Timing, Spacing, Architecting
1The theme of this issue of “Ardeth” is a daring one: reflecting on time, the design project, and architecture. The editors framed the proposal clearly, inviting authors to “explore the different critical postures that design […] takes on when it engages in the present with things handed down from the past, or when it aspires to address the future.” Perhaps inevitably, almost all contributions focus mainly on the temporal dimension of the built work, leaving the temporality of the project itself in the background, or at most leaving it to the reader to infer. Our aim here is to bring these two sides of the issue together – the time of the project and the time of the built work – and to offer a brief, albeit admittedly partial, guide for the reader.
2First, we should clarify what we mean by temporality when speaking of built architecture. Bruno Latour addresses this question in a text entitled Trains of Thoughts, where the problem of time and space is framed precisely through the presence of architecture. Latour argues that “the notion of event cannot be differentiated into its spatial and its temporal component” (Latour, 2005 [1996]: 178). Much like Gilles Deleuze, Latour treats the event as something more fundamental than the categories of time and space themselves. This, as discussed below, makes the role of architecture crucial.
3To develop his “train of thought,” Latour turns to the legend of the Wandering Jew (Latour, 2005 [1996]: 180):
Far from being obvious common sense terms, spacing and timing are in fact quite difficult to tell apart. Through what sort of labor do we produce the difference between space and time? The question is not as trivial as it seems. For instance, the legendary wandering Jew could not distinguish the two, every spot along his way being also a date. Since he never retraces his step, never stays in the same place, never settles, never comes back, there is no meaning for him in the notion of “place” differentiable from “date” – except, of course, the City of Jerusalem that he will reach “next year.” His itinerary would be made of “date-places,” of a string of events. It is only because we come back to the same place over and over again that we generate the notion of a place, of a topos, that lasts and stays the same, while we have moved.
4It isn’t clear which specific source Latour draws on for this schema – and that is problematic, given that the Wandering Jew is an archetype with an immense range of sources, appearing under many names and attributes, in conflicting anecdotes and retellings going back at least to the seventh century (Falchi, 2007: 112). Still, the image – closely related in many ways to the nomad in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze, Guattari, 1987 [1980]: 380-382) – gives us a sense of what an “absolute movement” of continuous differentiation might look like, and why such a condition makes it impossible, in principle, to separate space from time.
5Latour’s Wandering Jew portrays wandering as the inability to distinguish between here (Da-/hic) and now (jetzt/nunc). Each step in the journey (what Latour calls the “string of events”) differs from the next; there is no going back. Every place is also a date, so that topos and kairos cannot be pulled apart into a neat topology and geography, or a chronology and history. “Before” and “after” blur with “here” and “there,” or even “ahead” and “behind.” What remains is sequence – the notion of a series – that governs both dimensions. In fact, perhaps we can understand this shared chain of “events” as more fundamental than either space or time. We would have to return here to know that we are now in the same place – that before we were there, somewhere else. But wandering is an endless succession of differences, without repetition.
6Yet the Wandering Jew is only Latour’s starting point. To the deterritorialized figure of wandering he opposes a second, contrasting scene, in which space and time emerge by splitting apart, thanks to the appearance of architecture: the castle of Châtelperron. In just a few lines, Latour replaces the Wandering Jew with an ordinary traveler, leading the reader to transpose one figure into the other.
The size of the castle of Chatelperron diminishes irreversibly in the distance as the wandering traveler moves away from it. It is thus as much part of time as the hour he spent walking by. It is only if the walker stops and reverses his step that the castle size reverses itself and grows again, and, then, that the voyager can conclude that this is a place and not only a date. It is in comparing the irreversibility of his aging body with the reversibility of the castle’s size that there is a sense in the expression space and time, as in the usual definition of space as the “series of coexistences” and time as the “series of successions.” “I have changed and the castle has not, thus there is a space, a somewhat longer lasting landscape inside of which I move and age,” space offering the measure for time, and time the measure for space.
