Masterplanning the Adaptive City

architecture, urban design, and vast urban areas, rather than car parts or
consumer goods. 
Prototyping methodologies have a long history in industrial and product
design, robotics and interaction design, and the automotive, naval, aerospace, 
and other industries, and this approach to developing viable products is quickly
becoming firmly embedded in the contemporary design arena, in both avant-garde
and mainstream architectural practice. Contemporary prototyping tools arrived as
imports from these parallel design disciplines, and their value within all design
disciplines today lies in their ability to test computational systems through a series
of “hard” physical prototypes. Prototyping in any field aims for progressive
updating and optimization via feedback from demonstrations of performance,
evaluated in relation to predefined project criteria. These evolutionary design
methods, in which the prototype is a design instrument, differ from the notion of 
a model as an ultimate representation of a final design proposal. Prototyping
enables recursive and iterative workflows, rather than linear design methods
focussed on singular outcomes, of which facsimiles can easily be reproduced. 
The shift from an empirical, tradition-bound technics to an experimental
mode has opened up such new realms as those of nuclear energy,
supersonic transportation, cybernetic intelligence, and instantaneous distant
communication. 
Lewis Mumford, 1944
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224
TOM VEREBES
Computational models
presented as an
alternative to Le
Corbusier’s 
Domino
House model, which
drove architectural
production throughout
the twentieth century.
(Studio Tutor: Tom
Verebes; Students:
Kwong Yan Kit Kyle, Sit
Hoi Chang Kenneth, Yang
Hui Bella, Yu Hun Yan
Krist; MArch I Studio,
Go West Chongqing, The
University of Hong
Kong, 2011)

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The second machine age, which Reyner Banham claims flowered briefly in the
“Fabulous Sixties,” vaunted “miniaturisation, transistorisation, jet and rocket
travel, wonder drugs and new domestic chemistries, television and the computer.”
5
More of the same for machine enthusiasts, or the foundation of things to come?
Fuller’s notions of technology transfer, as seen in the airplane fuselage techniques
applied to his Dymaxion House and developed over a lifetime of geodesic
prototypes, were paralleled by innovations pursued by Jean Prouvé in his transfer
of steel aeronautical structures to airplane hangars and furniture, and later by Ray
and Charles Eames’s bentwood furniture produced using their “Kazam” machine
to bend plywood on molds which had been adapted from military technology for
producing leg splints. Gilbert Simondon, the French philosopher of technology,
theorized processes of molding, often associated with repetitive, uniform products,
as “continuous temporal modulation.”
6
Modulation, for Simendon, was achieved
through the electrification of material in the molding process. As Spuybroek
highlights, “when seen from a broader perspective . . . variable modulation
liberates the mould from the doom of identical copies, in which design work is
done and the execution is purely atemporal.”
7
Here we see the potential for
variability, or customization, in the fabrication process, yielding a differentiated
series of results rather than the uniformity of the standardized production which
began in the nineteenth century and continued throughout the twentieth century.
In effect, it is the coding of difference, which allows any production process to
provide for modulation. This is not mere replication with a predetermined degree
of variation, rather quantitatively differentiated coding gives rise to products which
are qualitatively different. 
As a methodology, today’s prototyping practices may also lead to more than
a new material paradigm. The repercussions extend to the globalized city, and the
networks which enable the flow of knowledge and material resources within a new
model of production. Prototypes help to create “design intelligence,” enabling
designers to call upon the flow of new, aggregated knowledge for future projects.
8
They allow designers to learn, from successes and especially from mistakes.
Simulation, testing, analysis, and feedback using ubiquitous digital and material
media requires learning new codes, protocols, and procedures. Innovation
therefore involves striving for insight in the present, and change in the future.
Innovation can come about serendipitously, accidentally, through error, or through
the consolidation of groups which share knowledge, and thus gain intelligence. 
225
ENDURANCE, OBSOLESCENCE, AND THE ADAPTIVE CITY
Two 1:10 scale material
prototypes, in laser-
cut MDF, for a series
of urban pavilions,
West Kowloon Cultural
District, Hong Kong.
(Studio Tutor: Tom
Verebes; Thesis
Student: Cheung Chun
Chi; MArch Thesis, The
University of Hong
Kong, 2012)

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Long before computational urbanism could be theorized, Frei Otto proposed
“the art of urban development” as a new kind of “non-living nature” requiring
expertise in the “present state and the possibilities of technology.”
9
John Fraser,
who conducted research into “predictive planning models” with his Architectural
Association (AA) students in the early 1990s, focussed on an adaptive and
responsive set of behaviors with which to forecast future urban conditions, and,
importantly, how they are differentiated and how they evolve.
10
Around the same
time, Jeffrey Kipnis and Bahram Shirdel, together with the AA graduate design
program, launched the basis for an inclusive, heterogeneous, and adaptive
urbanism. 
What are the consequences of prototypical practices for urbanism? Given 
the inevitable paradigm shift from a model of standardized production, in which
uniformity and repetition are by-products of globalization, prototyping at the scale
and complexity of the city raises some compelling questions for models of
planning. The notion of the urban project as a prototype of the future charges
urbanism, as a discipline, with scheming multiple futures, testing their
performance, evaluating, de-bugging, and adapting them to new, changing criteria.
What, then, is the potential of computational prototyping methods for creating
diverse and differentiated cities?
18.2 TYPOLOGICAL VARIANTS AND TOPOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATIONS
The word type presents less the image of a thing to copy or imitate
completely than the idea of an element which ought itself to serve as a rule
for the model. 
Quatremère de Quincy, 1825
11
Quatremère de Quincy, whose theories on type were set out in his Encyclopédie
méthodique in the late eighteenth century, made a distinction between an idea and
a model. This can also be understood as the difference between a “copy” and an
“imitation,” where the model “is not to be misinterpreted as an exact copy, but is
226
TOM VEREBES
The porosity of the
pavilion is generated
from simulations of
solar radiation, in a
design process which
charges decisions with
evaluation and
feedback. (Studio
Tutor: Tom Verebes;
Thesis Student: Cheung
Chun Chi; MArch Thesis,
The University of Hong
Kong, 2012)

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