Amanda Yates (Lead Author)

Gemma Loving-Hutchins

Massey University

Abstract

Aiming to frame architecture and architectural representation as performative

discourses this paper explores the moments in which architecture and its

representations transcend their normative stasis. In so doing this paper addresses a

void within the theorization and practice of architecture – the concept of time.

Through the design-based research discussed in this paper architecture and

architectural representation is reconceptualised as existing only in relation to time’s

flow and as performing the mutable environment through changes in spatial qualities

of light, shade or containment. In so doing we erode the discursive boundaries

between architectural artefacts, whether large-scale or small, and between architecture

and site. Site becomes understood here as a condition of change, the architectural

artefact a site construction which performs time. This conceptualisation of spatio-

temporal flow arises from Polynesian spatial concepts – particularly the notion of the

va or ma, where space and time are intermeshed – and from Western theories of time

and the event which propose existence as a condition of ongoing and ceaseless flux.

Keywords

time, temporality, duration, Oceanic architecture, performative

architecture

Introduction

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Seeking to establish architecture and architectural representation as a discourse of

time, space and sensory experience this paper explores the moments in which

architecture transcends its normative static state becoming an evental act. In so doing

this paper addresses a void within the theorization and practice of architecture – the

concept of time – and articulates a practice-based research and design mode that

engages time-based change. We explore here a ‘paper architecture’ project by

student and spatial designer Gemma Loving-Hutchins and analyse three built

architectures; the Sounds House and the Gallery for a Bachelor’s Bach by architect

and academic Amanda Yates; and the Chapel of Futuna by architect John Scott. All

four of these various architectures perform time as light casts shadow, tidal shifts are

measured, or architectural elements move in response to their event-based

environments.

Western architectural discourse has a history of resistance to the notion of time-based

change: architectural durability and weather-tightness have been regarded as

normative with transient and permeable structures, such as the light-weight

fabrications of the Pacific, understood as operating outside of an architectural

discourse. While architecture has been challenged to engage with the temporal from

the modernist period onwards through such texts as Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time

and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition architecture remains a discourse

fundamentally concerned with stasis and containment. Architectural theorist Sanford

Kwinter, in Architectures of Time, notes that while there is an increasing focus on time

and the event in philosophical and scientific disciplines, there is a lack of a similarly

rich development in the fields of art, music, literature and, by extension, architecture. i

He calls for cultural productions, including architecture, to shift from stasis and

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singularity to what he calls the evental,ii the dynamic and the multiple, all of which

are temporal states and experiences. Such a shift, he suggests, would require a change

in thinking from architecture as object to architecture as a field of relations, a part of

the “system of forces that give shape and rhythm to the everyday life of the body.

Thus the object – be it a building, a compound site, or an entire urban matrix …

would be defined now not by how it appears, but rather by practices: those it partakes

of and those that take place within it”.iii

In Architecture from the Outside, philosopher Elizabeth Grosz introduces time as a

condition outside of architectural traditions and suggests that “architectural

conceptions of space may be unhinged or complexified using a Bergsonian model of

duration on space and spatial objects, reversing the usual spatialization of time with a

temporalization of space”.iv Grosz refers to philosopher Henri Bergson’s theories of

duration that posit existence as a condition of ongoing, ceaseless flux where all is in

motion.v Linking this theory with architecture affirms a concept of spatiality that is

formed through and from change where “(s)pace, like time, is emergence and

eruption, oriented not to the ordered, the controlled, the static, but to the event, to

movement or action”.vi Such event-based space disrupts the architectural boundary

for, as Brian Massumi writes in Parables of the Virtual, event space is characterised

not by its “boundedness, but [by] what elements it lets pass, according to what

criteria, at what rate, and to what effect. These variables define a regime of

passage”,vii establishing architecture as a dynamic threshold rather than static

boundary.

This paper proposes architecture as a performative and time-based condition. We

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begin with the architectural design process, exploring how to rethink architectural

representations as dynamic and sited artefacts that operate as micro-architectures. We

present an extended project, Modelling Thinking, by final year Spatial Design student

Gemma Loving-Hutchins, developed within two consecutive studios, Evental Sites

and Site Constructions, led by Amanda Yates in 2009. We then explore the concept of

site as a cultural construction profoundly affected by regional environmental

specificities. Following Polynesian situated knowledges and cultural practices site

becomes understood as being fundamentally a condition of time-based change and it

is this site-specific flux that the architectural representations and built architectures

analysed in this paper respond to.

