Stefano Benatti

Considering the Strategy of Programmatic Indeterminacy: Urban Design Between Prescription and the Offering of Opportunity Stefano Benatti

To strengthen architecture, this work proposes something that would apparently detract from its force, by evolving the project?s control techniques, generally based on totalitarian designs. For such designs inevitably risk mutilation and are often illusory and fallible. The difficulties present in their forms of control are exposed by the real dynamics of construction and use. This study proposes the concept of an open project, focused on diverse superposed programs and uses, capable of reducing the author?s own aura, of accepting the increasing articulation of consultants of every contemporary project and that strategically manages to be used. The analysis is limited to an intermediate urban scale, as the relational dimension par excellence and the urban place of tension and exchange. As an articulation of program indeterminacy strategies, the study analyzes the Neo-Situationist tendencies in the contemporary urban design scene, in urban policies and collective events interpreting the city as the theatrical stage for the event. To investigate new experimental statuses for urban space, the cases are chosen for their capacity to create urban vitality in a playful and subversive key.