1. Introduction
We have a mental need to grasp that we are rooted in the continuity of time and in the man-made world it is the task of architecture to facilitate this experience. Architecture domesticates limitless space and enables us to inhabit it, but it should likewise domesticate endless time and enable us to inhabit the continuum of time. (Pallasmaa, 2005, p. 32)
The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for comparing and contrasting the design of buildings and open spaces across the dimension of temporality. We consider the past, present, and future of the designed environment as well as the temporal experiences of dwelling therein. This exploration relates space and time through the lens of human perception. Or, to turn it around, we could say that our experience of time is mediated through our experience in space. We are interested in sensory intensification (Papale et al., 2016) of the experience of time in space. For an analytical method we turn to phenomenology, a philosophy that deals with human sensory experience of the physical world and constructing meaning from that experience. We are concerned with the relationship of people to place, as Heidegger (1996) termed it dasein, or being-in-the-world, a richly complex concept of existence which we might, for our present purpose, translate directly from the German as being there. Christian Norberg-Schulz (1979) applied Heidegger’s concepts to place in Genius Loci: towards a phenomenology of architecture. We seek to provide a framework for considering the phenomena of spatialized time. Norberg-Schulz considers the spirit of a place over time in terms of constancy or loss. Kevin Lynch (1976) developed aspects of this relationship between place and time in What Time is This Place? In the classic text, Space, Time, and Architecture, Siegfried Giedeon (1941) situated architecture in an historic continuum. In this brief paper we examine spatialized time more broadly, exploring the variety of ways in which people do and do not sense and experience time in the constructed environments of buildings and open spaces. We ask in what ways people perceive and understand spaces as static or dynamic places. David Seamon (2000) offers a valuable overview of scholarship developing the phenomenological approach to environmental and architectural questions. We rely upon the work of scholars who built the case for multi-sensory perception as key to our experience of space and place (Bachelard, 1964; Merleau-Ponty, 2013; Norberg-Schulz, 1979; Pallasmaa, 2005; Rasmussen, 1964). A full consideration of this topic would require considerably more time and space than we have here. Our aim is merely to illuminate the questions by situating them in two different but related types of designed environments - buildings and open spaces.
2. Frames of reference
We construct our spatialized experience of time in terms of years and days, with seasonal and diurnal cycles characterized by distinctive differences in sensory input. For example, in climates marked by seasonal variation, we experience autumn visually in the changing hues of leaves, aurally and haptically in the crunch of leaves underfoot, in the smell of decaying leaves, in the feeling of cool breezes tempered by warm sunlight. Over the course of a day, we perceive the visual change from darkness to light and back to darkness, often accompanied by thermal change from cooler to warmer to cooler. Changing sun direction and angle provide a richly varying experience of place as different spaces are sequentially characterized by light, shadow, warming, and cooling.
In the moment, our bodies mark time through movement, including observation of dynamic elements of the environment and kinesthetic perception of our own progress around and through places. For example, we watch and listen as the sōzu fountain in a Japanese garden marks time visually and aurally with the clack of dropping bamboo tube and gush of water. In a rhythmically designed environment, such as an arcade, we hear and feel our own footfalls on the pavement, hear and feel the constriction of space under the arches, see the change from light to dark as we pass behind columns, feel the thermal change as we move from sunlight into shadow and back again.
In the longer term, we consider places to be of their time, existing on a historic continuum, and carrying with them a cultural reference to their era. This experience is typically constructed through our understanding of style as a marker for time. Visiting historic sites can take us back in time to vicariously experience the memories embodied in place. For example, a visit to an historic prison affords an experience in a constricted cell evoking the horrors of incarceration. Historic preservation, conservation, and adaptive reuse are all processes that require careful consideration of how people experience time and change over time in place.
