Building Time: Architecture, event, and experience

This book explores the temporal dimensions of architecture, emphasizing the importance of understanding time in order to appreciate good architecture. It presents twelve close readings of buildings and artworks by modern architects, demonstrating how time is the framework for our spatial experience of architecture and a key dimension of a building's structure and significance.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 288 pages
Publication date: 26 November 2020
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

While most books on architecture concentrate on spatial themes, this book explores the temporal dimensions of architecture. Through a series of close readings of buildings, both contemporary and classic, it demonstrates the centrality of time in modern architecture and shows why an understanding of time is critical to understanding good architecture.

All buildings exist in time. Even if designed for permanence, they change, slowly but inevitably. They change use, they accrue history and meaning, they decay—all of these processes are inscribed in time. So too is the path traced by the sun through a building, and the movements of the human body from room to room.

Time, this book argues, is the framework for our spatial experience of architecture, and a key dimension of a building's structure and significance. Building Time presents twelve close readings of buildings and artworks that explore this idea. Examining works by distinctive modern architects—from Eileen Gray to Álvaro Siza and Wang Shu—it takes the reader, in some cases literally step-by-step, through a built work, and provides insightful reflections on the importance of "making space for time in architectural design."

This is a book for both theorists and architectural designers. Through it, theorists will find a way to rethink the fundamental premises and aims of design work, while designers will rediscover the order and ideas that shape the world around them—its buildings, interiors, and landscapes.

Weight: 708g
Dimension: 171 x 239 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781350165182