Call for Participation:
**Deadline: 01 July 2024**
Conveners:
Michael Benedikt, University of Texas at Austin, USA
David Leatherbarrow, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Jonathan Hale, University of Nottingham, UK
Sophia Psarra, University College London, UK
The Architecture of Time is a two-day workshop bringing scholars, designers, researchers, and theorists together who wish to foreground the topic of time in architecture—a field where space usually dominates—in order to compare notes, mutually enlighten, and pursue collaborations.
Why:
Architecture’s involvement with time (as over space) is beginning to escape orthodox Modernist tropes. These tropes, created by the practice and theories of the Futurists, Constructivists, and Cubists of the early 20th century and systematized mid-century by historians in thrall to relativistic physics like Siegfried Giedion and Bruno Zevi, mainly had to do with movement through space over time, with emphasis on speed. • Vestiges of these tropes are still with us, prioritizing not only transportation systems, ramps, stairs, elevators, catwalks, openness, flows, and overlooks, but prioritizing too the look of movement, using streamlining, unstable-looking shapes, and avian or marine zoomorphism as well as large, actually-moving building parts and media displays. • But time enters and enlivens buildings in other, less imagistic ways too: ways having to do with the felt duration of our days relative to a building’s, with the seasons, wind, and sound, with purpose, memory, and history, with upkeep, re-use, and construction (the processes), with community and continuity, serendipity and kairos. We are speaking here of time understood in the tradition of philosophers like Bergson and Merleau-Ponty, writers like Proust and Woolf, artists like Duchamp and Eliasson. • This workshop is dedicated to exploring time in (at least) two aspects, the phrase “Architecture of Time” referring (1) to how buildings and urban landscapes register or “tell” time, resist time, age nonetheless, hold history, need maintenance, are parts of longer projects, interact with time-based arts, and so forth, and (2), to the structure (“architecture”) of temporal experience as such, i.e., as distinct from but also connected to spatial experience. With regard to this second aspect, might theorists of architecture have something to say to philosophers, neuroscientists, and clinicians studying consciousness itself, or narrativity, or the structure of mental calendars, all subject (to some degree) to cultural variation? And might they have something to say to designers and thinkers about architecture? For surely human consciousness was organized—given shape—not only by the world encountered very long ago, i.e. by nature, but also by the worlds we have imagined and crafted since, and by the things we know and can do now.
Format:
Day One: Presentations by the four conveners, each with discussion. Lunch at large. Group dinner.
Day Two: Presentations by six researchers (see Call below), each with discussion. Lunch at large. Cocktails.
Call for Participation:
With this Announcement, the conveners are calling for
(1) Presenters: Paper presentations by scholars, designers, researchers, poets, and theorists world-wide whose projects are involved with understanding the “architecture of time” in one or both aspects mentioned above, at or above the PhD level. Application deadline: July 1, 2024. Required: substantial abstract plus a 100-word biographical sketch, sent to one of the conveners. Six papers will be selected for presentation. Decision in July 2024.
(2) Discussants (face to face): individuals who are drawn to the topic and have relevant expertise are invited to nominate themselves to be Discussants. Please send a Letter of Interest to one of the conveners by September 15, 2024. Space limited.
(3) Visitors: with due regard for space limits (around 40 people), Visitors are invited to attend all or part of the workshop proceedings. Please contact one of the conveners a few days before the event to check for likelihood of space, or simply show up.
The Architecture of Time 