7At this point, the wandering nomad enters a radically different regime, moving from the “smooth space” to the “striated space” of architecture. “Space offers the measure for time, and time the measure for space” – and that measure is architecture itself. The castle we return to allows us to establish the here/there and now/then dyads. We are presented with a scene that shows how time and space bring one another into being – what Latour calls timing and spacing. The traveler must encounter architecture, with its singular and enduring form, in order to interrupt the flow of events and derive a distinct spatiality and temporality from it. Châtelperron has all the qualities of a landmark and a monument: a point of reference that gathers into the present – both spatial and temporal – the layers of immense constructive effort from the past, while also promising to remain there in the future, for those who wish to go back (Latour, 2005 [1996]: 180-181).
Because of the ancient, enormous, and continuous mass of work connecting various interactions over ages, the castle still holds, makes space, makes history, breaks the continuity of vision, bends attention, interrupts the travels of voyagers, and creates hierarchies, and thus the wanderer at its foot rightly feels that it differs from his own fast-aging flesh. He passes, and the castle does not. The castle co-exists, holds its ground, occupies space, creates a landscape, becomes a chef-lieu, whatever the expression, not because it is a spot “in” space, but because it is itself the event connecting interactions on a large spread of space-time-actants. Here history was locally made and traditions continuously kept it in place. Thus, there is a place.
8What we have here is very close to Aldo Rossi’s idea of persistence, or to Maurice Halbwachs’ reflections on the relationship between collective memory and the built environment (Halbwachs, 1980 [1950]: 139-140). This immediately raises a further question: is the ability to shape time and space something that can be generalized to architecture as such? What would happen if, instead of arriving at Châtelperron, the traveler emerged onto the Las Vegas Strip, the Rome ring road, the center of Riyadh, or the demolition site of Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower? In other words, there is a wide range of ways in which the “measure” and interplay of time and space can be manifested. An architectural work – “the event connecting interactions on a large spread of space-time-actants” – can operate in radically different ways than an old castle. Built architecture has the power to recompose the categories of past, present, and future – to link our present with an imagined past, or to present the anticipation of a promise as if it were a fragment of the future. Think, for example, of Manfredo Tafuri’s notion of “built utopias,” which he used to describe the German Siedlungen of the 1920s and 1930s (Tafuri, 1973: 100). This effect of temporalization is rarely the calculated outcome of design; more often it is a side effect – sometimes even an unintended, exaggerated backlash.
9We have, perhaps, partly clarified what we mean by temporality when we speak of built space. But it seems just as crucial to address the temporality of the design process that produces that space. On one hand, the res aedificata can be recognized as both the measure and the condition that makes it possible to distinguish space from time, and as the constitution of a form of temporality that in turn points to a specific regime of historicity – each time assembling the categories of present, past, and future in a different way. François Hartog, for example, describes Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe showing how a work can alter the relationship between history and memory to the point of establishing “a memory without mediation and without words” (Hartog, 2023: 159).
10On the other hand, we should not forget that such works, however transformed, are the result of a design process – one that also deploys its own strategies for manipulating time. It is in the gap between a project that seeks to temporalize its effects – say, by carrying the past into the future, or by pulling the present back into the past – and a built work that expresses its own temporality – whether it is a prototype that once promised a future but is demolished and consigned to the past, or a new building that reconstructs the past “as it was, where it was” – that a distinct critical and pragmatic dialectic opens up.
11We suggest, then, as a purely heuristic exercise, distinguishing between the temporality of the built work (or its material effects) and the temporality of the project. The first – illustrated by the example of Châtelperron – concerns the ways in which a built work is able to convey meaning and establish relationships between past, present, and future for those who experience it. We could call this a critical or hermeneutic temporality, since it produces interpretations of the meanings or values embedded in the work. The second form of temporality concerns the ways in which a design project strategically combines the categories of past, present, and future – through narratives, promises, generative analyses, calculations, and risks – in pursuit of a desired outcome. This could be described as a pragmatic approach to temporality, since it generates strategies for action and operational approaches to the project. With this distinction in mind, the texts in this issue of “Ardeth” can be read through the lens of how the temporality of the project and that of the work intersect – sometimes reinforcing and sometimes challenging one another.
