tick tock tick tock tick tock

check out 'the clock of the long now' by stewart brand. not about architecture or space exactly, but has some intriguing discussion about the implications of building something with the understanding that it could last 10,000 yrs instead of 30-50.

also other ponderings about the implications of time in the operations of humans.

book is probably about 2x too long, but a good brain-tweaker nonetheless.

it is supposed to be a long read...

do you go to sci-arc? more specifically, are you in 3a? Or is it just a coincidence you are asking about the basis of this semesters project ;-)

Do you mean like people who have actually mentioned spacetime in their design process? (Stephen holl only comes to mind) Or anyone whos interested in composition in a complete parallax experience? (ala Richard Serra?)

haha treekiller...but not quite. it's actually a thin book. it just says a few things a few too many times and in several different ways. don't wanna knock it too much, though. it really was a good thing to have read. helped a lot with my thinking re: my thesis development.

has had the engineers and beaurocrats thinking about space/time and the long now.



steve- does the book have 10,000 words? you could try reading one word a year to experience the long now.

hence the "time"


yeah, i have to pimp myself a bit

ah cool replies here...

well recently i read a book rethinking : space.time.architecture...
the title gets me lil excited...but mmmmm when i check the definision
of spacetime:4th dimension and the theory...its kinda different from wat it said in the book...*maybe my understanding kinda different* lol

so im just wondering....


hey steven its pretty interesting hehe ty ..well oe...both would do..
thank you

and that monumental is pretty interesting XD

mmmm nothing is coincidence heeheee

mmm how come i cant play the video in sci-arc =/

take a look at Maurice Merleau-Ponty's 'The Primacy fo Perception' and 'The visible abd the Invisible'. Also, I have defualted many of my project to a quote from Sergei Eisenstien

"But what characterizes the montage and hence its role as a cell or movie frame. the collision - the conflict of two opposing pieces."

Jenck's Architecture of a Jumping Universe

Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time is a must

theater projects are always good for spurring discussion of time/space relationships. i think it was peter brook who made the observation that a theater performance is the simultaneous enactment of three times in one space: the time in which the text/play is set, the time of the author's writing of the play (its origin), and the time of the performance.

I would have to surmise that you arent just interested in time or age in its typical sense, but are trying to look deeper into time as a property of perceptual reality. I remember steven holl mentioned spacetime directly a few years back, (Helsinki Art museum or something?) but I cant remember if it was bullshit. If youre going to be working on this for a while, you could try to read Hiedegger's Being and Time, or Hursurl, Merleau-Ponty, any of the phenomenologists. Theyre absolutely great, thorough examinations, and will probably change your life, but if you arent into serious philosophy you might find them agonizing and practically impossible to read. An easier place to start would be to pick up a book on minimalist art, I know Rosalind Kraus has written some decent articles. Richard Serra is particularly good. There was a bit of a fad over his forms after torqued elipses, but when you look into it (or see these things) there really is a remarkable exploration of the relationship between time, space and consiousness happening there.

My thesis was a cemetery, so, Ive probably done more research on this than is good for me...

Wow, no one has mentioned Siegfried Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture (1942)? According to him, Maillart, Corb, Mies, etc. were exemplars of "Space-time" architecture.

i am with you oe, my thesis was columnbarium. the process was interesting. start taking lsd, it might help you.

I did a project that had to deal w/motion and history. I became very interested in different phenomenon relating to point of view. Read a bit of Max Plank and Werner Heisenberg. I was able to mine that with some good results. Looked a lot at Umberto Boccioni’s paintings and sculptures. Finally on a more pragmatic vein I looked at Greg Lynn’s Animate Form and the Book Flying Dutchmen:Motion in Architecture. I’ve got to admit I even looked at some of Eisenmann’s translations...

Another tack you could take would be to dive into the whole Mies/Hiedegger impossibility-of-dwelling thing. I remember reading about this somewhere, Im not sure if it was post-rationalised. Theres a connection there to Loos and the whole raumplan thing there as well.

ha ya. smokey beat me to it.

jjh, really? where was your site? heh, the 'process' damn near put me in a grave myself.

oe, my site was a box store. the columnbarium was a 2000' bridge over the site. i don't know if i would have done it if i would have known what the project spawned into. i think it is a project of mine that will never be completed, but it changed my thought process enough that small parts of it have come out into other projects. i think the biggest thing i realized is how small a part the actual building plays into architecture. anyone can create a building, but for a building to have the 'meat' it has to be more than itself - i guess this is how to start looking at the 4th, 5th, 6th, etc. dimesion. i feel that early modernist were developing this idea - they were trying to create movements through their buildings. look at east germany to see how architecture was a meduim for the Cold War, also how architecture has been a meduim since 1989.

