Spatiotemporal Explorations in Landscape Deixis

Abstract

If there is a psychological urge that drives us to build, it must stem from a confrontation with emptiness. By build we may include physical structures (perhaps architecture), digital content, mental constructs, and interpersonal relationships. By emptiness we may include vacancy in physical space (perhaps the post-industrial landscape), a lack of stimuli, an absent mind, loneliness.

The practice of architecture, then, is an act of catharsis.

Buildings fill up the void, provide a framework for interaction, create a stimulus for activity and activation, mark a reference point in space and time for future memories, past actions.

In this way, we move through urban and tectonic spaces like the roman god Janus.

Janus was a god of transitions—of arches and thresholds and doorways—and thus a god of time. He had two faces; one to face the past and one to face the future. The normal human head is caught between, haunted by, memories and constructs. In the same way, the urban landscape holds a tension between the tectonic past and the unknown future.

The following work is an investigation of space, spatiality, time, temporality, and how we locate ourselves within those bounds. It is not an attempt to center the Janus head nor to cure the emptiness but rather a first step into the vast and transient blur of the momentous present.