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PG24 is a group of architectural storytellers employing film, animation, VR/AR and physical modelling techniques to explore architecture’s relationship with time. We are in search of bold new narratives to help us make sense of the complexity of today’s world.
Despite its omnipresence, time is often sidelined in design thought – overlooked by more prominent questions of aesthetics, budget and risk. Introducing time as a fundamental agent in design thinking can unfold a chronicle of assembly; predict a structure’s response to weather; calculate future patterns of occupation; introduce sound and relink architectural composition with music; offer an amplified sense of inhabitation and empathy; and connect with history and imagine the future. Long-term thinking helps us to consider the entire lifecycle of a building, from its conception to its death. Moreover, our highly mediated and interconnected world appears to accelerate the need for urgent social and environmental action. A sense of crisis looms daily: we are too ‘slow’ in our response to the climate emergency; our ‘fast-paced’ lives are overly dependent on carbon-intensive activity; inequalities seem to be deepening ever more quickly. Are we simply running out of time?
This year PG24 questioned time and its scientific, philosophical, psychological and political constitution. Are our global conventions of measuring time entrapping ? Can we escape international time and the hegemony of the clock? Can we find alternative temporal systems and different ways of being in time? Can design help us become better attuned to planetary movements and the circadian rhythms of our bodies? What is the architecture of uchronia, the temporal utopia?
This year’s brief stops to reflect on how a deeper consideration of time, duration and speed might trigger bolder and more effective solutions to problems that confront our bodies, cities, landscapes and Technosphere. In November we took a field trip to the Netherlands and visited the 10th Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, titled ‘It’s About Time’, from which we took our inspiration. The students’ work was informed by the exhibition’s formulation of three main designer strategies based on different velocities of change: the Ancestor, the Activist and the Accelerator. The unit defined 2072, 50 years from now, as a chronological orientation point that united all our projects.