AbstractThe onset of digital technologies is often cited as the determining force behind the recent paradigm shift in architecture. Here, Antonino Saggio makes the case for interactivity. He argues that it is interactivity rather than hardware or software that has been the essential catalyst, providing the fundamental precepts underlying contemporary communications and bringing with it a new configuring of relationships in which the subject takes centre stage and shifts the object to the periphery. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.