The 18th issue of ArchiDOCT presents papers that explore the theme of ‘temporality’ in architecture and the built environment from a theoretical or an applied standpoint. A variety of approaches, insights, and opportunities for research that arise from considering time in its heterogeneous dimensions and manifestations such as time as speed, rhythm, sequence or horizon have been handled.
In recent decades, the conceptualization and analysis of time has moved beyond Newtonian, linear, and objectivist approaches. The move toward “subjective temporal assumptions”, such as orientation towards past, present, and future, synchronicity, temporal depth, polychronicity, simultaneity, can have an impact on shaping strategic action within the field of architecture and design. Furthermore, new media and tools have opened new questions regarding the cognitive, perceptual, and ontological dimensions of time while disclosing a new set of different ‘temporalities’ that coexist and interfere with each other.
Authors whose doctoral research approached time in its entanglements with fiction, memory, embodiment, and potentiality were invited to submit their works. The call for papers included suggestive points of view such as fiction and story-telling being used as a tool for motivating organizational change and for reimagining the future by extrapolating possible futures from a radically diverse reading of the past; and memory, seen not only as narrative but also as material, as capable of recasting the study and modification of material artifacts as catalysts for the reinterpretation of past-present concerns to inspire future meaningful actions. Refocusing the discussion about architecture on issues of temporality, might inevitably bring into question the concepts of permanence and experience, movement and duration and ultimately change. A focus on a temporal understanding of architecture and all design-related issues is after all a focus on difference: change becomes a key factor where ‘things’ are maybe better understood in terms of ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’.
Within these premises, the 18th issue of ArchiDOCT invited academics, early career researchers, and PhD students, to submit papers that deepened our understanding of the possible relations between architecture, design and temporality. The objective was to define a new epistemological horizon for architecture while at the same time exploring the range of temporality’s theorization and the scope of its possible implementation.
The guest editors of this issue welcomed investigations on the theme of ‘temporalities’ - and time - in design processes and discussions through both a theoretical and practice-based approach to highlight the breadth and scope of the speculations of their possible implementation can bring about. For this reason, and considering the range of possibilities contained in the topic itself, it was specified that the contributions could approach the theme with a variety of methods and time-based procedures. That meant also discussions concerning conceptual and methodological papers touching upon tangible examples of temporalities either in applied design strategies or for research purposes. The main aim was to investigate the importance of temporal-related phenomena through ideas and lateral perspectives that could enlighten different conceptions related to temporal structures, norms, and assumptions and their inner dichotomies: linearity vs. simultaneity; diachronicity vs. asynchronicity; cognitive vs. experiential; and so on.
The interest of the proposed topic and the multiple points of view suggested, along with the rising prestige of archiDOCT as a research journal, led to the arrival of more than forty proposals, all of them with a remarkable quality. The members of the Scientific Committee have faced the arduous task of reviewing all that many abstracts and full papers, carefully scoring them in each phase in order to select the best ones. The success of the call and quality of essays received papers have been such that the Editorial Committee has decided to dedicate the next issue of the journal to this topic as well, making it possible to double the number of proposals that will be finally published.
“Timeliness and timelessness in spatial comprehension: Schematicity of socio-cultural knowledge in space and place constructions” is a good-practice example by Philip D. Plowright. This English researcher holds a Master in Architecture from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and a PhD degree from the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha in Spain. He is currently professor of Design, History and Theory at Lawrence Technical University in the United States. Philip D. Plowright is a founder of the systems-based think tank, synchRG, a registered architect, and editor-in-chief of Enquiry: the Architectural Research Centers Consortium (ARCC) journal of architectural research. He has published and lectured widely around issues of meaning, interpretation and process in architectural design. The essay that he has composed for this issue of archiDOCT describes how, traditionally, space and place have been positioned as diametrically opposed concepts, being impossible to focus on one if the other is considered. Being place the site of human experiences and significant associations, on the contrary space has no borders and is empty of human value. The manuscript examines this normative conceptualization of space by means of considering its relationship with time and human presence. According to Plowright’s reasoning, space, as a situated experience, can be considered as a container of a large volume of human meaning activated through a series of structures, schemas and metaphors. In the end, space and place will not be considered as dichotomous but parallel and supportive experiences, since they both include socially constructed meaning.