We directly experience extended time in places as a process of growth and aging. We experience growth through the life cycles of the plant materials of our open spaces, processes typically related to seasonal cycles. For example, trees grow over years and sometimes centuries, marking their age with annual rings. Other plants emerge from the earth in Spring, grow and flower in Summer, die back in Autumn, and hide under earth and snow in winter. We experience the aging of places through the processes of use and weathering. For example, we see and feel changes due to human use over time in stone steps that acquire the imprint of generations of feet moving up and down. We see an example of weathering in the houses of Nantucket, clad in cedar shingles whose initial golden glow deepens to grey over time. We can view maintenance of buildings and open spaces as a form of resistance to the effects of time.
3. Cyclical time
Open spaces necessarily afford direct experience of seasonality and the dynamic of seasonal change. A visit to an open space stimulates multi-sensory perceptions including sights, smells, sounds, and haptic touch of seasonal markers including ambient temperatures, wind, breezes, sunshine, moonlight, shade and shadow, humidity, rainfall, snow, ice, flowing water, thawing earth, decomposing leaves, blooming flowers, newly mown grass, falling leaves, migrating birds, etc. Successive visits over the course of a year reveal the seasonal cycle of the place. The design process offers opportunities to accentuate our experiences of seasonality or defy our expectations. For example, the Herbaceous Border at Beatrice Farrand’s Dumbarton Oaks Garden is designed with plants that bloom sequentially from Spring through Autumn, deepening our experience of change across those seasons. The Pebble Garden, on the other hand, mitigates the day-to-day changes with more hardscape than plant materials, walls to shelter from wind, and masonry to store sunshine for radiant warmth on chilly days.
Buildings span the spectrum from affording rich experiences of seasonal change to shielding occupants from awareness of seasonality. The glazed corridor of Glenstone Museum, designed by Thomas Pfifer, wraps around a water garden, immersing visitors in a vivid display of seasonal change as the water plants grow, flower, change color, and die back throughout the year.
A typical office building, however, denies seasonality, restricting temperature and humidity variations within strict parameters and suffusing the interior with constant levels of ambient light. The only information about season comes from views out the perimeter windows; tightly controlled interior spaces lack seasonal indicators.
Office buildings’ environmental controls also mask sensations of the diurnal cycle such as chilly mornings, warming afternoons, and cooling evenings. Window views afford the only information about time of day. While buildings require light, artificial sources can do the work of illumination without incurring the warming effects of sunlight. Constant lighting levels deny occupants the understanding of time that comes from viewing sunrise, observing and feeling changes in sun angle and direction throughout the day, viewing sunset, moonrise, and moonset.
Open spaces, on the other hand, require sunlight for photosynthesis, the process that converts light, oxygen, and water into energy required for growth and blooming. Open spaces necessarily attune visitors to the diurnal cycle, where sunrise, sunset, changing position of the sun in the sky, and shifting light quality signal time of day.
Water, too, can be a marker for diurnal cycles, when tide plays a role in the environment. While the tide is generally a phenomenon of open spaces, we can experience it indoors at the Querini Stampalia Foundation in Venice, renovated by Carlo Scarpa. A stone stairway leading from the water gate to the primary level marks a daily cycle as rising and falling tides advance and recede on the steps.
We are attuned to cycles of the seasons and days through our perceptions of nature. Outdoor spaces necessarily situate us in nature; by their design they may intensify our experience of time by providing rich multisensory information to mark seasonal and diurnal cycles. Buildings may be designed to afford or deny experience of passing time. Designers of buildings and open spaces alike can create spaces to connect their occupants to aspects of nature that situate us in time, mark the passage of time, and celebrate moments in time. Windows, thresholds, indoor/outdoor spaces, seasonal elements such as inglenook, grotto, porch, terrace, pergola, planting bed, green wall and roof, pool, and fountain are examples of designers’ tools for leveraging multi-sensory perceptions of nature to powerfully connect people to the flow of days and seasons.
