Masterplanning the Adaptive City

constituted by formal resemblance, [and] type is a product of moral imitation.”
12
Julien Guadet’s Éléments et théories of 1894 set out to describe the functional
elementalism of proto-modern architecture, aligning modern functional
hierarchies with classical typological organization. This was a way of breaking
down the parts of a building into their elemental characteristics, rather than
viewing architecture as rooted in compositional strategies.
13
Here, the relation of
function and a given type is static and does not evolve. Aldo Rossi and the Italian
rationalists, nearly half a century ago, made associations between this notion of
the model and material history in the city, using the historic artefacts present in
the city—which Rossi called “permanences,” and which call on the collective
memory of citizens—as a means of understanding and defining urbanism, rather
than the functionalism of the modernists. Christopher Lee warns against the use of
type with “an overreliance on precedents [which lead] to repetition and imitation,”
and rather highlights how “if type is an idea, its material manifestation and
expression can take on many forms.”
14
When we study forms, the organic ones in particular, nowhere do we find
permanence, repose or termination.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1806
15
Topology is a branch of mathematics concerned with the qualitative spatial
attributes of geometry, and how spatial properties are invariant under continuous
deformation or transformation. All topologies are geometries, but not all geometric
figures are topological. Topological spaces undergo transformation such that they
“lose all metric and projective characteristics, but retain their topological identity”
through transitions from one state to another. It was Leibniz, in the seventeenth
century, who first studied problems of spatial analysis, which formed the roots of
modern topology; Henri Poincaré is often credited as founder of the field. Leonhard
Euler’s often-cited solution to the Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem—which
was to identify a route through the city that involved traversing each bridge only
once—is a topological solution, and possibly the first conception of an urban
network diagram.
16
In fact, Euler’s “solution” of 1735 is not a solution but rather 
the presentation of a new problem or paradigm, establishing “a new geometry of
position” which represents a “distinction from metrical Euclidean or Cartesian
geometry” through nodes in a scale-free network.
17
The relation of typology to topology, the study of transformation, is key to 
re-defining type as a plastic, morphologically adaptable condition where
information contained in the model or diagram is not stable but in transition,
and is also re-formed each time it is deployed. Topology does not replace the
functional–performative contingencies of typology as a form of classification; 
it is not stable and absolute, rather it is in transitional, in-between states.
18
A hylomorphic model, according to Peter Trummer, “has clear directionality of how
matter moves into form.”
19
Trummer counters the essentialism of the hylomorph,
as instructions for a facsimile, with the Deleuzian idea of multiplicity. The
biological notion of speciation in breeding was employed by Foreign Office
Architects as a system of classification for the diagramming of their projects 
as an evolutionary, phylogenic tree. In this system of taxonomy, “projects are not
something designed but a breed of a particular species,” in opposition to the
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ENDURANCE, OBSOLESCENCE, AND THE ADAPTIVE CITY

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notion of type as “eternal and static.”
20
Here, organizational attributes come from
rules which form types and their variants. 
Contemporary computational design approaches aid speculations on
culturally specific spatial paradigms, patterns, and topologies, and have given rise
to innovations on default typological models, in the form of recent architectural
experimentation involving differentiated volumetric and surface conditions.
Mathematical models provide the basis for understanding architectural objects 
as the result of the interaction of information and forces on “rubber sheet
geometries,” involving “transformational events” and discontinuities. Various
topological themes continue to be explored by computational designers, including
embedding, homology, topological equivalence, immersion, minimal surfaces,
multidimensional spaces, and non-orientable surfaces, among others. Numerous
architects in the 1990s played out topological fetishes involving objects such as
the Möbius strip, the Klein bottle, knots, and holes, which provided the basis for
computational modeling of architectural spaces. Typological modeling need not 
be a fixed, formulaic mode of perpetuating normative spatial conditions, rather it
can be the diagrammatic basis for innovations borne from a topological or
transformational approach, as a generator of complex yet legible differentiated
morphologies. Form, then, is a mathematical notion which emerges through
transformational dynamics.
228
TOM VEREBES
Diagrams of an
evolutionary series of
solid models with void,
and a set of tectonic
systems explaining
their architectural
potential. (Studio
Tutor: Tom Verebes;
Students: Mak Wing Sze,
Li Ho Chun, Li Tsz Man;
MArch I Studio, 
Go West
Chongqing, The
University of Hong
Kong, 2011)

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229
ENDURANCE, OBSOLESCENCE, AND THE ADAPTIVE CITY
Series of
differentiated spatial
models generated from
torsion and topological
holes in three
dimensions. (Studio
Tutor: Tom Verebes;
Students: Rochana
Chaugule, Yevgeniya
Pozigun, Ujjal Roy,
Praneet Verma;
Architectural
Association, 2009)

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