Masterplanning the Adaptive City

210
PETER TRUMMER, BERLAGE INSTITUTE
The site for this project is the former Aspern airfield, located in the suburbs of Vienna. The
intention is for a population of 20,000 to live and work there.

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211
THE MEGABLOCK, AND AGGREGATION OF STREETS
Architectural
prototypes of the mega-
block and the street.

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212
PETER TRUMMER, BERLAGE INSTITUTE
The process of actualization of the mega-block and the streets on the site. Due to the gradient
land value of the site, the mega-block transforms its internal organization, its size, and the
number of different typological units. Correspondingly, the street transforms its sequential
character of densities, typologies, and morphology.

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213
THE MEGABLOCK, AND AGGREGATION OF STREETS
Models demonstrating
the intensive field of
mega-blocks and the
aggregation of streets.

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Principal Investigator: Tom Verebes
Research Assistants: Nathan Melenbrink, Li Bin, Kenneth Sit Hoi Chang
This University Grants Council-funded research project, conducted over a two-year
period, was led by Tom Verebes at the University of Hong Kong. The team of
Research Assistants were central to the development of this project, especially
Nathan Melenbrink, who helped propel the design research work in Rhino/
Grasshopper. It is at once a design research project concerning advanced
technology, and a project which seeks to rethink the conceptual and intellectual
arena of contemporary design methodologies within the disciplines of
architecture, urban design, and masterplanning. As an alternative approach to
conventional design processes, the focus of this project is the development of
computational design technologies for the design of urban systems, within an
intellectually disciplined academic context. Computational approaches to
urbanism engage with a complexity of factors, contingencies, and responsibilities
related to the design of large-scale architectural projects, urban design, and
masterplanning. As a challenge to the static nature of masterplanning, this
provides an information-driven understanding of urban growth, change,
densification, and time-based long-term development.  
CASE STUDY
THE UNIVERSITY OF HONG
KONG >ENDURANCE AND
OBSOLESCENCE TOOLBOX:
STUDIES OF ADAPTABLE 
MASTERPLANNING
2009–2011
Arrays differentiating
massing volumes, their
proximity and
orientation. 

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215
ENDURANCE AND OBSOLESCENCE TOOLBOX
Array of a 500-meter by 500-meter swatch of massing carved away by solar angles as a
generator for a dense urbanism into which daylight can penetrate.

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216
UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG RESEARCH TEAM
Plan and views of arrays of three-dimensional differentiated fields of building massing, reading
a two-dimensional graphic field to generate distributed abstract urban patterns. 

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04
217
ENDURANCE AND OBSOLESCENCE TOOLBOX

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Arrays of urban road
patterns on a steep
topography.
218
UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG RESEARCH TEAM

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219
ENDURANCE AND OBSOLESCENCE TOOLBOX
Arrays of building
massing deployed in
relation to topography.

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IV
PROJECTIONS
PROTOTYPING MULTIPLE FUTURES 

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This chapter critiques the legacy of standardization of material practices,
shifting from repetitive production toward increasing customization of spaces,
systems, and experiences. Prototyping technologies, now commonplace as
recursive methods in the design of small-scale objects and building, are
investigated as the basis for harnessing complexity at the scale of the city.
Control is understood neither as a constraining regime nor as standardization,
but rather as an experimental mode of testing multiple urban futures.
Architectural typology is not viewed as stable and fixed but open to
transformation and repositioning. Promoting innovation and experimentation,
this final chapter elaborates an argument for heterogeneous and high-quality
architecture, which balances endurance and change, longevity and
adaptability.
18.1 NEW PROTOTYPICAL PRACTICES
From the standpoint of the second decade of the twenty-first century, it now 
seems clear that in the twentieth century standardized production methods and
materials, coupled with a throwaway culture in construction, led to a decrease 
in the lifespan of buildings.
1
Such standardized production has in the past two
decades been challenged by a small, experimental, globally distributed culture of
computational designers who have shifted their attention to materialization. 
An implication of this project to actualize the virtual is a high degree of control 
and precision. Unlike the twentieth century paradigm of control as being the
mastery of standards and efficiencies, our current industrial paradigm is one of
computational control, put to work to harness and manage complexity, and to
deliver it. The practice of urbanism in this century will forge a critical link between
architecture, landscape architecture, infrastructure, and the city. 
The fact that, for architects, the discovery of their decline as ideologists, 
the awareness of the enormous technological possibilities available for
rationalizing cities and territories, coupled with the daily spectacle of their
waste, and the fact that specific design methods become outdated even
before it is possible to verify their underlying hypotheses in reality, all create
an atmosphere of anxiety.
Manfredo Tafuri, 1976
2
Monotony has been, for much of the last century, the default effect of
standardization, while variety was rare. Consider the main innovation of Henry
Ford, that of the assembly line for making Ford’s Model T cars, and its ensuing
impact on twentieth-century production. This single innovation contributed
substantively to a new model of standardized production. In which ways can
computational methods of material production “narrow the gap between
representation and building,” or from file to factory production?
3
Interestingly,
contemporary prototyping tools come from the automotive industry and industrial
design, but the question here is one of scale—we are concerned with extra-large
CHAPTER 18
TOM VEREBES > ENDURANCE,
OBSOLESCENCE, AND THE
ADAPTIVE CITY

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