The term ‘site-constructions’ is employed for both the architectural representations

and the built architecture described in this paper. In so doing we seek to erode the

distinctions between architecture, architectural representation and evental site. We

argue here that the architectural artefacts explored in the project Modelling Thinking

are micro-architectures in their own right because of their engagement with time-

based environmental change. We propose these constructions as architecture, rather

than ‘sculpture’ – that other built condition located in site – because of their siting

within the discourse of architectural design. We explore these micro-architectures

along with the macro-scaled built architecture in the final section of this paper, Site

Constructions, and assert that they may be understood as hybrid site-constructions

that overlay or merge the architectural and environmental given the manner in which

they perform their time-based sites.

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Architectural Representation: Modelling Thinking

Cultural critic Elizabeth Grosz asserts that philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s project is “…

in part about thinking, about how to think, to think while making or rather while

doing: to think as doing.”viii Grosz suggests that Deleuze is concerned not with fixed

bodies of thought but rather with thinking as a creative and generative practice that

engenders difference. This paper is concerned with architectural representation as a

mode of thinking through making – we seek to reframe what architectural

representation can be in order to draw out new ways to think and make architectural

space.

Architectural theorist Justine Clark identifies the originator of drawing as Diboutades,

a Corinthian maid who traced the shadow of her lover’s silhouette on the wall, as a

way to remember him after he departed. Clark suggests that, “We might also think of

the myth as a picture plane – a surface onto which things are projected and traced,

drawn and redrawn, reworked and revised.”ix The mythical linking of drawing and

shadow provokes the development of a reiterative drawing process in the Modelling

Thinking project in which solar projections of architectural artefacts are ‘traced,

drawn and redrawn, reworked and revised.’

In his introduction to Architectural Design’s “Design through Making” issue, guest

editor and architect Bob Sheil asserts that architectural drawing’s role has changed in

the last 10 or so years as it has moved from a generative medium and building

documentation device to a digital 1:1 construction. With this change Sheil notes that

the:

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maker of the drawing is thus entering a territory formerly the exclusive realm

of those in the craft and manufacturing industries… Not since the era of the

medieval master builder has the architect occupied the realms of

representation and fabrication with such interdependency.x

The digital drawing or modelling process enables digital fabrication, the processes of

drawing, modelling and making intrinsically interlinked in this digital environment.

The Modelling Thinking project explored in the following sections of the paper also

seeks to conjoin fabrication and drawing processes here using the time-based flux of

the environment to ‘draw’ architectural artefacts in shadow or tidal shifts. These

experiments begin to draw temporality into the design process itself and frame

architectural representations as architectural ‘fabrications’ embodied in time and

space.

Figure 1: Stills of film of modelling process

Phase one of the Modelling Thinking project conjoins a fabrication process with a

representational process: the process of creative thinking is explored here as the act of

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modelling – the modelling of thinking – becomes the subject of short films

documenting the process. After filming the modelling process, a time-based

representational technique in itself, the models were sited such that they were exposed

to environmental change; the first iteration rendered in sunlight and shadow as

durational drawings onto a paper ‘site’; further iterations, discussed in the Evental

Sites and Site Constructions sections of this paper, measuring the shifting edge

between sea and shore or mapping the fluid datum of the sea’s surface.

Figure 2: Model and durational drawing

The durational drawings are performative renderings of the model’s presence in space

and time. They were constructed by placing a model onto a paper sheet and, every

hour, tracing the model’s shadow onto the page. The eventual sequence mapped the

path of the sun over a period of five hours. This process was also repeated with time-

lapse photography. The role of the model shifted under this time-based ‘drawing’

mode from one of architectural representation to architectural artefact; the paper and

sunlight became the model’s temporalised site, the drawings durational

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representations of a sited construction. These durational drawings momentarily

figured the model as a micro-construction subject to the field of relations that is its

time-based site.

