Title: Interiors and their temporalities: Etching time into Modernist Materiality
Abstract: “Since the classical period,” Marvin Trachtenberg claims in his thought-provoking 2010 book Building-in-Time, “architecture has always been known as the victim of time – of the entropic agency of time’s arrow” (Trachtenberg 2010: 1). As a consequence, architecture has often been conceived of in terms of space rather than time. Within this dominant paradigm even so-called historicist phenomena such as the imitation of classical building principles in the 18th century or the vogue of neo-movements in the 19th century can be interpreted as attempts to arrest the passing of time in favor of “timeless,” transhistorical spatial structures. This evacuation of time from architecture, it is argued by Trachtenberg, reaches its climax in the “chronophobic” and even “chronicidal” nature of High Modernist architecture (Trachtenberg 2010: xxii). In contrast to the premodern way of building, he argues, modernist architecture lives “in its own timeless-time bubble”