The Deep Time Project

The Deep Time Project is a multidisciplinary platform of inquiry, research, and investigation about the multiple temporalities coexisting within the planet. This project aims to develop strategies and reframe current global challenges to address the important cultural, social, and ethical questions associated with them.

At the core of this project is the conviction that developing longer perspectives will change the way we behave in the short term and that art, culture, and design are foundational in transforming the way we relate to each other, to the planet, and to the ways we think about our collective role in shaping the future.

The unprecedented global challenges we are facing today demand radical and new temporal accountability. This entails a paradigmatic shift by which what we call “the globe” (home to our ever-globalizing cultures and economies) and “the planet” (this very old cosmic entity we’ve been inhabiting of late) are seen as entangled and unfolding in shallow (human) and deep (planetary) time simultaneously. Inevitably, recognizing deep time as part of human nature, and hence as integral to the architectural condition, will reposition architecture “in the web of life and in the connected but different histories of the globe and the planet.” This daunting but necessary transformation will change the ways we think about architecture, the ways we design and build, the ways we, architects, account for worlds.

Pedagogy & Exhibition

The Deep Time Project is a pedagogical experiment offered to all students at MIT aiming to establish new methodological frames and narrative strategies able to regard architecture as planetary Abstraction. The course’s premise is that the great challenge of becoming true planetary stewards demands that we develop a “deep time” literacy.

Each project exhibited in The Deep Time Project: Architecture as Planetary Abstraction aims to develop a new vantage point to rethink architecture’s agency in the current constellation of human and environmental crises and within the larger context of the deeper history of this planet.

Inspired by a series of weekly readings and conversations with guests—geologists, journalists, anthropologists, historians, architects—around the notion of deep time, each project explores a different constellation of temporalities and agencies in architecture through material essays-vehicles for analytic and interpretative critical views of architecture that combine text, moving image, sound, and physical prototypes.

Essays

Related Bibliography

• Richard Fisher, The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time. London: Headline Publishing Group, 2023.
• Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.
• Dietmar Offenhuber, Autographic Design: The Matter of Data in a Self-Inscribing World. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023. 
• Jimena Canales, The Physicist and The Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson and The Debate that Changed our Understanding of Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015
• David Farrier. Future Fossils: A Speculative Guide to Our Next 100,000 Years. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023.
• Bina Venkataraman. The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age. Riverhead Books, 2019.
• Elisabeth Grosz. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Duke University Press, 2004
• Elisabeth Grosz. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Duke University Press, 2005.
• Elisabeth Grosz. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. Columbia University Press, 2008.
• Tim Ingold. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge, 2013.
• Tim Ingold. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge, 2000.
• Tim Ingold. Imagining for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence. Routledge, 2022.

Additional Resources

• The Deep Time Project, MIT
• Taking the Long View: The Deep Time Project
• Carbon to Rock, Igneous Tectonics, 2021 Venice Biennale
• Carbon to Rock, MIT 4.154 Design Studio
• Shadow Time, e-flux

Contributors

Cristina Parreño Alonso is an architect, designer, and senior lecturer at the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT, where her research Transtectonics explores the cultural and environmental implications of expanded temporal sensibilities in architectural material practice. She is the director of her eponymous architectural firm. Her work has been recently on view at the Schusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow, and she was one of the architects selected to participate in the La Biennale di Venezia 2021.

• Simina Marin
• Andrea Sandell
• Tatiana Strina
• Ekin Bilal
• Juan manuel Chavez
• Lara Avram
• Pa Ramyarupa
• Christina Battikha
• Ardalan SadeghiKivi
• Emily Jane Wissemann
• Natalie Pascale Pearl
• Paul Soren Gruber