MANUELA RAITANO Why should we devote time to time? Or, rather, why should we publish an issue of “Ardeth” on the theme of time? From our point of view, this “keyword” was chosen, in agreement with the Editorial team, with the aim of proposing a topic capable of building bridges between different facets of architecture. Depending, in fact, on whether time is conceived as memory of the past, as evidence of the present, or as a promise of hope for the future, the critical reflection can extend from conservation to transformation, from the architectural scale to the urban, from monument to landscape restoration; even touching on the field of musealisation, which pertains to how we narrate the past in the present.
Given the broad spectrum of the theme, and starting from the consideration that this simple four-letter word actually contains endless different interpretative worlds (probably as many as the readers of these pages) we sought to address the issue by giving it the pace of a dialogue between the architect and the museologist: on the one hand, the voice of those who work in the field of transformations of inhabited space, producing the artifacts of the future; on the other hand, the voice of those who instead collect, interpret and arrange the testimony of material culture over time.
Personally, as an architect, I recognise time as a dynamic datum of the project. There are both the time of ideation and the time of construction, which make architecture a “delayed” art; there is, then, the time of fruition, which is the true life interval of the work; and there is, finally, also the time of disuse and ruin. But above all, as the essays collected in this issue demonstrate, there is a critical dimension of architectural design that is intrinsically linked to time, to the relationship between the new and the pre-existing, as well as to the act of reinterpreting what comes to us from the past, be it architecture or a part of the city.
PAVEL KUZNETSOV As a museologist – often perceived by the public as a dusty timekeeper – I’ve always been intrigued by how and when architecture, through the lens of time, becomes heritage. In this regard, I’d like to remind readers that the work on this issue began with the keyword “heritage,” which, in conversation with the “Ardeth” Editorial team, quickly evolved into the broader, more umbrella-like notion of time.
However, many of the essays we received still concern heritage. This is because, when we talk about time, it is natural for us to follow the chronological order and start from “the past.” In fact, nowadays we are deeply interested in the past, in the accumulated body of architectural works through history, whether functioning or abandoned, ruined or perfectly preserved, relatively recent or centuries old. Is it enough to affirm that the past is a source of inspiration for the present generation of architects? Or is it about learning lessons?
The Beaux-Arts tradition of directly copying the masters may have faded long ago, but the fascination with the past has not disappeared. Architecture pilgrimage of young professionals has always existed: one only has to recall the legendary Le voyage d’Orient (Le Corbusier, 1911), or Louis Kahn’s European tour in 1928 (Johnson, 1986). However, it is only in recent decades that this intense commitment to architectural heritage, which in the past characterised the training of just a few architects, has become a widespread phenomenon.
MR I agree that the “cult” of heritage is quite a recent phenomenon in design culture. And I’m also intrigued, as you are, by how and when architecture becomes heritage – it implies tracing temporal thresholds that, once exceeded, modify the status of an artifact, turning it into “heritage.” This introduces the need for periodisation. But we should remember that periodisation always produces taxonomies that are critical and highly tendentious.
In short, if periodisation is essential in every historiographical reconstruction, then it becomes necessary to unfold temporal taxonomies, to make them less obvious, in order to understand what we are missing every time we follow the most accredited narratives (Palombi, 2025). In historiography of architecture, we are used to dividing time into “packets,” which we then name with a noun designating a specific style or trend. Very often, periods that mark a transition between styles are traced back, or postponed, with Occam’s razor, to moments pre or post something else, whereas they express, in their complexity, far more layered times. No era, in fact, expresses itself in a single way. Can we say, then, that time comes flat, in the narrative of posterity?
I hope that one of the reflections addressed in this issue concerns the possibility of looking at the history of architecture and the city through less schematic taxonomies. Especially since our conceptual frames change, depending on whether we look through the lenses of the scientific paradigm, which sees time as an entropy-driven entity; or through the lenses of literary symbolism, for which time is instead analogy and difference; or whether we recall Vichian philosophy, where time is a cycle of occurrences and recurrences; or Bergsonian philosophy, where time is nothing but continuity – a flow of perceptions in which the subject is immersed through memory.
Yet memory is not only the core of the subject’s identity, but also of human societies’ (Halbwachs, 1925). For me, this is the real aspect that architects and museologists have in common: the recognition of a collective memory made of human works, to be transmitted to the future (Christillin, Greco, 2021). A recognition that we architects operate through restoration and you through the “museum,” a place dedicated to the narration of memory.
