Masterplanning the Adaptive City

Informational diagrams have become the basis for most of the preeminent
contemporary design approaches in architecture and urbanism. Termed by the
Burrys “nongeometric diagrams,” these notational systems chart relationships
between spaces, activities, and events, some of which are not wholly predictable.
As a shift from a “critique of the power of the plane and gravitational vector 
in mainstream Modernism,” today’s interest in topology leads us to consider
distributed networks. This, the Burrys argue, “is a fundamentally different space in
which to live.”
21
The emphasis here is on the relevance of topology to the study as
well as the making of the city—the ultimate transformational space. Topology is
therefore a way of understanding, and modeling, urban change. As we have seen,
cities exist within global networks, local and internal relationships, and are
essentially always in transition. In this light, topology turns out to be a fertile arena
for researching approaches to understanding existing urban conditions, and
projecting ideas of urbanism into the future.
Over two decades, design culture has developed an enduring fascination
with surface complexities. Architectural discourse continues to grapple with the
theoretical consequences. Many of the projects presented in this book interrogate
aspects of the use of topological instruments for urbanism. At stake here is the
possibility of a noncompositional approach to urbanism which embeds change in
the formation and transformation of urban organization.
18.3 ICONS AND INNOVATION
Despite the global financial crisis unfolding over the last five years, architects 
and urbanists, whether avant garde or “rear garde,” are still aiming to satisfy the
“market driven appetite for more and ever more complex and formally exotic
buildings.”
22
Iconic architecture, as it has become known, challenges conventions,
and enables experimentation and innovation. To deny the world its icons renders 
it grayscale, strips it of color. “Background buildings” are always in the plural
(though the notion of a background and foreground is one of emphasis), but the
transformative building that “fully transcends its specialized context—that is, that
challenges and intervenes within developments taking place across an entire
society”—remains rare.
23
The history of architecture has been a history of iconic,
230
TOM VEREBES
Morphological model 
of proposed fabric
inserted into the
historic fabric of the
Old Town of Shanghai.
(Studio Tutor: Tom
Verebes; Student:
Claire Yuen; MArch II
Studio, HKU-Harvard GSD
Joint Studio, 
Types,
Prototypes and Systems,
The University of Hong
Kong, 2009)

---

seminal moments, and in order to maintain a meaningful history cities need to
invest in cultural production, even if some of that culture stands out.
Many architects have outlined the terms upon which architecture should be
redefined, and hence arrived at a description of the “new” role of the architect. 
In order to chart the future and to innovate, designers need to be in “literal and
continual modulation of, and communication with, social and historical process.”
24
Innovation has cultural dimensions which go beyond an understanding of design
as finding solutions to given problems. As Speaks claims, problem-solving
approaches to design provide “answers without questioning the problem given,
and therefore [add] nothing new,” whereas innovation “interrogates and reforms
the problem given and adds value by creating new knowledge and new products
not anticipated in the problem.”
25
Unlike the modernist masters, today’s
“experimental architecture practices [are] compelled by the need to innovate, to
create solutions to problems the larger implications of which have not yet been
formulated.”
26
The important advances being made in computational design in architecture,
and their “affordances and efficiencies,” are leading global urbanism to valorize
the icon. Innovations in our ability to model and manage complexity represent a
paradigm shift, in that we are now able “to generate design variants which break
from Fordism,” and inevitably can “more rapidly conceive, explore, describe and
construct non-standard projects within the real world constraints of economy,
materiality and function.”
27
Schumacher describes elegance in design work as that
which “achieves a reduction of visual complexity, thereby preserving an underlying
organizational complexity.”
28
Elegance is therefore not simplicity but rather
differentiation, qualified and ordered. Organizational complexity is comprised of
the modulation of quantities related to component parts in continuously iterative
spatial logics. 
231
ENDURANCE, OBSOLESCENCE, AND THE ADAPTIVE CITY
Section of proposed
urbanism within a thick
ground and deep tower.
(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)

---

The city, according to Steven Johnson, is an environment which “squelches
new ideas . . . effortlessly,” and which, for historical reasons, is “powerfully suited
for the creation, diffusion and adoption of good ideas.”
29
Johnson identifies
numerous modes in which innovations are generally made, often relying on
platforms of collaboration, and on serendipity, error, or misappropriation. Urbanity
is a motor for new ideas, technologies, practices, and spaces. If the world is
changing quickly, it seems designers need to ride these transitions and to learn
better how to adapt to an evolving world. One thing is sure: ignorance is the enemy
of insight—it creates complacency instead of proactivity, and gives space to
conservatives who lobby against innovation without a clue that they are doing it.
18.4 CONTROL, RESILIENCE, AND CHANGE
In organic planning, one thing leads to another, and what began as the
seizure of an accidental advantage may prompt a strong element in a 
design, which an a-priori plan could not anticipate, and in all probability
would overlook or rule out . . . . Organic planning does not begin with a
preconceived goal: it moves from need to need, from opportunity to
232
TOM VEREBES
View of proposed
interconnected towers
in Wan Chai, Hong Kong.
(Studio Tutor: Tom
Verebes; Thesis
Student: Gordon Fu Kin
Fai; Thesis Student:
Cheung Chun Chi; MArch
Thesis, The University
of Hong Kong, 2010)

---