Radical Contingency

Strategy and Tactics in Architectural Design

Abstract

While narratives tend to present architectures as coherent results of a plot, with precise roles and relations, actual projects are more like the conjuncture of various trajectories: involving actors, factors, aims, preferences, good (and bad) intentions. Tracing all those elements is almost impossible, but sailing through them is mandatory. The paper inquire into how architectural design can exploit the potential deriving by the radical contingency of all process, by changing the way we look at it: no more as a flaw of the plot, but as its main richness. This means looking at architectural design as a floating sequence of strategies and tactics aimed to achieve the project, seeking for prospective alternatives in the facticity of the process. Such potentialities are to be investigated in projects of all scales, in any moment of the process, in order for architects to be able to maintain their creative, purposeful and formative role.