References

“In 1905 Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity showed how measurements of space and time varied for observers in different reference frames and that time did in fact move slower under certain conditions. Special Relativity replaced the conventional notion of absolute time with the notion of a time that is dependent on reference frame and spatial position. Time is the fourth dimension of space. This continuum of time and space became known as “spacetime.” In modern physics things that happen in spacetime are called “events” with both spatial and durational qualities. This discovery was so revolutionary that the discipline of Architecture has still not figured out how to adapt this theory more than 100 years after it was proven.

“TIME IS THE FOURTH DIMENSION OF SPACE.”

Architecture has relied on Euclidean geometry and Cartesian coordinates since the beginning of its written history. It provides a fairly straightforward and static means of understanding space. It was measurable and finite. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is anything but. Everything is relative, mutable, experiential.

There have been some attempts. Sigfried Gideon in his book Space, Time and Architecture introduced the idea in 1941, but no one picked it up. Kinetic architecture tries to address the dimension of time in a literal way. The work of Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry employ some of the new geometry but are physically and experientially static. More recently, Art Theory has explored slowness as a condition of contemporaneity as in Lutz Koepnick’s analysis On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary.

In his book, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, first published in 1996, Juhani Pallasmaa writes,

“The incredible acceleration of speed during the last century has collapsed time into the flat screen of the present, upon which the simultaneity of the world is projected. As time looses its duration, and its echo in the primordial past, man loses his sense of self as a historical being, and is threatened by the ‘terror of time’. Architecture emancipates us from the embrace of the present and allows us to experience the slow, healing flow of time. […] The time of architecture is a detained time; in the greatest of buildings time stands firmly still. […] Time and space are eternally locked into each other in the silent spaces […]; matter, space and time fuse into one singular elemental experience, the sense of being.”

SOURCE SLOW SPACE