Time
The glow of grime
Two hours closer
And thus the heart will break
From the head of Jove
The productions of time
Ise Shrines, Nagoya, 685–Present
To know the place for the first time
A time when time was not
A little dose of time travel
Parkinson's Law
This is how time is forgotten
Good design is timeless
From body to body
Time turned into shape
Eternity was in our lips and eyes
Reverse chronology bias
Because I could not stop for Death
I know all about entropy
Endurance
She was the universe
The lapse of many years
The dignity of age
Typography exists to honor content
Already memories
Unpossessed places
Dead branches
A coherence in things
Do I dare disturb the universe?
A little thing
Hours
We have turned our faces towards the future
A timeless space
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Ever, Never
I can't remember
Deprived of all thickness
No place it hadn't already been
Primer
How Buildings Learn
Human kind cannot bear very much reality
Home Star
One Tenth of a Second
An Article by Venkatesh RaoThe details are fascinating, but the central argument — that the birth of modernity can be traced to a meta-crisis spawned by the 0.1s problem — is worth understanding and appreciating whether or not you’re a time nerd like me.
There is no convenient leitmotif, comparable to the 0.1s problem, for our contemporary version of the rhyming conditions, but something very similar to the “tenth of a second crisis” is going on today. I suspect our Great Weirding too involves some sort of limiting factor on human cognition that we haven’t yet properly wrapped our minds around. It isn’t reaction time, but something analogous.
The Shape of Time
A Book by George KublerThis place is a message
A FragmentThis place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
What will be has always been
A Quote by Louis KahnHofstadter's Law
An Idea by Douglas HofstadterIt always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
The Waiting Place
A Poem by Dr. SeussWaiting for a train to go or a bus to come,
or a plane to go or the mail to come,
or the rain to go or the phone to ring,
or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No
or waiting for their hair to grow.Everyone is just waiting.
The Microsoft Sound
A Quote by Brian EnoThe thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long."
I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel.
In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.
Ideas of permanence
A Fragment by John PawsonOne of the interesting aspects of photography is the way it loosens our instinct to draw distinctions between the permanent and the temporary. In these enduringly fixed compositions, the detail of a mark scratched into the surface of a wall carries no greater weight of reality than the frozen swirl of light on plaster or the calligraphic-like shadows of chair backs cast across a floor.
- async
To supersede the span of individual life
A QuoteNothing gives man fuller satisfaction than participation in processes that supersede the span of individual life.
— Gotthard Booth
Navigation by shibboleth
An Article by Dorian TaylorThe inverse-chronological colly on the front page is exactly what I didn’t want to end up with. I have tried my damnedest to keep everything on this site as temporally neutral as I can make it. I even intentionally leave the dates off the documents. Temporality only matters if you’ve already read everything and you want to see what’s new or changed, like if you’ve subscribed to a feed. Which is exactly what that is on the front page.
Fragments of time
A Quote by Italo CalvinoLong novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot live or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
All in & with the flow
An Article by Buster BensonWhen decades happen
A Quote by Vladmir LeninThere are decades when nothing happens, and then there are weeks when decades happen.
A Visual Inventory
Amassing the archive
I once sent a camera to a client, with a request that she keep a visual diary of her newly completed house. For a number of months she duly sent me one photograph a day, of whatever caught her attention, and it was fascinating seeing the spaces from her point of view.
In part it's simply about amassing the archive, but it's also about understanding the implications of every design decision and bringing this knowledge to bear on new projects. You have to keep pushing the learning process.
The spaces between things
It's easy to underestimate the significance of the spaces between things...as soon as you frame a section of the view with architecture, the eye has a place to rest and previously invisible details come into focus.
An absence at its centre
At first glance, the rocky outcrop reflected so sharply in the still surface of the water looks like the ghostly image of a house. Interestingly, once read this way, the image always seems to have an absence at its centre.