In particular, I am intrigued by architectural museums, which are in themselves an oxymoron, a sort of “circular metaphor”: architectures that contain the narration of other architectures.
- 1 Comment by N. Ladovsky to his project entitled “Architectural appearance of the communal house” (19 (...)
PK With years of experience in a major architectural museum, I have come to understand (though architects are fully entitled to disagree) that the mission of such institutions is to preserve, interpret, and communicate architectural ideas to the public. In short, keeping ideas rather than merely physical objects.
To be clearer, buildings may or may not survive, but architectural ideas are inherently immaterial and, in a sense, timeless. It matters little what form they take as museum artifacts – be it house-museums (full-scale buildings), their fragments, drawings, architecture models, archival texts, or even oral histories – they are free from the physical and temporal constraints of their material manifestation.
Of course, architecture can be temporary in itself, like that of exhibition pavilions, and in those cases time only underlines the ephemerality of its physical presence. But we must always remember that every material realisation is intrinsically tied to time, while immaterial values – concepts and ideas – can last indefinitely. Thus, while time undeniably has a destructive impact in the physical sense, it also gives architecture the potential for immaterial duration.
In some ways, one can go even further than the Soviet modernist Nikolay Ladovsky, who argued for the immaterialisation of architecture and claimed in 1920 that “space, not stone, is the material of architecture.”1 I would add: space in time. In fact, what happens after completion is an ongoing reinterpretation of architectural works and their reassessment over time – a theme that resonates through many contributions in this issue of “Ardeth”.
- 2 This expression became famous thanks to Trotsky, who used it in relation to the Mensheviks.
MR Another aspect that must be considered is that the set of architectural works to which we grant value always grows over time, due to the accumulation of documents and human artefacts over the ages (Choay, 1992). This accumulation is incessant and inevitable, and leads to instances of posthumous accreditation of value (Riegl, 1903), based on each era’s choices of what to transmit to the future and what, instead, to consign to “the dustbin of history”2 (Dalla Vigna, 2009).
Here, our ability to judge comes into play, and we should develop the skill to judge past and present without preconceptions. In fact, we live in an era characterised by a dangerous kind of preconception: the overvaluation of the past. Being obsessed with the re-proposal of the glorious languages of the past, we risk not recognising the valid expressions of the present (Reynolds, 2010). The angel of History has reversed its course, and now we are suspended between a future that we no longer know how to reach and a past that holds us back at the point of origin (Bauman, 2017). How can we, in this framework, strengthen the sense of the present, and also strengthen the pride in contemporary artifacts? How can we, in short, accredit value also to current events?
I ask this because, even if physics tells us that there are infinite local times that flow differently depending on gravitational fields (Rovelli, 2017), the hypothesis of a time that “trumps” all others seems unlikely to me. This hypothesis is linked to the idea of a “cryopreservation” of the past, which risks undermining the sense of the present and consigning only empty simulacra to the future.
PK What you call “cryopreservation” raises many other operational questions, which I would like to address through an exemplary case: the house of Kostantin Melnikov, designed by the architect in 1927-1929 in Moscow, as a dream home for himself and his family, as part of the Soviet collectivist utopia.
Over the course of 80 years of continuous family life, the house accumulated both tangible and intangible traces, becoming a living archive of personal and architectural memories. In 2014, it became a public house-museum, part of the Schusev Museum of Architecture, highlighting its temporal dimension, which spanned the entire 20th century, until the death of its final resident – artist Viktor Melnikov, the architect’s son, in 2005. Like a time capsule, the Melnikov House continued to work as an archival space, physically storing and preserving Melnikov’s oeuvre, manuscripts, and historical records, within the very walls he designed. Upon completion of the Getty-sponsored survey in 2017-2019, the International Advisory Committee, chaired by J.-L. Cohen, strongly recommended to preserve the traces of time and to minimise intervention in the conservation process, which was to be undertaken “as much as necessary and as little as possible” (Kuznetsov, Mustonen, Tsareva, 2019). However, the situation changed dramatically after the invasion of Ukraine. The Melnikov House became an indirect cultural casualty. The museum leadership changed and the end of collaboration with European experts led to a series of decisions that undermined the preservation philosophy. Under the pretext of “restoration,” the house underwent a comprehensive reconstruction with significant loss of authenticity. It now appears as a brand-new object, as if it had just been built. The critical temporal strata – the lived experience from 1929 to 2023 – have vanished. A 100-year-old patient has suddenly become a newborn.
