Attuning Space
2025
ADS0, RCA
Set in Piazza Antonio Gramsci, Milan, the project explores how to reframe an existing urban space without erasing its physical or social memory. The piazza is approached as a stage for everyday life, where meaning emerges through use rather than prescription. The design acts as an open-ended script: calibrated ambiguity invites its actors to interpret, adapt, and co-author the space in real time.
Against a backdrop of economic and environmental constraint, the project rethinks placemaking, where boundaries are no longer defined by physical barriers, but through perceptual definition. Working with the relational potentials of the space it treats existing conditions, interpretations, and temporal programme as active design parameters.
Rooted in insights from spatial cognition and behavioural observation, the project interrogates
how people make sense of space beyond the visual, through movement, memory, and micro-appraisal. It invites appropriation as a form of participation, recognising that meaning arises not
from form alone, but through lived experience. In doing so, it offers a replicable approach to shaping public space: one that remains open, responsive, and grounded in the complexities of human presence.
The project bridges research, methods, and insights from the field of spatial cognition directly into a design process, at times reaffirming common practice, and at others revealing solutions that defy conventional logic.
Through fostering methods such as visuo-spatial analyses, condition mapping, and behavioural observation, we develop design parameters rooted in how space is truly perceived and inhabited.
By subtly manipulating environmental cues, we reshape the signals that guide how people move through and engage with the site, often unconsciously.
Artificially introduced conditions intervene in the instinctive micro-appraisals people project onto space, assessments of comfort, safety, and belonging that shape behaviour.
The plan is considered not as spatial organiser of the program, but as a carefully crafted script for human interrelationships. The user/actor is offered a free range of options and trajectories, passing through realms of varied degrees of possibility.
Like a loosely structured board game, it contains its own internal logic, rules that invite participation rather than dictate behaviour. The plan becomes a framework for interaction, not instruction.
Calculated ambiguity becomes a tool for engagement, welcoming appropriation as a vital form of participation. The piazza holds nuanced terrain of affordances, open enough to absorb varied intentions, yet specific enough to suggest possibility.
By re-engaging instinctive interpretations of space, we begin to rebuild spatial agency, human relationships, and the spatial relatability of the piazza: restoring its capacity to be felt, understood, and claimed in everyday life.