Abstract
Drawing on scholarship that explores the making of time, this article aims to develop sociological understandings of architecture’s relations with temporality. Commentary from within and outside architecture has often suggested that a sensitivity to time is missing from its practices (and indeed, that time is actively excluded from architecture). We argue that, rather than attempting to rectify a perceived absence of engagement with time in architecture, it is more fruitful to explore architecture as inevitably implicated in the making of time(s). Mobilising empirical material from a qualitative study of building design for residential care in later life in the UK, we illustrate various relations with, and visions of, the future that are produced through architectural practice. Rendering architecture’s time-making practices explicit, we suggest, makes it possible to reflect on whether, and to what extent, its time(s) could be done differently.
Highlights
As a recent special issue of this journal attests, there is a ‘need for new theories, methods and practices to question the status, role and salience of the future’ (Coleman & Tutton, 2017, p. 445)
Rendering the temporalities of architectural practice explicit, we suggest, makes it possible to reflect on whether, and to what extent, its times – and the futures of buildings and their users – might be done differently
The team involved in the landscaping project emphasised the importance of not ‘locking up’ (Artist, Case Study 3) the design of the garden, and of working collaboratively with users to ensure that it could be made open to redesign and use by future residents. This was described as ‘designing for the unknown’ (Landscape Architect, Case Study 3), through observations of project workshops and meetings, we found that this process involved alternating ‘doings’ of the future landscape as unknown/open and as anticipatable/fixed: The artist turns to the model
Summary
As a recent special issue of this journal attests, there is a ‘need for new theories, methods and practices to question the status, role and salience of the future’ (Coleman & Tutton, 2017, p. 445). This neglect has implications for architecture’s relationship with futurity; its capacity to produce an ‘openness to the future, the promise of time unfolding through innovation rather than prediction’ Such an openness and relinquishing of control over the future is, Grosz argues, vital for architecture’s capacity to support positive political and social transformations, and for architecture itself to be defined as a dynamic set of social practices (rather than understood through the more static prism of its buildings on the ground)
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