12To make this interpretive exercise easier for readers, we have created a small combinatory table that interweaves the categories of past, present, and future, applied both to the temporality of the work and to that of the project. This produces two “time matrices”: one describing how design projects temporalize, the other describing how built works temporalize. Each matrix generates nine key forms of transition (from present to present, present to past, present to future, and so on). To give a simple example: in the project matrix, the box marked “from past to present” corresponds to an “archaeological” project type, while in the work matrix, the same box indicates a temporality that re-presents the “roots” of a place and its continuity with the past. Importantly, a project’s temporality does not necessarily result in a matching temporality of the work. On the contrary, the articles in this issue show precisely the opposite.
13The summary diagram highlights the shifts we traced in the authors’ arguments between the level of project and the level of work. This third matrix overlays the first two, making visible the discrepancies across the texts. Each article is represented by a black tile (pragmatic/project temporality) and a white tile (critical/work temporality). As in a board game, the movement between black and white is traced by lines that chart the routes of arguments, their relative positions, and their degrees of divergence. Readers are invited to play the same game – perhaps arranging the texts differently, or testing the validity of our attempt to reduce them to this framework – in an experiment in “interpretive cooperation” (Eco, 1978 [1979]) with what we are proposing.
14In the brief reading guide that follows, the position of articles within the diagram is indicated by codes. For example, the code [P(PRE>FUT): modification] refers to the project matrix (P), in the position “from present to future,” followed by the keyword for that position (modification). Meanwhile, [W(FUT>PRE): anticipation] refers to the work matrix (W), in the position “from future to present,” again followed by the corresponding keyword.
15In his conversation with Liu Jiakun, Maurizio Meriggi gathers insights into the work of the Chengdu-based architect, recently awarded the Pritzker Prize. Liu describes his design approach as a transformation of space in continuity with tradition [P(PRE>FUT): progressive modification, while at the same time aiming at the creation of innovative and original models [W(FUT>PRE): anticipation].
16The dialogue between the editors and curator Alice Roegholt revolves around the restoration of the Het Schip complex in Amsterdam. The call to preserve De Klerk’s building [P(PRE>PRE): maintenance] opens the possibility of recovering a work that had fallen into oblivion and deserves to be re-presented to the contemporary public [W(PRE>PAS): revival]. According to Camila Burgos Vargas, recovering the “contemporary layers” of late twentieth-century architecture [P(PAS>PRE): archaeology] requires rethinking heritage criteria so as to capture the value relationships between preserving what exists and introducing new, recent interventions [W(PRE>PAS): between ordinary contemporaneity and valorizing the recent past].
17Daniele Dabbene proposes the strategy of counterpreservation as a design approach aimed at undoing the material freezing effect that heritage practices can produce [P(FUT>PAS): destituent project-dismantling]. This approach treats the artifact not as a closed object but as an “open process,” where “the acceptance of decay” pairs with “a fascination for ruined atmospheres – seen not simply as inert remains, but as living witnesses of a distant past” [W(PAS>PAS): evocation of a lost and forgotten past]. In his visual essay, Filippo Balma explores a series of archives, “where the past is preserved, the present controlled, and the future designed” [P(PAS>PRE): archaeology/museum]. The photographs and drawings make explicit the architectural relationships that form not only the spaces but, above all, the internal organizational structures of archives conceived as complex documentary systems [W(PRE>PRE): archive managed in ordinary time]. Monica Naso and Michele Bonino, starting from an interpretation of domestic temporalities rooted in the Chinese tradition [W(PAS>PRE): roots] and oriented around rituals, identify in some contemporary projects a coherent and innovative development of those premises. This development offers a way of imagining the (cyclical) temporal dimension of domestic space [P(FUT>PRE): prototype]. In the article by Trias Mahendarto and Arum Lestariningtyas, the issue of ordinary maintenance in the village of Tossi (Sumba, Indonesia) – the complex outcome of a local practice ecology disrupted by tourism – [P(PRE>PRE): maintenance] is intertwined with the difficult task of preserving place identity and traditions in an economically transformed context [W(PAS>PRE): roots].
