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ARCHITECTURE OR ACCELERATION

Position as opposition

Anne Bordeleau

In order for the patient to survive from the crisis Alberto Pérez-Gómez diagnosed in 1980, a decision had to be made.² When I consider the phrase Architecture’s Appeal, I can only think that the title must point to our responsibility as architects to constantly appeal a decision that appears to have been made. Pérez-Gómez was specifically building upon Husserl’s reading of the crisis in European sciences, but the necessity for architecture to plead and plead again, i.e. to put forward a formal answer or objection, is relevant in light of another use of the term crisis. Since 1780, crisis has been applied to history to express “a new sense of time which both indicated and intensified the end of an epoch.”³ Acceleration, this sense of time that ascended over the last 200 years as a child of modern sciences, now dominates not only political and economic dimensions, but also everyday life, the perception of culture and even more fundamentally how we situate ourselves in the world as mortal beings.⁴ The idea of reconciliation, whether or not it is still possible, implies a relation between the temporal and the eternal, two realms traditionally mediated through architecture. Positing the possibility of mediation at the heart of architecture’s relation to time, in this paper I first question the impacts of acceleration to then glimpse at architecture’s appeal: how it exerts its power to address itself to “chora” as a “space of ontological continuity,” wherein the transience of becoming writes itself against the immutable figure of Being.5

Acceleration and depth

In a critical research on acceleration, the sociologist Hartmut Rosa ascertains the existence of our late-modern experience of time through a study of its social, theoretical and political underpinnings.⁶ Some of Rosa’s observations on the socioeconomic dimensions of acceleration will be familiar. Indeed, it is widely accepted that the growing rate of production and technological innovation fuels a greater level of consumption along with the insatiable sense of unfulfilled desire. The perception of acceleration has far-reaching consequences that include individual and collective senses of a scarcity of time, the conditions of the non-simultaneity of the simultaneous between (and often also within) specific social groups, the institutional adaptation in the form of exceptional powers as well as the experience of a growing distance from tradition. Implicitly, Rosa’s study also points to the troubling nature of the relation between surface and depth. Over the past decades, architectural theorists such as Antoine Picon, Sanford Kwinter and Joan Ockman have considered how an unchallenged technological will rests at the core of the relation between the fluid surface and the petrified depth.⁷ In Polar Inertia, Paul Virilio also addresses the stiffening effects of technology.⁸ Paradoxically, the technology that propels the perpetual attraction for change and novelty also leads to the eternal return of the same. The technological promise of emancipation ultimately congeals in a new form of oppression that calls for alternatives to former conceptions of salvation. Identifying the daunting and ultimately oppressive nature of endless movement, voices both within and outside architecture – Marshal Berman, Hilde Heynen or David Harvey – have alluded to the persisting need for some redeeming figure of stability.⁹ This figure, however, takes the form of an aestheticization of politics, a longing for the eternal, or a spatialization of time. The reference is no longer the possibility of ontological or even historical continuity, but rather the frozen moment of an endless present. We have moved from a time defined through duration, sequences and rhythms to what Manuel Castells describes as timeless time: a time without depth.¹⁰

The loss of depth, a real depth in the sense advocated by Pérez-Gómez, is directly related to the transformation of our relation to time. It must be understood in light of the shifting conception of, and changing relation between, time and eternity. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, the ability to measure time verified impressions of a temporal foreshortening that were gradually transformed from an experience based in eschatological Christian expectations of an end fixed from outside, to progress in the natural sciences that could be measured within history. In the words of historian Reinhart Koselleck, the Christian apocalyptic conception of a “foreshortening of time … became a metaphor for acceleration. . . .”11 Rosa adds that in a secular conception wherein eternity refers to a world that will continue after our fast-approaching death, the ability to live faster, that is to live more options, eventually serves “as a functional equivalent to eternity.” Functionally, the “almost infinite plurality of forms of life” that a late-­modern individual embraces to match transformations in their changing world becomes synonymous to “traditional ideas of an ‘eternal life.’”¹² In a strange reversal, the “open, experimental, and fragmentary images of the self” that one adopts to keep up with incessant changes pose as the figure of eternity, whereas stability in one’s identity is avoided, doomed to be anachronistic.¹³

The redefinition and relocation of eternity is dramatic in at least two crucial ways. First, and fundamentally, the new secular conception negates the formerly implied transcendental dimension. From a temporal perspective, the quality of meta-narrative that any ideology tends towards is inevitably endowed by a certain sense of eternity. Plurality of fragmented approaches – like the “almost infinite plurality of forms” at the level of the individual – now replace former attempts to hint at some shared stable ground. Second and paradoxically, the secular location of eternity within accelerated time actually fuels an alienation from time. The experiences lived in accelerated time do not carry mnemonic depth; they disappear from memory as quickly as they vanish with the present.¹⁴ This lack of reference leads to a form of self-alienation. To avoid becoming anachronistic one must constantly focus on the new, one must move with time’s flow. In “Le Cygne,” Charles Baudelaire was referring to the life of things that we behold in our memory once we have experienced them, a life that he then considered could outlive the objects themselves.¹⁵ Along with the stable figure of eternity, even Baudelaire’s memories – as heavy as stone – now evaporate.

Architecture’s compensation: territory, the everyday and the fragmentary

The demystification of infinity in relation to human orientation in space has its temporal counterpoint in the ascending importance of acceleration. The former implies the superfluity of a larger cosmological order; the latter brings eternity within time at the expense of the lived-time of experience. As we witness the fragmentation of architectural practice and its expansion into larger fields, we can discern two apparently opposed tendencies. Current practice is polarized between tactical interventions and infrastructural urbanism, between ephemeral installations and metabolistic approaches to the territory, between explorations of digital materiality and ecological urbanism. At the punctual and ephemeral end of the spectrum, the emphasis is on the “everyday.” At the other end, different definitions of “perpetuity” form the temporal framework inherent to broad and operational interventions. But whether in their investment in the everyday or in longer sustainable cycles, how far do these approaches reinforce or resist the intrinsic processes of our late-modern temporal regime?

Small-scale intervention, playful or parasitical projects that emerge and vanish quickly – lasting the time of a day, a festival or a season – projects rooted in the everyday typically rest on the participation of a willing crowd. Digital architecture is often the motor of production; mass customization, freedom in permutations and apparently limitless possibilities of appropriation frequently characterize the installations. When these projects are published, users are invariably represented. The architecture of the everyday must be shown in use, the crowd it gathers is the measure of its success. But they gather, how? Given the alienation engendered by the secularization of “eternity as acceleration” and its effect on the experience of time, how meaningful can the everyday remain? With the absence of an Other, of eternity as an immutable idea, isn’t the everyday merely existing on the skin that time has already shed? In Virilio’s words: “in our ordinary everyday life, we are passing from the extensive time of history to the intensive time of an instantaneity without history made possible by the technologies of the hour.”16