40 years have gone since the publication of Umberto Eco's Lector in Fabula, partially reformulated in the English version as The Role of the Reader. The book, a seminal work in the field, set the conditions for a semiotic oriented approach to textual interpretation: according to Eco, each text contains its own constraints for interpretation, a set of "instructions" that can be more or less defined, depending the nature of the text itself - open or closed texts - but in any case are independent of actual / empiric readers . The role of the reader in the text is thus the pure actualisation of a strategy already inscribed in the text, according to the position of a rigorous structural approach. A clear cut distinction is hypothesised between correct interpretations foreseen by the author and usages of a text. Eco distinguishes between three 'intentions': intentio lectoris, intentio operae, intentio autoris. Of these, only the intentio operis, i.e. its structural organisation, is a valid one for interpretation. Aim of my intervention is to reconsider a similar position face to contemporary openings of semiotic research to new forms of textuality and new semiotic "objects". Indeed, Eco mainly referred to literary and linguistic texts, as his examples clearly show. But what happens if we try to apply the heuristics of the Model Reader to a totally different kind of texts? A clearly example of a quite different textuality can be found in the digital world of new media and social networks, which could be certainly analyzed from that particular perspective. In my intervention I will concentrate in a different case, and I will try to see to which extent the notion of Model Reader can be applied to space; in particular, to what extent we can use the intentio operae in the case of spatial objects: architectures, monuments, buildings, urban spaces and so on. In these cases the situation appears to be much less clear cut: the intention operis is not the only source of authorized meaning. Space is continuously re-semantized, according to the ongoing various practices of users, and users' practices become constitutive elements of the spatial text itself. Following Michel De Certeau and his distinction between strategies and tactics, I will argue that the sense of space foreseen by architects and city planners (the intentio autoris) can be dramatically reinterpreted by users. In these cases the intentio operis cannot, alone, account for the interpretation of the text.