Drawing a frame
The panels of tessellating hexagons have been laid to stabilize a path running through what remains of the nave of Rievaulx Abbey. They demonstrate the impact of drawing a frame around anything, even if that frame is nothing more than a plastic cell and the subject an area of grass. I like the way the path simply peters out to either side, with no sharply defined boundaries.
Economy of line
With a composition as disciplined as this, everywhere you point the lens feels like a natural frame. The visible architecture comprises simply three walls, two benches, and the top of a flight of steps. It is a perfect expression of economy of line, with the dark green backdrop of the trees acting as a foil for the light grey concrete and granite.
The smallness of human life
The smallness of human life is graphically expressed in this graveyard, in the low stubs of the headstones dwarfed by the towering tree trunks. Perhaps unexpectedly, the effect of this monumental contrast of scales is a feeling of comfort — the secure tranquility of a final resting place overseen by these massive forms, whose benign nature seems to be underlined by the little wooden nesting box on the central tree.
Attenuation and repetition
The distortion here is produced by the movement of a car, on a road near La Ina in Andalusia. My eye is always drawn to attenuation and repetition and the stratified view here exhibits both characteristics to such a degree that the image appears stretched. The extended parallels of the power lines are layered above the repeating arches of the viaduct and the low mass of the roadside barrier.
The aesthetic potential of flaws
The archaeological quality of this section of exposed wall provides an example of the aesthetic potential of that which is flawed or broken.
Cantilevers of bronze
Set close to the surface of the water, the visible structure is made of only two materials — vertical cantilevers of bronze set between horizontal treads of dark grey granite.
A single material
There is something very appealing about a form constructed in a single material.
Of the plainest variety
It is unusual to find such mismatched elements on a single facade as this fine stonework coexisting with these stained and rotting shutters, on a house in the fortified town of Feltre, in the northern Italian province of Belluno.
Where considerable labour lies behind the cutting and fitting of the stone, the timber planks have been left in their raw state, with no paint or carved decoration. Even the iron hinges are of the plainest variety.
Stacking the rails
Stacking the rails in an interlocking zigzag configuration creates a self-supporting structure that is easy to repair and to take apart. This traditional construction method also has the advantage of requiring few tools, since no holes have to be dug for posts and there is no requirement for nails.
White walls
When people say that white walls are cold and characterless, I wonder whether they have ever stopped to look at one. It's not just about the drama of light and shadow, although I love the fragment of the ghost chair in this picture, but the way the smallest nuances of texture and tone come alive in certain conditions.
The precise construction of relationships
This flight of steps runs up the outside of a Modernist house in Switzerland. What is striking here is the precise construction of relationships. The gaps between steps allow crisp lines of light to fall on the darkly shadowed wall, reinforcing the subtlety of the dialogue between granite and the concrete, which has been bush-hammers to expose the stone aggregates.
In the lee of the sills
The first thing you register here is the dramatic inconsistency in the coloration of the timber cladding the house in Haldenstein: the natural hues of the wood survive only in the lee of the sills, like re-growth along the parties of a head of dyed hair. But a second glance takes in the precision of the cuts made to accommodate the window and the fact that the pine is used in seamless lengths.
An Escher-like quality
There is an Escher-like quality to these flights of steps, but it is the intricate net of shadows created by the roof structure of this sky-lit sculpture gallery, falling across a succession of vertical planes and reflecting back on the surface of the glass, which commands attention. Slender metal bars set crosswise between the rafters add their own animating rhythm. It all makes for a very complex visual arena in which to view art.
Monumental structures
These disused gas cylinders occupy a site on the outskirts of Stockholm. For the first ten years after moving to London, the view west across the train tracks was of a similar pair of monumental structures, transfigured by every sunset. One has since been dismantled to make way for the expanding national and international railway stations.
The character of a light box
In certain conditions, the white walls at home take on the character of a light box. In traditional Japanese architecture the intensity of atmosphere has a lot to do with the way natural light is filtered through the shoji paper panels, suffusing the interior spaces with subdued light, calming the spirit and sharpening the senses.