Interiors and their temporalities: Etching time into Modernist Materiality

摘要

"Since the classical period," Marvin Trachtenberg claims in his thought-provoking 2010 book Building-in-Time, "architecture has always been known as the victim of time - of the entropic agency of time's arrow" (Trachtenberg 2010:1). As a consequence, architecture has often been conceived of in terms of space rather than time. Within this dominant paradigm even so-called historicist phenomena such as the imitation of classical building principles in the 18th century or the vogue of neo-movements in the 19th century can be interpreted as attempts to arrest the passing of time in favor of "timeless," transhistorical spatial structures. This evacuation of time from architecture, it is argued by Trachtenberg, reaches its climax in the "chronophobic" and even "chron-icidal" nature of High Modernist architecture (Trachtenberg 2010: (ⅹⅹⅱ)). In contrast to the premodern way of building, he argues, modernist architecture lives "in its own timeless-time bubble" since it is sealed off both from future time (as modernist buildings are not made to endure) as well as from the time of the past (as modernism rejects all references to architectural history) (Trachtenberg 2010: 4-5). In modernist architecture, what is left then is some kind of eternal present. This a-temporal architectural ideology, which is inherent in post-renaissance architecture and is typically exemplified by High Modernism, is contrasted to buildings dating from before the Renaissance. In the premodern era, Trachtenberg contends, the slow pace of building processes inevitably lead to the materialization of the passing of time (and hence of the co-existence of different moments in time) in the structure of the building. Then, temporality was intertwining with the production, occupation and use of space. After the Renaissance, so one might conclude when reading Trachtenberg, building no longer enabled the passing of time "to take place." But was that really the case?