On the Ways Architecture Attempts to Exist Outside of Time

To describe something that exists out of time is to describe something that is not architecture. (p.92)

The core observation made by Till’s book is the way architecture works to set itself apart from the forces of contingency. The author explores multiple ways that this gap manifests, but much of the book uses architecture’s stance toward time as a central illustration of his point.

While architects may dream of their buildings coming into the world as fully fledged durable items with enduring value, the reality is that they always enter the social realm as transient objects, subject right from the beginning to decline in value and an inexorable slide to the status of rubbish. (p.71)

For Till, the concept of time is shorthand for the contingent forces of change, use, dirt, and decay that form the unavoidable context of architecture. He criticises what he sees as architecture’s refusal to acknowledge this context in its practice.

For example, the industry’s obsession with the aesthetics of the architectural photograph or rendering over-emphasizes a frozen, manufactured moment in time at the cost of attention for the eventual everyday existence of the building over time. “In a way the reliance on the photograph is a confession of the fragility of architecture in the face of time; the shift of attention from the object itself to the representation of the object signals a retreat into a more controllable but less real realm.” (p.86)

This refusal of time has subtle, but harmful, effects on the mentality of architects:

They become detached from the scene that they are designing, thereby distancing themselves from it as a site of political and social significance. At a temporal distance, the user becomes an abstraction and so available to be subjected to determinist methods of analysis and design such as functionalism, just as the distant tribe is corralled into determinist behavior patterns under the rule of structuralist anthropology. (pp.94-95)

I recognize the author’s critique in my own experiences in the interaction design. Projects are sold and approved based on a static concept of interaction and experience, frozen on paper in descriptions, renderings, wireframes, and storyboards. As a result, it’s almost like we’ve decided we can dictate the behavior and emotions of the people who engage with our designs. As a field, we’ve tried to address this through the idea of iterative process and prototyping, and it works out reasonably well for constrained contexts. But there are times I feel that a loosening of design authorship and a shift towards designing for appropriation is a more realistic mentality for designing with people in mind. Till touches on this idea when he talks about “building the unfinished”:

Where the functionalist or behaviorist architect attempts to determine use in a fixed and singular manner, the architect of the unfinished mentally inhabits the spaces of their future building in myriad ways in order to test them for their openness to appropriation, and then makes adjustments when the whole feels too constricted. The important thing is that it is conceptually unfinished in order to allow time to take its inevitable course in a positive manner. (p.108)

Till’s treatment of time in architecture is emblematic of his overall arguments in the book. When architecture is seen as separate from the real contexts it exists in, we ultimately suffer from environments devoid of consideration for the social and emotional needs of people.