Rhytm Architecture

Even though architecture often might be conceived of as timeless, there has always been different ways of dealing with time in architectural discourse and practice. Since the early 20th century the temporal activities that goes on in and between buildings has, for example, been addressed by concepts such as function, flexibility and program. Architecture is of inevitable importance in our everyday social lives and has a political role to play also in its mere factual claiming and changing of space. But architecture is also a kind of delegated, or materialized, representation and manifestation of political powers in society, powers we generally don't know completely, but still need to acknowledge. My investigation departs as a personal reaction, originating several years ago, to the still widely held notion of architecture as atemporal, well-designed built objects striving towards aesthetic perfection and created by a single author. A plausible way to capture, i.e. to experience and represent architecture as a less stable and more situated phenomenon would be through the study of various rhythms of urban life. In this study it is more precisely the micro-rhythms that connect everyday life situations with the built environment, placing architecture in between the subjective experience and the objective experiential frame that is being examined. I am thus interested in how mundane activities such as eating, walking, shopping, smoking, waiting, etc., brings different kinds of materialities together in a sequential and rhythmical fashion.