18Valerio Della Scala surveys how the new town plan for Turin is being shaped from an architectural perspective, where backcasting strategies for large-scale urban scenarios are tested through pilot projects used as tools of anticipation [P(FUT>PRE): prototype], following a model of progressive transformation [P(PRE>FUT): progress in continuity].
19Building on the reworking of Saverio Muratori’s hypotheses, Rossella Gugliotta develops a framework for reading the city and, more specifically, the island of San Bartolomeo in Venice across the centuries, highlighting the layers of change that emerge from the past [P(PAS>PRE): archaeology]. Here, the diagram is not seen as a merely descriptive tool, but as an “active instrument of interpretation and design”: a methodological practice that makes the map operative as an urban drawing. The diagram is thus closely tied to the processual representation of mutations, in order to identify new spaces of temporal and spatial reality [W(PRE>FUT): progress in continuity]. Antonello Marotta, through a programmatic act of temporal synchronization between project and built work, examines a series of design processes by Ensamble Studio, which reveal the persistence of matter in an almost extra-historical sense: “Resistant works, bound to their place, transformed by time and consumed by the winds, where artifice and nature coexist until their differences are erased” [P(FUT>FUT): utopia; W(FUT>FUT): eternity]. This material embodies the agency of project-construction, understood as a subtractive practice that adapts to the time of matter, generating a space that emerges from “a mass of archaic time, surfacing from the past and presenting itself in its authenticity.” Finally, by proposing a drawn experiment, Federica Morgia sets out her own theoretical hypothesis grounded in the principle of catastylosis [P(FUT>PRE/PAS): between prototype and ruin], leaning toward an analytical conception of time: “a project… that seeks to investigate the transformation of a three-dimensional modular frame, always observed from the same viewpoint and at the same distance, across a prolonged and repeated time interval” [W(FUT>FUT): eternity].
20Looking at our synthesis diagram, we note that, in stark contrast to the other ones, the column of destinations “to the present” is heavily populated. A sample of eleven texts is of course insufficient to support a generalization, even if we were to believe fully in the rigor of our classification. Still, one striking feature of this map is the empty box of tabula rasa/novum. It is as though none of the authors could – or wanted to – trace the path of discontinuity, the radical leap “from past to future,” so central to a certain strand of modern design, conceived as a “setting-into-state of becoming,” one that “wants the future to be past” (Cacciari, 1982: 50-51) – a design that built its promise of refoundation on its own supposed validity and legitimacy, and that, consequently, made the time of the project coincide with the time of the work within the “smooth space” of the tabula rasa, without confronting the constraints of the present and its contingencies.
21Today, by contrast, our insistence on distinguishing between design practices and the material effects of “works” stems from the fact that this promise has definitively faded – or perhaps, to paraphrase Latour, we were never really able to keep it. This brings us back to the reflection on the abandonment of a “language of the new,” or of “estrangement,” in favor of the notion of “belonging” (Gregotti, 1984: 2-3). The question, as it applies to this issue of “Ardeth”, is no longer simply the distinction between project and work, but rather the space and time of research and writing about design and construction practices. Where might these intertwine, to explore the project as a performative dimension of the work? The matter becomes even more complex when we consider those methodological premises of the project that derive their legitimacy precisely from the horizon of future promises.