The first manuscript is written by Ingrid Mayhofer-Hufnagl, PhD architect and assistant professor of architecture at the Leopold-Franzens Universität Innsbruck in Austria. The work, titled “Anastrophic architecture: How to operationalize architecture to design time”, attempts to discuss how new algorithmic methods specific to the field of artificial intelligence might offer new concepts of temporality to architecture. According to her reasoning, this circumstance could modify our logic of time with the corresponding consequences not only in our design methodologies, but also in how we understand history. For the author, the transformation of time is far more meaningful than other traditionally relevant entities in architecture such as objects or forms. Different cases are discussed to illustrate this phenomenon, revealing that traditional linear approaches might be illusory effects imposed by human narratives and biological analogies. The discovery enables an investigation of the possibility of operationalizing architecture to structure time differently, reversing traditional logics.
The second manuscript is entitled “Critique of permanence and linearities in urban Africa. Perspectives from Onitsha markets in Nigeria” and is written by Chukwuemeka V. Chukwuemeka, a multi-disciplinary designer and urban researcher who holds a PhD in Architecture from KU Leuven in Belgium, and is currently postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University in the United States. His work deals with the temporary nature of urban markets, specifically those which nowadays are at the heart of the day-to-day life and growth of Onisha, Nigeria’s third largest city. The flow of people and merchandise in these locations leads to fractal types of spatiality in space and time, closely linked to the Igbo culture of the region. These genuinely local spatialities are often in clear contradiction with the logics of linearity and permanence typical of Western cultures and that still permeate urban planning in many post-colonial African cities. The manuscript explores this contradiction and how to learn from this emergent forms of spatiality when ambitioning equity.
Marcel·lí Rosaleny-Gamón is the author of the third manuscript. He is a young architect and PhD candidate at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain. His work, titled “That what persists and that what perishes: The Valencian Barraca in the cultural landscape and the collective imaginary”, focuses on how time has shaped the two kinds of agricultural landscapes typical of the county where the city of Valencia lays. Their defining elements nowadays are the result of a process of persistence and perishing of different features throughout the history of the county. The current cultural landscape is defined by those which exhibited more resilience, such as the traditional house, so called barraca, whose apparent temporary and fragile aspect conceals a meaningful set of virtues and values. Its appearance and image have gone beyond the merely original utilitarian aspects and have been decisively incorporated into the local cultural imaginary in multiple disciplines such as painting, photography or literature.
The fourth manuscript contains the results of the doctoral research of Stefano Romano and his PhD tutor, Valerio Perna. Both architects are professors at the Faculty of Architecture and Design at the Universiteti Polis in Tirana, Albania. “Revolving around ‘temporality’. Contingency as a means to question the stability of space through the flowing of time” deals with the traditional subsidiary consideration of time when it comes to architecture and compared with pure spatial aspects and the idea of space. The authors argue that this usual understanding of architecture as a singular stable object is threatened by a more complex analysis which considers everyday dynamics. The essay aims to explore the possibilities disclosed by incorporating and interpolating the notion of temporality in architecture through a comparative analysis encompassing architecture and art and leading to an understanding of the reciprocal relationship existing between body and space and some materializations of it. The concept of contingency, understood as a future event or circumstance which is feasible but cannot be predicted with certainty will play a relevant role.
Juan Francisco García Nofuentes and Roser Martínez Ramos e Iruela are the authors of the fifth and last manuscript of this issue of the journal. Both are architects and got their PhD degrees at the University of Granada, where they are currently tenured professors at the Higher Technical School of Architecture. Their essay, titled “Territory, horizon and tobacco. Eternal ethnographic architecture in a certain period of time” deals with the concepts of geometrical chronotope and typological chronotope. This term refers how configurations of time and space are represented in language and discourse. The chosen example that will guide all their reasoning is that of the tobacco drying sheds that dot the county of the Vega de Granada, characterizing its landscape. Studying the syntactic and morphological conditions of these purely rational prototypes, the semantic connotations of the area studied are revealed and many time invariants will become the essence of this timeless architecture.