Just as the reader makes a book anew through their reading, the user makes a building anew through using.  The duality of the Open Work,  as explored by Umberto Eco, offers freedom through generous design, allowing the user to become a co-author. Equally nature, history and memories are not just protagonists but may become authors, determining the trajectory of design. Such authorship can involve accidents, as well as intentions. In such, it echoes climate science, ecology, and complexity theory where nature is seen as the author.

This engagement creates awareness of change linked to time and duration, creating moments in which every visit reveals new discoveries and rich novel spatial experiences. The receptors of such experience, the senses, are therefore of strong importance to the work, as are the authors of change: seasonality, patterns of engagement through time, decay, and weathering etc.

The continuity of change, the experience of movement through space, and decay across time become imperative factors of the work. As these narratives evolve, a relationship between the work and Umberto Eco’s The Open Work is enabled to flourish. The work becomes open to an unlimited range of possible readings, causing the acquirement of new vitality, perspective, or personal performance as it engenders ambiguity.

Spaces that are less prescriptive, or their structures are more subtle or ambiguous, allow the possibility for the agency of the user to define how the spaces are used or the sequences in which they see them. Spaces which suggest possibilities or are changing, rather than fixed or too heavily dictated, give choice and sometimes even demand it—this can act to give a deeper sense of the experience of place, even for subtle architectural languages.

These experimental works explore, question, and challenge our traditional notions of the edge, weathering, blur, and shadow; asking the question, how might work become ambiguous, offer multiple readings, and offer authorships beyond itself?