4. Movement and time
Buildings and open spaces embody time and afford us embodied experiences of time through the kinesthetic sense that tracks body position and movement. Our bodies respond to rhythmic design of buildings and places (paving, steps, colonnades, allées of trees, lighting, etc.) that mark time for us. Regular rhythms make our footfalls function like a metronome beating out a tempo that we can experience with our eyes, ears, and bodies. Changes in rhythm slow us down or speed us up, heightening our awareness of time in space. The elements of buildings and open spaces can work like choreography, directing us to enter, move directionally and rhythmically through space, change tempo, reorient, ascend, descend, move individually, come together, and finally exit, experiencing the journey through space in a kinesthetic sense. Acoustic properties of paving and enclosures can stimulate our sense of sound as we hear our movement through space and time. Buildings and open spaces can be designed to intensify our experience of time through visual, auditory, haptic, and kinesthetic perception. This is easier in the design of built environments, where a higher degree of enclosure offers greater control of human experience within. In open spaces, it is necessary to accentuate in order to achieve a high level of multi-sensory input. Pallasmaa (2005) argues against ocularcentrism, making the case for richer experience through multi-sensory perception of places. It is important to stress here that the design of buildings and open spaces alike can stimulate kinesthetic perception to afford the experience of time to occupants without vision or hearing.
5. History and memory
Buildings and open spaces can take us on time travels. For example, sensory perceptions of descent, constricted space, material coldness, and darkness in Daniel Liebeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin evoke physical feelings of terror experienced by holocaust victims, thrusting visitors back to the time of World War II. The architecture embodies the experience of the people it memorializes and transfers understanding of that historic experience through sight, sound, smell, touch, and kinesthetic perceptions of the space. While other parts of the museum function as containers of historic objects and contexts for understanding the meaning of those pieces, this area communicates history through embodied experience.
At Caples Jefferson Architects’ Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn, New York, crossing the open space between old and new building gives visitors the experience of time travel from the contemporary city back to the African American community founded along a Native American road. In the ghost landscape of the site, road emerges from plant growth, vanishes, and reappears, intensifying the experience of moving between present and past with the heightened awareness of the changing feel of the land as layers of roadbuilding and agriculture reveal themselves over time. When you leave behind the modern city streets to enter Weeksville Heritage Center, you feel the atmosphere change. The noise of cars recedes, and birdsong rises, the smell of pavement gives way to scents of plants and earth, and the unyielding surfaces of concrete and asphalt change to dirt and plants, transporting the visitor back to the area’s agricultural past. For city kids, this is a place to immerse in the unfamiliar sights, sounds, smells, and feel of a way of life experienced onsite by long-ago children. Visitors enter along a passageway marked by shadows that evoke African patterns. Returning from their time travels across the site, visitors are brought back to present time as they observe how the shadows’ positions changed over the duration of their visit. The new building, too, has become part of the history of the site, with its wooden exterior weathering over its nine-year life span to a quiet grey that takes a supporting role to the painted historic structure. At the Weeksville Heritage Center, the architects told stories of change in context, use, and inhabitants over time as they engaged questions of conservation, preservation, and adaptive reuse.
6. Growth and aging
A building, the ultimate result of architectural design, is completed at a discrete point in time. It opens fully formed, ready for its work to begin. A designed open space, on the other hand, embodies the promise of its future. From its opening day onwards, a designed landscape is characterized by growth and change, in response to human use, nurture, and natural processes over time. Both building and landscape are complex systems with interrelated parts. Building systems tend towards stasis, with movement of building parts occurring within tightly controlled boundaries, often hidden from view in locations such as mechanical rooms. Landscape systems tend towards dynamism, characterized by active processes such as plant growth, water movement, weathering, and habitation by humans and other species. Buildings are typically designed to resist the impacts of use and environmental processes. An exception is the use of building materials such as copper or cedar that weather over time, developing a blue patina (copper) or darkening to grey (cedar). Building maintenance is typically directed towards resisting and reversing effects of use and weathering. Open spaces also require constant maintenance, which may foster our understanding of change over time by revealing processes of growth, maturation, aging, and death or, on the other hand, may seek to minimize effects of time by maintaining the place in a state of arrested development. For example, mowing grass produces a constant appearance over seasons and years. Trees, however, defy human attempts at control.
