the organism’s action, that set off another response in the organism. The ecological loop thus formed between actions and reactions could, in turn, be represented as an electrical circuit, such that life itself appeared as a controlled flow of information. Yet the meaning of a responsive environment—rather than a responsive organism—remains elusive through Busbea’s cases, even while reflecting a widespread interest of that decade. In a welcome coincidence, the fogginess of the subject matter here supports the book’s argument.To tease out the various meanings of the responsive environment and its unique hold on the cultural imaginary at the time, Busbea follows a group of discourses produced by some well-known figures, such as Gyorgy Kepes, as well as those lesser known, such as Wolf Hilbertz. Synonyms for environment—context, surroundings, milieu—cut across the six chapters, while other terms also emerge, for example: pattern, perception, affordance, management, control, and response. The precise meaning of “an environment” for Busbea’s characters is thus constantly modified and never fixed, and wherever it goes, it appears to unsettle stable meanings as it moves across disciplines such as computer science, architecture, industrial management, and art.What accounts for the simultaneous convergence of this environmental interest and its associated illusive structure of meaning? And what is all this attention to responsive environments doing for design as its agents attempt to modify the “human” that sits at the end of the book’s subtitle? These are the questions that motivate Busbea’s narrative.The first chapter begins with the work of Serge Boutourline, who assisted Ray and Charles Eames with some exhibition designs and an amusement park for the Seattle World’s Fair of 1962 before venturing into various independent projects. Among these projects, Busbea explains, the concept of a responsive environment centered on a subject—a theoretical human. For example, a “feedback machine” of Boutourline’s invention called Videosketch included a video camera, processor, and monitor that perceived and produced light, was tested by Susan Buirge in her dance performances. Less intrinsically technical but similarly cybernetic in orientation was a diagrammatic plan that featured a distribution of elements installed in an exhibition, designed and published by Boutourline in 1967. In this plan, he traced the movements of a ten-year-old child ambulating through the gallery at various speeds, as evidence that a room’s organization around the child’s body denied its spatial stasis. In both cases, Videosketch and the exhibition plan, Busbea points to the way a human body’s motion could be captured, displayed, and used for the cause of making environments responsive.Busbea links such works to the writings of several thinkers who employed the language of environment and feedback. J. J. Gibson is one example, known for his work on perception and the concept of a “visual field,” which he used to embed the human body as a responsive and organizing entity within an indeterminate ecology of space and things. Another is Gregory Bateson, who, in his 1979 book Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, elaborated a theory of connections through patterns that “humanity” derives and collects over time.1 Busbea’s final example is, not surprisingly, the media maven Marshall McLuhan, who took patterns to be programmable and therefore fully within the purview of design. Busbea quotes the well-known text “The Invisible Environment,” where McLuhan synthesized Gibson and Bateson by pushing media beyond an “extension” of the human body to “the nervous system itself,” thereby transforming the environment into a potential circuit board for human communication.2The second chapter focuses closely on Edward T. Hall, who was emblematic of a McLuhanesque designer, particularly in his work on patterns as they relate to city life as well as managerial ideas on the efficiency of spatial layout. From The Silent Language (1959) to The Hidden Dimension (1966), in Busbea’s telling, Hall viewed human behavior as determined by subconscious (therefore silent and hidden) patterns.3 Patterns of behavior, particularly of movement, could be deduced from experiments conducted on laboratory rats in mazes as well as from observations of humans circulating through and using various parts of the built environment. It is disturbing, to say the least, that such analyses would become focused on inner cities in the United States and applied to comparisons of the behaviors of members of various races. The normalization of human behavior looms like a cloud over this chapter, as Hall accommodated the biases held by social elites through scientific studies that he considered helpful but present-day readers will find eerie. He collected his recommendations in his 1974 Handbook for Proxemic Research, from which Busbea recounts an obnoxious project for the YMCA JOBS program in Chicago.4 Hall constructed an artificial office to observe and correct working-class African Americans in interview situations. He then studied behavior patterns of the inhabitants at the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis