Paolo Amaldi
Time Against Time Symposium
26/09/2024
City of Architecture and Heritage
Trocadero

In architecture, space occupies a central place at the expense of time, which is too often neglected, even though it is a key factor in considering the ecological, social, and economic transition. Faced with the climate emergency, this symposium places the question of time at the heart of the debate, as an essential element of architectural, urban, and territorial projects. Rethinking our discipline through the lens of time will allow us to reconsider architecture in light of the temporal dynamics in which it is embedded, an indispensable condition for modifying its circumstances and mechanisms. The American historian Marvin Trachtenberg emphasized that temporality is an epistemic condition that silently affects all production and experience of the built environment. In his book *Buildingin-Time*, he outlines the modalities of construction with and within time that took place during the Renaissance, before human relationships with time were radically transformed. Indeed, mechanized, measurable, and quantifiable time is a legacy of this early modernity, which is now oriented toward progress. The German sociologist and political scientist Hartmut Rosa develops precisely this aspect in his book *Acceleration: A Social Critique of Time*, showing how the question of temporality becomes increasingly evident in the subsequent crises of modernity that we are currently experiencing or undergoing at an accelerated pace. If the question of time becomes more central to our contemporary debate, how do environmental problems reintroduce questions of temporality into architectural practice?
