The Architecture of Time

Abstract

Architecture today seems to be most commonly thought of as a snapshot of how it existed at a specific point in time. This point in time is always in the past, manifested as memory. This being said there is very little room for architecture in the “present.” When we think of architecture we are either imagining how it was in the past (be that distant, near-term, or immediate) or what it will be like in the future (even if only one second into that future.) This concept explicitly states that architecture is always in constant transformation and evolution (or devolution). To this end, architecture and construction are cyclical in a sense. All projects begin life as a whimsical projection of human imagination and evolve/devolve through conception, design, construction, usage, adaptation, and ultimately disintegration. Upon this “final” end, the process eventually begins anew. Never at any point within this process is architecture ever “static” or frozen in time. All architecture is a construction of the past and an enterprise that endeavors into the future. It is built upon our previous knowledge and past ideologies and will constantly be manipulated by forces beyond itself as it moves into the future. And yet the way conceive of our built works tend tp fix our buildings in time, which denies both their history and their future. Both architecture and time constantly change and continually move forward. As time passes, innumerable factors affect the architecture and for that matter everything else in the universe. This ranges from decay, to adaptation, to marking, to destruction and ultimately reconstruction of a new entity. It is therefore impossible to ignore the past and ignorant not to consider the future. So, obviously, architecture that responds and adapts to change is therefore better suited to succeed within our ever-changing condition. If the architect considers the concept of continual change in the design of space, its survivability will invariably be enhanced to the extent that adaptability is embedded into it. It is the designer’s choice as to how much or how little to incorporate the possibility of adaptation into the design, but in any case we cannot eliminate all vestiges of the past or even the future. All architecture responds to change whether it is intended to or not. This change is also usually cyclical; be that by day, by season, by year, by lifetime, by economic cycle, or by the endless renewal of life and death. So in the creation of architecture, its cyclical evolution and devolution must be addressed in a real and significant way. Architecture without a sense of progressive time is not architecture, it is simply an illusion. Thus it is proposed that the project will explore the development of space that expresses this evolution/devolution process based on past knowledge and memory as well as an expectation that continual, unpredictable change is inevitably forthcoming.