Unexpected made natural. Turning the project into a tactical tool

All crises produce shocks, changing people’s perception of life, habits, and rights. In systems theory terms, we could state that, during a crisis, people start marking a distinction between the past and the future, noticing transformations previously ignored. Two attitudes emerge: a nostalgic one, pretending to go back to normal as soon as possible, avoiding any changing; and a revolutionary one, claiming that nothing will be the same as before and asking for stronger changings. But things do not stay unvaried, nor do they overturn: the future happens together with the evolution of people. There is a continuous shifting we are not even aware of, and which becomes noticeable only at a critical distance. This is especially true about space and its perception. But not all transformations are good: some of them appear to be forced and artificial, and end up being rejected by people, while others appear to happen in a natural way. This highlights the weakness of traditional design, which uses projects as prescriptive models for the future. Again using systems theory, we could say that projects, by marking a distinction between what is designed and everything else, also originate the possibilities of unexpected, which is nothing more than an (unavoidable) flaw of design. In a crisis, the above-mentioned attitudes push the predictive approach to its limits and, by proposing either old or new models, they prophetically raise expectations toward an ontologically false future. Quite the opposite, also with the aid of case-studies showing how unexpected normality can be, the paper investigates architectural design as the artfulness of evolving spaces by exploiting the so-called potential, changing unexpected into the founding element of design. The project then becomes a tactical tool for implementing subtle, yet effective actions, so as to influence spaces toward an ontologically unexpected, yet natural future.