Sadly, this is not the only case. Another famous example is Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s controversial restoration of the Cité de Carcassonne. Despite the differences in historical context, the cases of Carcassonne and the Melnikov House raise the same essential concern: how the present rewrites the past, and then pretends to be the past.
MR Without a doubt, our idea of conservation is closely linked to an idea of duration – one that bears the marks of the evolution of time and refuses to freeze the work at any precise moment, even that of its origin. That is the reason why brand-new restorations are far from our modern sensibility. But I would also like to propose another key to reflection, which opens to different sensibilities. Time, in fact, can be perceived as a chronology that goes from A to B; but it can also represent the moment itself, the hic et nunc.
In the myth, Cronos establishes his power by swallowing his children – that is, by pushing back events. But when Zeus makes Cronos eat, instead of his children, “stones” – which we can read as an analogy to constructions, or material works – historical time begins. Which is time-oriented, precisely, chrono-logically. Therefore, the myth tells us that history originates when human beings deposit in time (that is, in the stomach of Cronos) their material testimony.
But on the other hand, the Greek term Kairos expresses another quality of time, related to the event taken in itself, as pure appearance: the “right” time, the opportunity to seize. All this is to say that, if in architecture Cronos is linked to the disciplines of conservation, Kairos represents instead the epiphany of the new. Cronos, therefore, represents measurable time, the succession of instants; Kairos, instead, embodies the instant captured in itself. May we say that brand-new restorations are children of Kairos more than of Cronos?
We may say that these two opposite conceptions of time are related to “two cultures,” science and the humanities, which still struggle to talk to each other (Snow, 1959), but that should be considered complementary and both fundamental for a complete understanding of architecture. In fact, it seems extremely reductive to me to think of time, in the design process, only as a scientific (measurable) datum or only as a poetic fact.
PK The coexistence between “measure” and “poetry” that you hope for, in my opinion, is found in Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, where he uses time in both ways: chronological (as a sequence, or promenade architecturale) and experiential (as a poetic construct). Visiting the villa – purchased in 1959 by the state, and since then listed as a historical monument – one experiences a sort of journey through architectural space. The ramp guides visitors upwards in a choreographed sequence that involves the duration of the act of walking and the sense of moving through the space. It is a structure to be experienced over time, reflecting the shift from a modern and efficiency-oriented conception of architecture based on the hours of light of the day, to a narrative architecture, in which it is possible to perceive time also in terms of the appearance of spatial events.
MR Beyond duration or experience, there is still one modality of time, related to daily human experience, that can be represented in architecture: cyclical time. I am thinking of all those architectures that incorporate movement within themselves.
For example, in the competition for the expansion of the Chamber of Deputies in Campo Marzio (1967), Maurizio Sacripanti designed offices, cylindrical in shape, rotating on their axis throughout the day, always looking for optimal lighting. It was a real “machine-building,” though not in the Corbusian sense of outil, but rather in the sense of a mechanism marked by the diurnal cycle and by the cycle of actions that it had to host.
I would also like to point out that, opposite to the aesthetics of machinery, there is also the possibility of incorporating time into architecture by bringing out its potential for destruction: for example, “showing the wrinkles” of buildings and preserving their patina, as critical restoration demands; another possibility is even to prefigure the state of ruin, as in Joseph Gandy’s depictions of Sir John Soane’s Bank of England (Schumann-Bacia, 1996); and an even more extreme choice lies in accompanying places and architecture towards a path of controlled decommissioning, once their life cycle has been completed (Merlini, 2008).
In this conceptual framework, despite the promise of eternal youth by cosmetic surgery, the acceptance of the deterioration of things over time is taking place into our consciences. In the present moment, characterised by wars and political instability, we are forced to accept once again that human works can be influenced by dramatic and radical changes over time. This scenario seemed far from our consciences after the Second World War, but today it emerges as a horrible, but not unrealistic, possibility. We are learning to live with the terrible awareness of the transience of human life and works.
Time, in short, will not last forever: this is a fact. So much so that I often wonder if the adjective “eternal” is losing its sense. Although the city where I live is called “eternal city,” no human work will survive, for example, the geological upheavals that in the long term will modify the morphology of the Earth, bringing about, as scholars predict, a new Pangea.
