Programming Uncertainty / Art & Architecture
Yehuda Safran, Paris & New York

“...you need talent to make a good project, but a genius to make a good program.”
Le Corbusier

We will be looking for a template of development, a transformation which will unfold not so much in a strait line, but spasmodically, a line with knots in it, one that therefore constitutes a distinctive type of temporal sequence. It is therefore that we shall begin working with a virtual site in the form of a film. Here time will not be merely technical, not a mere division of days, hours, not moments that are reversible but a temporal sequence as an integrated and irreversible template. We will learn to appreciate the highly stratified temporality which does not allow a single state of mind to overwhelm an already delicate situation. Between the interweaving of a large horizon, its landscape, the history of its landscape and the requirements and demands of contemporary forms of life, we will be able to discover gaps and discords. Through these conflicts we will be able to gain the state of awareness, an awareness of our presence in time, on this site, hence its possible expansion. The site thus will reveal itself to be a complex situation in which multiple orientations and diverse polarities jostle and intersect, one in which those ruptures occur that which we will call our project.

"Programming Uncertainty" will work as simultaneously, on very short and very long scales of time, testing new solutions for programming urban environments. The necessity to create new methodologies of approach to urban planning and to architecture programming in the city is inspired by a growing diversity of urban fabrics and ecologies within them. The new infrastructures that constitute a city need new tools to be grasped as well as a new type of creative endeavor: a new mind. Cities depend on maintenance and renewal, operations that have to adapt intelligently to accommodate the ever-changing conditions of their emergent vitality. This workshop will focus on the creation of "intelligent softwares", that can become better devices for mapping and designing future exchanges and configurations - a new approach which will enable us to discuss and produce future urban fabric. These DEVICES are more aware of the city's movements in time, movements of population, changing occupation and recreation, recombine their diversity in a dynamic urban experience - models that evolve an abstract but singular mode of connection among the city's habitants of tomorrow. This methodology will invert the usual hierarchy of steps taken to devise a project, so as to devise a method, creating the modality which will encourage and enable the participants to design a program.

-- FILM COMPONENT -- ABSTRACT TEMPLATE Depiction of patterns of exchange of the different areas to be integrated in the urban fabric: existing zones and invented ones. Analysis of patterns of possible future exchanges between these areas. Presentation of patterns of relevant experiential differentiation/value of each area. -- MODEL COMPONENT -- The model is 4-dimensional (not unlike film, but with different materials) and it stands for testing how to connect the exchanges happening within these areas. The experience of materials, scale and operative framework of the model will be used as representational features that depict elements of scale, position, repetition, hierarchy, in different fabrics and will test recombinations of their features when their interaction will be mediated differently. (Diagrams) -- OPEN-SCORE-PROGRAM/SOFTWARE -- The Open Score is 5-dimensional, meaning that it represents the 4 dimensions that we are aware off, while simultaneously presenting the "time machine" - the individual methodology working within them.