When buildings are designed to emulate open spaces, they, too, can offer visual cues to passing time. For example, Dominique Perrault’s Ewha Womans University blurs the boundaries between architecture and landscape, tucking built form underneath campus open spaces and rendering open space as built form through the use of architectonic materials. As a result, the building participates in seasonal cycles and the longer-term natural cycle of growth, maturation, aging, and death.
7. Comparing and contrasting human perception and experience in buildings and open spaces
We began by considering buildings and open spaces as essentially different settings for human activity, but it is more useful to consider a continuum between exteriority and interiority (Bartorila & Loredo-Cansino, 2021). With phenomenology as our lens, we have proposed a framework for understanding how designers of buildings and open spaces can stimulate the senses to situate people in time as they move through space and over days, seasons, and years, making experience of the designed environment richer and accessible to differently abled participants.
Diurnal and seasonal cycles, important indicators of temporal flow, are experienced through multi-sensory perceptions of natural phenomena. Open spaces offer easy access to aspects of nature that signal seasonal and daily cycles. Designers can accentuate these phenomena in the planning of outdoor places to deepen human experience of temporality. Selection of elements and juxtapositions can intensify visual, auditory, olfactory, and haptic perception of change, heightening awareness of time in place and one’s place within time. The design of buildings requires even more intentionality to connect those who dwell within to the cycles of days and seasons that situate them within the flow of time because enclosure and mechanical environmental controls and lighting systems tend to suppress building dwellers’ awareness of natural phenomena. A variety of design strategies can counteract these tendencies. Opening to nature with elements such as windows, skylights, clerestories, doors, porches, terraces, courtyards and bringing nature in with elements such as green walls, pools, fountains, and fireplaces can connect occupants with sights, sounds, smells, and feelings of seasonality. Incorporating passive environmental systems for lighting, shading, heating, cooling, and ventilating can provide sensory experience of time of day and season; involving occupants in opening or closing shades and windows for natural lighting, shading, warming, or cooling, the haptic experience of touching and manipulating elements of building enclosure add to the changing appearance and sensations of light, warmth, coolness, and breeze to intensify awareness of change over the course of the day.
Buildings and open spaces alike can be designed to intensify or suppress our experience of passing time in the moment. Whether in buildings or open spaces, spatialized time can be understood by analogy to music and dance, through rhythm and tempo of footfalls. Whether walking or wheeling through a space, rhythmic markers such as colonnades, pergolas, allées of trees, paving patterns, and alternating swathes of light and shade can address senses of sight, sound, and touch to connect time to movement through space. When designers consider how occupants experience the journey through a building or open space, with its side trips along the way, opportunities open to heighten awareness of time as well as space in indoor and outdoor environments.
Historic time can be understood by conservation, preservation, and adaptive reuse of buildings and open spaces and the design of memorials in ways that evoke past times through all the senses, transporting us through sights, sounds, smells, touch, and embodied experience of place in other times. It is important to consider that we may be transformed into different personas as we travel through time to experience multiple simultaneous realities.
The category of growth and aging is where we note the greatest difference between the expression of time in buildings and open spaces. Where buildings are typically designed to resist destructive processes such as rain, wind, cycles of expansion and contraction, effects of these natural processes on open spaces are inevitable. Designers of buildings may elect to express some of these phenomena, for example by selecting materials that change color as they weather. Designers of open spaces must make a choice between maintaining spaces in a manner that denies change or embracing changes as an intrinsic aspect that situates place in time.
The author hopes that this framework will be useful to designers of buildings and open spaces as well as to critics of the designed environment as they consider how multi-sensory experience of time can enrich place for people of varying ages and abilities.