yeah steven, i agree...its the 4D experience,
the ppl experience the space...the space experience the light or so on and on lol

wow this is amazing....so many references muahahhaha

yeahh oe! i love to look deeper and understand it from different view, i agree with u about richard works..very nice indeed

Siegfried Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture << mmm yeah i need to find this book lol

mmm motion and history....thanks mies will look at it ;)

"But what characterizes the montage and hence its role as a cell or movie frame. the collision - the conflict of two opposing pieces." <<imagine...pretty good lol...can i see ur works? sounds interesting ;)

im gonna read all the references here...and then read about spacetime in mathematical thoery later, hypercube and stuff


well oe i will dig up and save u *depends* lol

also look at matthew barney's 'cremaster cycle' and the eames film 'the powers of ten'. hell, i just watched 'magnolia' last night and that movie depicts space and time very well. the intro to showtime's 'weeds' is a great one too. i force myself to allow the design to continue beyond the building. i have never been caught up into blob architecture or logorithmic design. it takes architecture and turns it into a spreadsheet.

What I was looking at was ways of blurring events over time. When doing this, patterns emerged, as you might expect, that aren’t readily discernable in linear time. What I didn’t expect to see was this: When the camera (observer) began to move, cyclical motions or linear regular motions created patterns that deformed into unexpected shapes. These shapes were the imprints of the observer’s motions. They became, at least for me, recordings of the act of observation and by extension, memories of the observer. This became the driving force of my project, different points of views different memories of the same event. The film Rashôman comes to mind.

Ha, 'the meat', incredible, Im sure we thought about alot of the same things.

heh, careful vampy. the rabbit-hole is deep,..

Edward Tufte writes about mapping multiple meanings of data- often dealing to space-time information. It is not too far of a stretch for an architect to map conceptual/physical data to create 3d forms- or "space" with many possibilites of layering information and creating depth.

If you are really interested in conceptualizations of space and time in 20th century physics, you should pick up Peter Galison's Einstein's Clock's, Poincaré's Maps, or even Stephen Kern's The Culture of Time and Space. Ken Alder's The Measure of All Things talks about the Borda Circle (an 18th century triangulation device used for the accurate reading of map coordinates, a product of contemporary Enlightenment Science). Klaus Hentschel's magisterial The Einstein Tower talks about the relationship between Erich Mendelsohn, Albert Einstein, and Erwin Fruendlich in the design of the Einstein Tower in Potsdam. Emily Thompson's The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 will also provide some interesting food for thought, as will her collection, again with Peter Galison, called The Architecture of Science. If you are further interested in how scientific endeavors literally shape space, consider Bruno Latour's Science in Action or Laboratory Life. And perhaps the most vital vision of how scientific and technological thinking shapes our literal landscape, one should not overlook Leo Marx's The Machine in The Garden or Paul Shepheard's Artificial Love.

uh, Sanford Kwinter's 'The Architectures of Time' seems to right on point. i'd skip the the misty metaphysics of the phenomenonlogists and lena more towards the sciences to understand the operations of actaul time.

why are we still talking about this? it should be part of our collective consciousness by now.

Hi.
I came across this blog while researching into my thesis topic of Space, time and architecture: The publics experiences within internal spaces.

I am an Interior Design student in South Africa completing my degree. The points brought up in this discussion are very helpful. The one tool I am using to get information is a online interview. I was wondering if anyone would be interested in answering a few questions on the Fourth dimension in Architecture principles and characteristics. The questions are fairly basic and i will email them through to you in a Microsoft word document with a letter of consent attached for you to read and sign.

I would greatly appreciate your knowledge on the topic.
Please will anyone let me know if they are interested.
Thank you so much

Thank you so much

Hi,

By reading; Merleau-Ponty during my graduation project I've been interested in the four dimensional architectural experience ever since. In which I believe has its roots within the motion/movement of the observer through time and therefore space. 

I'm interested in what your point of departure is when you start the architectural/design proces of an architectural assignment. 

I ask this, because at the moment I start with a "regular" architectural concept or arrangement of functions and then approach this by designing the way people approach, walk through, experience, etc,  the entire composition. Actually some sort of promenade architecturale.

But this doesn't yet satisfy me in terms of "the fourth dimension". I'm looking for ways to link and derive composition and arrangement more directly to the 4 dimensional aspects.

I'm interested in your ideas, projects, references etc.

Thank you in advance