Figure 3: Model and time-lapse photography

These films, drawings, photographs and models are activated through the passage of

time and shifting casts of light – this research asserts that through this temporal

activation they transcend their status as representation and become durational and

spatial sites in their own right. These explorations radicalise architectural

representation shifting this from a discourse of stasis to one of time-based and site-

specific dynamism. In the following section we expand on the notion of site as a

complex and multiple condition inherently associated with the temporal.

Evental Sites and Situated Knowledges

The term site is a complex term with multiple meanings that shift between discourses.

In their text Site Matters architectural theorists Carol Burns and Andrea Kahn assert

that in “design discourse, a site too often is taken as a straightforward entity contained

by boundaries that delimit it from the surroundings.”xi The condition of site is they

suggest more complex and multivalent than this unitary reading and may be

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understood in three different ways: “[t]he first concerns vocabulary: the terms and

concepts normally drawn upon to talk about site. The second deals with history: how

site-oriented issues, design processes, and the siting of specific projects are treated by

the historiographical record. The third strand investigates the manifestation and

derivation of site-related design practices.”xii This paper proposes another notion of

site as an environmentally specific cultural construction – and explores the situated

knowledges of Oceania that emerge from the time-based natural environment.

Writing on Oceania architectural theorist Albert Refiti and choreographer and director

Lemi Ponifasio assert that the ocean is the primary site of the Pacific. Refiti and

Ponifasio describe the ocean as being “(o)f all the grounds … the most insubstantial

because it has no particular identity, no fixed position”xiii and suggest that this unstable

site condition leads to a Pacific spatiality defined by the indefinite and the momentary.

Architectural theorist Mike Austin suggests that Oceania’s time-based architectures

derive from the architecture of the seaxiv, those waka (boats) sited on the shifting

surface of the ocean. Austin writes that it is clear that:

water and boats affect Oceanic architecture in many ways from structure to

construction to detail to ornament. In the Pacific, sails become floor mats (and

vice versa), old boats are used as storage structures, and both buildings and

boats are held together by a technology of weaving and tying.xv

Like the temporal environment of the ocean, Pacific space embodies a spatiality of

motion that is “thoroughly imbricated with the technologies, mythologies and

aesthetics of movement”.xvi The condition of movement or transience generates an

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ephemeral temporality in the built environment that contrasts with Western

architecture’s aspirations to durability for, as Austin notes, “Pacific Island buildings

are constructed in materials that decay rapidly giving the architecture a shifting and

transient quality …. These dimensions of architecture in the Pacific contrast sharply

with the fixity associated with Western architecture”.xvii

Both waka and fale (Samoan/Tongan house) then are sited constructions that first and

foremost measure or respond to the time-based field upon and within which they’re

located. As environmentally responsive and permeable architectures they contrast

with Western architecture’s historic concerns for durability, weather resistance and

stasis and therefore have often been understood as operating outside of Western

architectural discourse. This research frames architecture as a performative and fluid

condition – in this discursive model Oceania’s performative architectures provide a

regionally and culturally specific model from which to generate time-based

constructions, whether micro-scaled artefacts or macro-scaled buildings.

Figure 4: Site Construction: installation at Lyall Bay, Wellington, NZ.

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Testing out both time-based architectural representations and architectures the second

iteration of the Modelling Thinking project moved from a paper site into the

continually changing environment. A site-construction was fabricated and situated at

the edge of sea and land. The liminal siting of the construction enabled the artefact to

act as a measure that made evident the flux of the ocean. Successive photographs

documented the shifting tide in relation to the sited artefact, the located architecture

emphasising the flux of its environment. In the following section, Site Constructions,

we discuss further examples of temporalised architectures, focussing on a third

iteration of Modelling Thinking along with three large-scale inhabited structures.

Site Constructions

Burns writes in “On Site: Architectural Preoccupations” that “(c)onsidering the site in

terms of theory and siting in terms of architectural activity outlines the insistent

intersections of architecture, site and construction and also illuminates design thinking

in architecture.”xviii This research considers site in terms of theories of time and

ontologies of fluidity. The notion of site as a temporal condition forms and informs

the performative architectural artefacts discussed in this section of the paper offering

another mode of designing that blends architecture and environment as a complex

intersection – a site-specific and time-based site-construction or landscape-

architecture.

