Our Most Urgent Crises
Strelka Magazine, 2020
Building as Material Event
DEEP TIME ARCHITECTURE. BUILDING AS MATERIAL EVENT
Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) Volume 75, 2021. Issue 1
“There is no space without event, no architecture without movement.” And here we must add that there is no movement without time; and further, that given enough time, even a solid-like material (think of a building here) flows.
As a major player in “the built,” the power of architecture—and the material processes it entails—compares to that of titanic natural forces. Architecture has become a geological force whose consequences need to be viewed from the vantage point of the planet, from geological timescales of observation.
Deep-time architecture redefines the building as a material event, blurring the boundary between human timescales and the Earth's dynamic cycles
.... a mode of thinking, designing, and making where architects are both accountable for the ecological crisis brought on by technological achievements thus far and capable of redirecting the long-term course of deep-time planetary “material-events.”
Deep-time architecture fully embraces tectonics in its multiple meanings: tectonics in architecture, as the science of construction and techniques of material assemblies, and tectonics in geology, as the structure of the crust of the Earth, its processes, and its evolution through time.
Deep-time architecture is a call for architects to start performing according to much broader temporal scales, embracing architecture’s material practice in its relation with the Earth.