Marble and Fairbanks

• Price: $17.95
• Paperback—160 pages (1997)
• ISBN-13: 978-1-891197-36-6
• ISBN-10: 1-891197-37-1
• Dimensions: 6.5" x 9"
• © 2005 The Regents of the University of Michigan, Marble Fairbanks

Editor: Luke Bulman

Copy Editors: Polly Koch

Design: Thumb Projects, New York

Sample Selection

Bootstrapping is about generative growth. It is a process that utilizes a small amount of energy, or input, to trigger larger, successively ore complex processes. In colloquial social terms, bootstrapping refers to the ability of the disenfranchised to rise up despite dominant power structures. In its more recent use as a technological term, it refers to hardwired circuits that enable organic generative growth (i.e., the small amount of software hardwired into computers that allows the installation of further software). For an architecture practice, bootstrapping suggests an approach that places renewed significance on the discrete and specific material and organizational decisions that are made within an expansive and increasingly connected global context—a globalism in which the dominant tendencies of large institutions overshadow the effect of the individual actions that collectively make up those institutions. Bootstrapping is the identification of strategic connections to the vast network of surrounding potentialities that allow an architectural project to be generative—for endpoints of a design process to continually evolve from, or completely transcend, their origins. Bootstrapping requires looking intensely at how architecture operates in the world after design (after the architect) so as to identify patterns of performance that then feed back into subsequent designs.