PK Nothing can survive as it is, that’s true. But that has always been the case: the perception of architectural works has often dramatically shifted over time, shaped by political, cultural, and institutional forces. And sometimes we need time to understand the real consequences of events. So, we don’t need to evoke the scenario of a total disruption to understand how an architecture can lose its authenticity. Let me only recall Antoni Gaudí’s works, which remained overlooked until the exhibition at the MoMA in New York (1957-1958), marking a turning point in international recognition followed by a wave of scholarly interest (Hitchcock, 1957). And this also led to the explosion of mass tourism in subsequent decades, to the point that the works of the Catalan architect are now mass-culture icons.
But I would like to return to the issue of cyclical time, which you raised when mentioning Sacripanti’s unbuilt project. The aforementioned house by Konstantin Melnikov was also designed to accommodate the rhythm of everyday life. In fact, the architect used sunlight as a “natural alarm clock,” in the so-called “golden bedroom”: the movement of the sun along the room’s circular wall was calculated so that the morning light would naturally wake up the sleepers, coming in at the right time through the hexagonal windows to the northeast. Moreover, in full accordance with modernist principles, the house has a free plan, further accentuated by the effect of “living” windows, which offer the possibility of opening or walling up any of the 120 structural hexagonal openings. Consequently, the house in Krivoarbatsky Lane has an intrinsic potential for changing over the time: it is an architecture prêt à changer.
However, if we talk about cyclical time in architecture, the culmination has been reached in Villa Girasole by Angelo Invernizzi (Galfetti, Frampton, Farinati, 2013). Built near Verona (1929-1935), the Villa’s architecture incorporates time in a direct, kinetic way. It is an L-shaped house set on a quarter-cylinder moving around its axis along four sets of rails and rollers according to the sun. This structure makes a complete rotation along the circular tracks in more than 9 hours, embedding the movement of the sun into the architecture itself, much like sundials introduce a temporal dimension by projecting shadows onto façades or public spaces.
Arguably, the architectural expression of time in architecture reached its peak in Vladimir Tatlin unbuilt Monument to the Third International (1919-1920). His 400-metre-high tower was intended to symbolise the dawn of the new era of world revolution and the end of bourgeois time (Lynton, 2008). The semi-transparent, inclined metal structure consisted of two spirals with four volumes rotating within it. The spirals may remind the DNA helix, although that iconic image was codified decades later. They symbolised different cycles of social and political activity, each rotating at a different speed: a cube, housing the legislative congresses, completed one full rotation per year; a pyramid, for executive functions, rotated over the course of a month; a cylinder, intended for the dissemination of news, turned daily; and a hemisphere, for propaganda purposes, completed a rotation every hour.
The tower was not just symbolic; it was designed to really mark time. It represented a shift from classical forms, conceived as timeless, to time-based structures and functions. With Tatlin, architecture became performative.
- 3 See the interview in Capuano, Carpenzano, 2016.
MR Indeed, in Tatlin’s tower mutation prevails over permanence. The rotating elements continually shift their relative position, without freezing the building’s specific form. Instead, Villa Girasole has a different guiding principle, I think: by following the sun, the Villa is inhabited by a fixed, never-changing light.
To put it simply, we could conclude that, while classical orders and fixed forms are typical of Western approaches, mutation and non-permanence are typical of Eastern ones. They seem like distant universes, yet I wonder if, at this time, landscape design might not represent a bridge between these two worlds. I have always been struck by the words of Enric Batlle, a European landscape architect who, describing his renaturalisation of the Val d’en Joan landfill, stated that the project is not built, but rather builds itself over time, as nature follows its own path, causing the place to change autonomously over time.3 At the same time, Konjiang Yu, as a Chinese landscape architect, said that he creates “spongy spaces” that function as evolutionary matrices. These approaches seem to refer to a new paradigm according to which designers establish open rules, without precluding any degree of freedom, leaving room for self-generating actions – almost as if the architects provided algorithms, and no longer forms and spaces.
All this may seem unsettling, but it is not necessarily opposed to the classical concept of architectural order – perhaps nothing more than a weakened version of it. After all, every algorithm, however evolutionary it may be, establishes rules: it defines which orders are possible and which are not, narrowing the scope of action.
And this is, ultimately, what every architect does, every time they lay out the rules to organise the development of a project over time.