The third phase of Modelling Thinking again intervened into a site, exploring context

by mapping change. This third construction was also embedded into the sea floor: at

low tide the site-construction was exposed, its site traced over with shadows upon the

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sand; at high tide the structure rose vertically above the watery surface its horizontal

cross-struts acting as a means by which to map the rising and falling ocean datum.

The architectural artefact became here a kind of site-specific event zone characterised

not by its “boundedness, but [by] what elements it lets pass…”,xix operating as a

construction around and through which moved evental flows of sea-water.

Figure 5: Site Construction: Vertical Measure, Lyall Bay, Wellington, NZ.

The micro-architectures of the Modelling Thinking project share architectural

strategies with the macro-scaled architecture that we will address in the remainder of

this paper. All three buildings discussed respond to or measure the changing

environment, each in different ways: the Sounds House parallels the micro-structures

in that at times it lacks an architectural interior and is open to flows of wind, rain and

sun; the Gallery for a Bachelor’s Bach features one primary architectural element that

registers changing light and shadow; while Futuna, the most highly interiorised of all

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the buildings, is a temporalised architecture whose patterns of light and colour reflect

the shift of sun or clouds.

Figure 6 & 7: Sounds House open and closed phase

The Sounds House is a site-specific architecture that responds to environmental and

programmatic change, interior and exterior space shifting radically through time as

the house opens and closes. Located on a steep bush-clad hill in the Marlborough

Sounds the house was designed for a semi-retired couple who had spent a lot of time

on boats. Compact and operable the space can be trimmed, by the adjustment of

louvre walls or the rearrangement of large sliding panels, to suit weather and

inhabitational event.

Conceived as an time-based spatial field, the boundaries of the house are multiple and

mutable: discontinuous and perforated roof-walls form open zones; sliding panels

demarcate or dematerialise space dependent on their contingent location; interlinked

rooms and louvre walls form defined space that remains permeable to the exterior.

The resultant space is characterised by fluid boundary conditions that render interior

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and exterior as time-based conditions, architecture here complexified by the

introduction of durational change. This time-based space becomes characterised not

by its boundedness, its interiority or exteriority, but by its flux between these

conditions in response to the environment or to the programmatic desires of the

inhabitants.

Figure 8 & 9: Sounds House open phase

To enter the house, one passes through a tight passage and enters into the exterior. The

outdoor room with its timber deck and sectioned roof frame an expansive view of

bush, sky and sea. In the closed phase the living space forms an island of interiority

surrounded by the outdoor room with its partially enclosing walls and roof. In its open

phase the living space and timber platform establish a field that is intermittently

contained only and constantly responsive to environmental flows of wind, rain and

sun. This central openness recalls the original marae-nui-atea that is the ocean. The

chamfered roof channels water to a rain-water tank for domestic use, and down a wall

to a series of folded concrete storm steps that sluice water down the hill to a small

pond. An outdoor bath is located next to this water wall, a constructed remembrance

of Oceania’s primary ground, the temporalised environment of the ocean.

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Figure 10: Gallery for a Bachelor’s Bach

The Gallery for a Bachelor’s Bach operates as another kind of site-construction – a

primary gold-leaf wall that acts as a screen upon which late afternoon light plays. The

gallery, a one-room addition to a tiny cottage in a bush-clad valley, is both art-space

and living room – moveable panels over glazed slots and one large glazed aperture

provide the owner-collector with a way to moderate seasonal, diurnal or momentary

shifts in light in relation to the doubled needs of inhabitant and art-work.

Glazed slots on three sides establish the gallery as a kind of spatial gnomon. The

diurnal passage of the sun is marked by these slots which also frame the external

environment for viewing. Light is mediated by sliding panels that block direct sun

from art works, an effulgent glow only seeping from the sides of the panels. The

positioning of these panels also marks time, north-eastern panels employed in the

morning, west oriented panels in the afternoon. The gallery’s walls extend past the

interior volume as frames that also collect shadow – low winter light casts linear

shadows of wintery branches, strong summer sun dapples shifting leaf patterns.

