Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture

by Sanford Kwinter

An exploration of twentieth-century conceptions of time and their relation to artistic form. In Architectures of Time , Sanford Kwinter offers a critical guide to the modern history of time and to the interplay between the physical sciences and the arts. Tracing the transformation of twentieth-century epistemology to the rise of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, Kwinter explains how the demise of the concept of absolute time, and of the classical notion of space as a fixed background against which things occur, led to field theory and a physics of the "event." He suggests that the closed, controlled, and mechanical world of physics gave way to the approximate, active, and qualitative world of biology as a model of both scientific and metaphysical explanation. Kwinter examines theory of time and space in Einstein's theories of relativity and shows how these ideas were reflected in the writings of the sculptor Umberto Boccioni, the town planning schema of the Futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia, the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and the writings of Franz Kafka. He argues that the writings of Boccioni and the visionary architecture of Sant'Elia represent the earliest and most profound deployments of the concepts of field and event. In discussing Kafka's work, he moves away from the thermodynamic model in favor of the closely related one of Bergsonian duree, or virtuality. He argues that Kafka's work manifests a coherent cosmology that can be understood only in relation to the constant temporal flux that underlies it.

Genres: Architecture, Theory

251 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2001

About the author

Sanford Kwinter is a Canadian-born, New York–based writer and architectural theorist, and a co-founder of Zone Books publishers. Kwinter currently serves as Professor of Theory and Criticism at the Pratt Institute. He formerly served as an associate professor at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and has also taught at [link=Massachusetts Institute of Technology], Columbia University and Cornell University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Having received a doctorate in comparative literature from Columbia University, Kwinter lectured at Harvard University, the University of Applied Arts Vienna ( Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien), the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Over the past twenty years, his publications have pioneered new ideas in art, architecture, science and the humanities. He has written widely on philosophical issues related to design, architecture, and urbanism, and was involved in the series of conferences and publications convened by ANY magazine between 1991 and 2000.

Reviews

[Tom M (London) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Introducing these essays Sanford Kwinter joins the general chorus (of those of us who think about such things) that to maintain its relevance, design (including architecture) now requires a systematic renewal; the idea of recurring crisis is built into modernity, and we need to respond to it. Kwinter believes that the design discipline's "greatest current hope" is to examine the field of contemporary speculation and experimentation in the sciences and in philosophy - looking for a new context. In the course of this book he does not self-critique his own adoption of the word "hope" nor the nature of his own desire for a new overcoming - but I anticipate his essays will of themselves generate such responses.

Rebelling against the Machine Age that first inspired it, modernism is now searching for a new ideology that supersedes a mechanistic view of the universe. Kwinter finds many pointers to the way ahead in the philosophy of Henri Bergson, who gave preeminence to the intuitive over the intellectual and, by attempting to integrate biology with a new theory of consciousness, anticipated some aspects of relativity theory. Einstein's researches are taken into account as Kwinter re-examines Boccioni, Sant'Elia, Kafka, Duchamp and other major figures of "first modernity" - trying to find intimations of a new non-linear, non-progressional idea of time. The discrete event replaces the epic narrative; we are not "going somewhere"; we're here. What is "here"? Kwinter's task is to grasp the coordinates of the moment we now live in and describe it, delineating its architecture. Thus architecture, rather than creating things, becomes a methodical activity that identifies existing phenomena and attempts to describe what these are, producing new information groupings, nomenclatures, and formal expressions. Therefore, such data-gathering is not like the cumulative administration systems of say, the great Library at Alexandria or the operational networks of the Vatican. This is a new place, and we are here in it thanks to fragmentation (Cubism) and acceleration (Futurism).

Nor is it like Kafka. In the absurd, all-powerful bureaucracies described in "The Castle" every aspect of existence is part of a self-perpetuating administrative system complete with its operators and lackeys (and I include, of course, a certain type of architect). Today, as organisations theory replaces Taylorist-Fordist conceptions of time and human relationships with new business models (the industrial district, the virtual organisation) so in every field a synchronous change of perception seems to be occurring. As a teacher, publisher, urbanist and designer closely associated with Bruce Mau, Peter Eisenman, and Rem Koolhaas, Kwinter's aspiration is to grasp the architecture of this occurrence, albeit in the form of essays that are over ten years old and which he reissues here with a caveat about their only partial validity.

The moment we are talking about (I mean now) is the instant in which Gregor in "Metamorphosis" opens his eyes to find he has assumed a new form. An unannounced transformation has occurred while we were asleep (in non-consciousness). On waking, we discover this event has redefined our presence, in the only environment available, as impossible and meaningless. Subsequently Kafka's narrative "goes nowhere" as he describes the absurdities that ensue. Gregor's unavoidable and embarrassing new body as a giant insect is an extraordinary, hilarious, above all a strange unforeseen event that can neither be assimilated nor overlooked, and that demands a redefinition of everything. This is what Kwinter is talking about.

At around the same time when Kafka was scribbling down these thoughts in Prague, the urban visions of Antonio Sant'Elia (drawing no less feverishly in Milan) were filled with melodramatic desire for a tragic event of dénouement (war) followed by a new time of endless movement and utterly unimaginable new conceptions of space and cities. Whilst his analysis of Sant'Elia is fresh and perceptive, Kwinter does not examine Futurism's conception of modernity-as-Promised-Land but it is one that seems particularly à propos, since the book is Kwinter's plea for modernism to find new territory by experiencing a new event he anxiously awaits, like a lookout peering ahead into the fog. Let's hope it isn't an iceberg.

For those able to lift their snouts from the trough for a moment, this is an essential addition to your library.

[Kevan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Architectural theory pulling from the dusty shelves of literary and philosophical history. Hard reading, but it'll make you smarter and cause you to deplore how widely unread you are. It also made me go out and buy more books.

[Aryan Kato · Rating 4 out of 5]

Required introductory reading for simultaneous interests of Bergson and Deleuze. There are two sections on Kafka for those interested in only the literary. Ah, yes the "if . . . then" engine of tactical real time.

[Matt Fischer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very dense, but interesting as it goes along. Kwinter examines some of Kafka's work and makes a strong argument that the essence of modernism is an unavoidable slide into abstraction. I tend to agree, especially after reading this work.