Two intertwined principles: the refusal of prescriptive planning and the conception of architecture as an open skeletal frame. The second principle dismantles the authority of the master plan and hands decision-making back to inhabitants, proposing a self-organizing city where use precedes form. The eighth principle, by recasting architecture as an infrastructural grid awaiting “fillers,” seeds both the megastructure and the plug-in imagination later expanded by Archigram, the Metabolists, and the GIAP. What emerges is a delicate dialectic: order as an enabling scaffold, freedom as a continuous inflection of that order. Friedman’s work exposes this evolutionary tension—variation grounded in invariance, chance tempered by structure—revealing a proto-adaptive urbanism where the city is not a finished object but a fluctuating field shaped by its inhabitants’ desires and temporalities.