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The main site-measure device, the gilded wall, is situated opposite the large glazed

panel and in the path of low angled winter sun. At this time the space signals seasonal

rhythms, the slow play of leafless winter shadow moving as a temporalised projection

across the gold wall. This durational change radically shifts one’s experience of the

space through an acute and architecturally amplified mapping of the passage of time –

the architecture becomes an evental field that changes with the time-based

environment. The space approaches the transcendent as angling winter light reflects

off a translucent table briefly, rendering a butterfly’s outline in light and shadow on

glowing gold before the light fades to dusk.

Figure 11: Gallery for a Bachelor’s Bach – butterfly’s shadow

John Scott’s Chapel of Futuna is also an architecture that performs in response to the

rhythms of the environment as when the sun casts colour onto the monumental

concrete interior or when rainwater pools. The building operates as a site-construction

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that measures time and the environmental flux of wind, cloud, rain and sun. As such

the building echoes a Pacific spatiality defined by the indefinite and the transitory and

sited metaphorically, and often literally, on the shifting surface of the sea.

The outer limits of the chapel are delineated, on the diagonal, by twinned pools that

measure temporal and environmental flows as rainwater channels down valleys of the

sloping roof. These doubled pools recall the temporalised environment of the ocean

that is constantly subject to change. These weather-activated bodies of water prefigure

the time-based flux of the interior of the chapel.

Inside, the space of the chapel is dependent on the elemental rhythms of angling sun

or shifting skyscape to perform as a transcendent and translucent architecture: at these

times the emergent, diurnal or seasonal rhythms of the environment are cast as

coloured light and pattern on the mass of walls and floor. The folded roof contains

two large doubled acrylic panels, one orienting to the north-east, the other to the

north-west; through this orientation diurnal rhythms appear in chamfered lozenges of

light that map the sun’s path as they track across the space. Speaking of the moment

the chapel’s spatio-temporal display was first seen sculptor Jim Allen recalls: “I think

it was John that saw it first. He came running in – as we were in another building –

come on, come on, come and have a look at this. We all ran across to the chapel – the

yellow and blood-red light was on the wall – the most amazing thing … there were

people standing there in silence – just watching the light, the way it moved across and

up the wall … It was quite shattering.”xx

Conclusion – Spatio-temporal Architectures

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In order to unsteady architectural assumptions and generate discursive ‘difference’

both architecture and architectural representations are understood in this paper as

time-based artefacts sited in a temporal environment. The architectural representations

that engage environmental change – whether durational shadow drawings of models

or site installations that measure the constant change of the ocean – are understood as

site constructions that assert architecture as a condition of space and time. Testing out

theories of the event at a small scale, the micro-constructions offer a way to radicalize

architectural thinking and architectural space through a theorized and artefactual

engagement with the time-based environment.

The macro-scaled architectural constructions, with their shifting, porous boundaries or

light-activated interiors extend on the proposition of temporalized space embodied in

the micro-architecture. Like Massumi’s characterization of event space as passage

these architectures disrupt boundaries, whether through a physical rearrangement of

building envelope or via a more virtual dematerialisation that allows for the

transmission of evental flows from the exterior. The conceptualisation of spatio-

temporal flow articulated in both the architectural artefacts and larger constructions

arises from Polynesian and Western theories that posit time-based change as a primary

condition of existence. Architecture becomes understood here as existing only in

relation to time’s flow and as performing the mutable exterior environment through

changes in spatial qualities of light, shade or containment.

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i Kwinter 2001, 49.ii Sanford Kwinter characterises the evental as being “concrete, plastic, and active (i.e. evental)” in Kwinter, 2001, 69 n. 29. iii Ibid., 14.iv Ibid., xxi.v Bergson 1960, 355.vi Grosz 2001, 116.vii Massumi 2006, 85.viii Grosz 2001, 58.ix Clark 2002, 9.x Sheil 2005, 7.xi Burns 2005, x.xii Ibid., xix.xiii Ponifasio and Refiti 2003, 140.xiv Austin 2004, 226.xv Ibid., 226xvi Ibid., 227.xvii Ibid., 227.xviii Burns in Kahn 1991,148.xix Massumi 2006, 85.xx Walden 1987, 122.