The integrated circuit industry continues to progress rapidly deepening the gap in between the technological break- throughs and the electronic design automation industry. This gap is even more problematic in the context of physical design, the last automation level between applications and the technology. The challenges of meeting the physical and performance constraints needs innovation at the algorithmic level, and at the methodological level. This study presents a methodological approach to physical design automation relying on model-driven engineering. Relying on the flexibility, and adaptability of the Smalltalk environment we propose an agile framework enabling fast physical design tool-flow prototyping. We illustrate our ap- proach by using the Madeo FPGA toolkit as a legacy code-base that is incrementally changed to adopt this model- driven development strategy.