Powers of Time: A Studio Dealing with the Relative Duration of Things in the Universe and the Effects of Adding Another Thing Advanced Research Studio
In Powers of Ten: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effects of Adding Another Zero, Ray and Charles Eames explored the way daily life was produced through different size scales in the universe, from the subatomic level to beyond the Milky Way. This studio attempted a similar exploration—one in which time, rather than size, was the primary concern. Time is fluid and its materiality irreducible. To paraphrase Sanford Kwinter, time has been expressed historically through rationalized accounting practices, but these are mere tools meant to abstract and measure the senseless procession of events in nature.
Advanced graduate and undergraduate students worked in groups on sites where mass extinction—a better term for ‘global warming’—was most visible: a town in the arctic circle, a city along the coast, or another place exhibiting important signs of environmental unrest. These sites were selected and documented by the students. Then, each team was asked to respond to the trauma of extinction by instrumentalizing time, designing a single project through a series of architectures that ranged in duration from a few seconds to several years and even deep time.
Architecture has long been mistaken as a discipline of stasis. We tend to think of architecture as fixed and finite, having a beginning and an end, and usually oscillating between the act of drawing and the enactment of building. Even so, architecture is already (and has always been) in flux. The world’s mountains, forests, and other landscapes are in fact artifacts of previous human and nonhuman designs, staging fragile and susceptible natures that have changed time and again. Today, as in the last few centuries, the discipline’s role has been made to reinforce principles of solidity, durability, and stasis: we experience buildings as finished products and forget to account for their pasts and, more importantly, their futures. Powers of Time created and unveiled the temporal narratives of architectural projects by relying on nature to render visible the different timescales embedded within each design.
In response to two ongoing disciplinary problems—the problem of time and the problem of spatiotemporal representation—this studio asked, how would architecture change if its temporal relationships weren’t self-referential but instead relative to all things in the universe? Or rather, what if time were conceived as something real? Powers of Time aimed to reassess architecture by shifting its gears from solidity, durability, and stasis to fluidity, impermanence, and fluctuation.
Course Type and Audience Advanced Research Studio Undergraduate and Graduate students
Institution University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Location Milwaukee, WI
Faculty José Ibarra
Term Spring 2020
Works Displayed Credits Keygan Sinclair and Stephen Cortez DJ Curley, Lucas Dedrick, and Caroline Schlosser Bella Biwer, Armand Gamboa, and Claire Hitchcock-Tilton
