A Brief Pre-History of Houses Who Tweet

There are currently only a few houses who use social media. But with the increasing availability of inexpensive hardware, and prolific networked software, the number of houses who actively communicate online in one way or another is sure to grow. An examination of some tweeting house types from within the context of architecture history and theory reveals some models for how this social architecture might develop.This paper shows that tweeting houses raise concerns that are solidly within the set of questions traditionally addressed by architecture. The tweeting house’s existence depends on acts of translation between different media, some managed by a designer, some automated. The tweeting house actively presents social and tectonic affordances that offer opportunities for engagement, functional and otherwise. And finally, tweeting houses raise issues about the public, external representation of a set of private, internal conditions, some of them personal to the house’s occupants, some of them intended for broader reading. This paper will use examples from the history of architecture, adjacent design disciplines, computer science, science fiction, and hybrid example projects that partake of all of these fields, to show that while the house with a social media account is a unique and new techno-architectural possibility, it is not without history or precedent.