Designing in Medias Res. Adaptive Reuse as an Exaptative Strategy

Architectural design is often seen as an activity that envisages a very vast range of possible outcomes; from its physical realization, to the elaboration of alternatives, to the partial or total reconfiguration of the mandate, up to the cancellation of the assignment or to its transformation for other purposes. At the same time the design activity has normally a quite clearly identifiable beginning in a series of recurring events: the official assignment, the definition of the functional program and the clients’ expectations, the inspection and the first investigations, etc. The very concept of "condition survey", which constantly returns in the lexicon and argumentative methods of the technical documents, evokes with a certain precision a “before” and an “after” state, a temporal threshold that marks a discontinuity within the history of a place and starts a process meant in some way to reconfigure its destiny. This condition is particularly evident in the adaptive reuse and urban design domains, where the presence of pre-existing artefacts is a binding constraint. Thus, dealing with the complexity of architectural and urban transformations and their transitional nature inevitably means taking note of the intrinsic evanescence of this ideal dividing line. The designer - especially in the current historical situation, characterized by increasingly complex technical challenges and growing economic scarcity - is more and more distant from the idealized demiurgic and authorial figure already demystified in recent years, and increasingly close instead to an interpreter who penetrates processes already underway, reorienting their outcomes and “pre-adapting their characteristics”, in the sense that Gould and Vrba attributed to the term exaptation. The paper aims to reflect on this condition starting from a design experience in Bari, Italy, which has led to questioning the boundaries of validity of the project action and the margins for redefinition of the project itself.