Masterplanning the Adaptive City

architect’s point of view, the intense urbanization of China is resulting in
countless uniform cities that are spatially homogenous and repetitive.
Urbanism is still being conceived from outmoded planning mechanisms
and organizational models aligned to a Fordist model of standardized
production. Computational design and production systems may help to
instill compelling differences in the countless cities across the nation. I am
interested how Chinese cities in the future can be differentiated to local
historic, cultural, geographic, and environmental specificities. Given
China’s trajectory toward globalization and internationalization, will China
find a means with which to evolve more unique, heterogeneous attributes to
cities? How do you foresee new modes of nonstandard production to
influence Chinese cities to develop particular, identifiable features in the
coming decades?
SYS
These are important questions. Firstly, when development happens without
urban planning, different regions develop different social and material
culture, food, language, building typologies, and technologies, as a model of
diversity. China had a clear hierarchical structure in empire times, which
brought about many local and regional differences in architecture, towns,
and cities, but by now much local culture has become extinct. We need to
protect traditional values and culture. Secondly, cities are identical because
of the technologies used to design them. When we had hand-made cities,
made from bricks and wood, we used to cut our own symbols on houses, to
literally draw your own stories on your house. Now everything has become
machine made and mass produced. I see this only as infrastructure. In the
housing prototype I was describing earlier, we are conceiving architecture
made from four systems: skin, skeleton, infill, and the MEP systems. The
skeleton of the city can be more like infrastructure, and separated from the
infill system. The skin can integrate the diversities of the climate, culture,
community, and individuals. The infill part adapts to users’ requirements, and
could have a life cycle of ten to twenty years, but the skeleton can have a life
cycle of one hundred to two hundred years, and the skin thirty to fifty years.
TV
I recall the influence of Plug-In City by Archigram in the mid-1960s, which
developed a model of a structural frame and infrastructure of the city within
which people can customize space, or move it elsewhere. It seems, though,
you are proposing this building prototype on an even larger scale of urban
infrastructure. 
SYS
I am suggesting cities can behave in a more soft and supple mode. It has
become very difficult these days to define cultural character. Looking back
to history, contemporary Italian architecture has changed from ancient
times. We should not misuse historical forms. We should make the city
more able to adapt to change. 
TV
Through working on an intelligent approach to the design life of buildings,
your aim in this project is to develop the ability for the city, through your
prototype, to absorb change over long durations, to avoid obsolescence,
wasteful demolition and constantly new construction. The intention is 
also to prevent architecture from being overly generic or disposable by
extending a network approach to the city, because network topologies adapt
well to changing conditions.
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SU YUNSHENG WITH TOM VEREBES

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SYS
These issues are at the core of why cities have become so similar. In China,
we are having serious discussions about who has the right to make
decisions. In traditional cities, each family follows regulations when 
they build their house. These regulations include the color of roofs, the
numbers of south-facing rooms, while there are other freedoms, such as the
dimensions of buildings and the numbers of courtyards. If you let people
make decisions, they will follow each other, and new languages will emerge.
Localities create character, although they might not be beautiful, but they
are at least features.
TV
It’s interesting to contrast the traditional and contemporary worlds,
globalization to local conditions, uniformity to uniqueness. I think the only
risk is to say that in the past when the world was not globalized there was
more cultural difference, and we now have too much uninformed nostalgia
for looking back. What is needed is to find local articulations of difference
with our contemporary industrial paradigms, without relying upon
references such as traditional roofs to establish a cultural identity in the
architecture of the city. In this vast country it will be fascinating to see how
Chinese urbanism will be differentiated in the future, and how future cities
might avoid the homogenizing tendencies of today’s urbanism. Despite the
force of globalization, it is the vitality of the differences between cities
which remains compelling. 
SYS
As a last point, I am interested in how parametric design can make housing
different, as we tried to demonstrate in our project for the Shenzhen
Biennale.
TV
One of the ways in which computational design, broadly speaking, and
parametric design especially, can address these issues is spatial
differentiation, based on local information informing universal systems.
SYS
Still, I think we come back to the question of who makes decisions, 
the users or the single designer or commissioner. Diversity comes from
bottom-up systems. This is what we’re trying to do.
TV
We’re both trying!  
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CONVERSATION 5

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