and advised corporate management on the layout of the John Deere Headquarters in Moline, Illinois, putting “proxemics” increasingly at the center of an architectural language related to behavior, environment, and feedback. Hall defined the office interior with words like “slots,” “fences,” and “territory,” making it an explicit site for declarations of ownership and assertions of hierarchical power. In this case, the alliance of responsive environments with cultural dominance serves as a cautionary tale.Some familiar figures in art and architectural history populate the third chapter, which has the same title as the book and is less directly related to the economies of work or social life. Here, Frederick Kiesler’s invention of “correalism” and the publications of Gyorgy Kepes through the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT open the door to what Busbea calls the “avant-garde environment.” Indeed, MIT served as a hub for artists’ and architects’ collaborations in this domain, and even hosted the first critique of the movement by Nicholas Negroponte, who, as Busbea quotes, found “responsive environments … very, very suspect, because we don’t know how they should respond. We all feel they ought to respond, but the only examples are the most banal, second-rate light shows” (130).5 Negroponte nevertheless engaged in a 1972 workshop titled “The Responsive House,” where the illusory quality of the ambition became central to the group’s discussion.Perhaps the strangest case collected in the book is featured in the fourth chapter, which centers on the Soft Control Material designed by Avery R. Johnson and Warren M. Brodey, who founded the Environmental Ecology Laboratory in 1967. This “material” is quite fascinatingly immaterial in that it was never realized. It was meant to work in synergy with an organism that it would both learn from and teach, thereby altering its behavior as an aggregate body. The proposed substance would breathe and pulse because it was made up of various cell structures stitched together with servomechanisms to produce what the inventors called, after the cybernetician Gordon Pask, a “chemical computer.” The material was never applied for commercial purposes, but the various patents reveal the seriousness of the experiment as an application of computers beyond software and into soft tissue. Holding intellectual property on such speculative proposals also indicates an emerging desire to capture potential knowledge products, a sort of analogue to present-day “start-ups.” The fifth chapter, titled “Cybertecture,” locates another odd set of characters and their products, called man–environment systems, on which Wolf Hilbertz and his students collaborated at the University of Texas at Austin in the early 1970s. Their work was coded in a visual language of fantasy and science fiction layered over with a New Age utopia that Busbea notes would make their project “frankly, impossible” (184).The final chapter moves from the impossible to the actual, as it ties the preceding research to the architectural production and cultural writings of Paolo Soleri. Soleri, too, appreciated New Age discourse, founding Arcosanti as a refuge for psychological fulfillment. Busbea rightly points to this modern cult as building on well-known tropes in the history of modern architecture and design regarding the improvement of the self by aesthetic means. This is clearly suggested by his stated aim “to create outsides that might improve human insides” (210). Beginning with an agora-like building in the form of a large barrel vault, made of reinforced concrete and open at both ends, Soleri’s constructions often sought to frame views of the Arizona desert. Future constructions were more monumental, such as Crafts III, composed in a Brutalist language of modular frames that housed spaces for workshops and apartments for residents. As a modern cult of New Age environmentalism, with some monuments, Soleri’s work represents a fitting conclusion to the book’s lineage of responsive environments, and to its particular assemblage of research on the 1970s. Soleri envisioned his cities, as Busbea writes, “as the end point of a teleological sequence of the coevolution of natural systems and consciousness itself” (227).With mysticism so visibly intertwined with architecture, it might be hard to recognize the legacy of the responsive environment in our daily lives. Such designers sought to produce an interface of interactivity, but they could not anticipate the transformation of the all-encompassing nature of their interests into a worldview. It is something of a relief to see these strange visions embodied in dance, soft materials, and desert utopias as the responsive environment becomes increasingly digitized. Busbea’s book is a welcome prehistory of interactivity, one that makes our present no longer feel either inevitable or doomed to repetition. Reading this book today can help us see the present as an unnecessary normalization of a responsive consumer environment: on-demand delivery of nearly anything we can imagine and the instant gratification of social media may be only some inheritances of the mystical utopianism of the 1970s.