Mean Time. Expiring Architecture

The research, recognizing the relationship between architecture and violence, investigates the field of apotropaic experimentation formulated by the architectural discipline in response to artificial trauma. Starting from Cedric Price’s “Mean time” exhibition — where the architect experiments with unusual ways to measure time through space, focusing on the interstitial transitional time frames that emerge within the built environment — the research concentrates on the chronic adverse condition of impermanency that characterizes our contemporaneity and retraces projects, strategies, and dispositifs that architecture has defined to deal with and adapt to the transitory time intervals opened by trauma, identified in this work as mean time. The goal of the research is articulated on a double level. Firstly, to verify how a taxonomy of provisional devices, filters, buildings, and principles stressed by the traumatic event have been absorbed within the architectural discipline and inserted into other semantic contexts, manipulated, and adapted to become, unexpectedly, permanent elements within the architectural discipline. Moreover, the work focuses on the shift concerning the containment concept and the progressive focal reposition in its object. While the devices deployed to arm the conflict between man and traumatic events in the short- and medium-term register at their center the human body, providing a separation from a threatening environment; with the bunker and its reinterpretation, the human body has been gradually removed from the center of the containment issue, replaced by the same threatening element that needs to be separated from the outside. The mean time — implying the presence of a vanishing point and a certain dureè — evokes the array of diverse expiring architectures, grasping three different time lengths: short (days), medium (years), and long (centuries), three different temporalities that refer to the initially planned obsolescence of the intercepted case studies. The short-term retraces movements and practices defined to exorcise and overcome the trauma by construing cyclical rituals and reiterated operations: a corpus of movements, trajectories, and practices exposing strategies to overcome trauma through repetitive, erasing, and in some cases, spectacularizing operations on the event that provoked it. The medium-term is dedicated to the bunker taxonomy: the body’s protective archetype built due to the paranoid obsession with stability, resistance, and permanence. From its intense spreading during the World Wars to its contemporary reinterpretation, by employing its main features to construct in particularly hostile contexts or, as a result of the nowadays perception of the imminent end of the world, to erect new luxury havens where millionaires can shelter from the catastrophe of the moment. Finally, the long- term embrace projects that interface with the geological time, exploring architecture’s strategies to operate on landscapes and territories traumatized by the emergence of threatening hyper-objects, reacting to a sort of slow-motion catastrophe through projects that question the very concept of containment: the nuclear waste repositories.