Like you, I am here

My research started with a general interest with the relationship between time and architecture, and personal feelings of a temporal alienation, displacement and disconnection with its looming existential anxieties and fears. 

Time is overwhelming and incomprehensible, and our innate fear of impermanence – what Karsten Harries refers to in Building and the Terror of Time as the “terror of time” can be paralyzing.

He argues that we build shelters, not only to protect us physically against the elements but that they also “promise protection from time’s terror. To feel sheltered is to have banished feelings of vulnerability and mortality.” To Harries, architecture functions as a defence against this existential fear. It serves as a “domestication of time,” giving us a sense of control over something inherently uncontrollable. 

If our built environment is the space where our everyday lives play out and soothe us from our existential fears, what happens when our environments are made to actively resist the impression of time and our inhabitation? When we are quick to erase, replace, and discard these traces, we build an environment devoid of a deeper reciprocal relationship between us and our built environment. 

These traces of a haptic engagement with our built environment are considered "undesirable" -  we build with wear and stain resistant materials due to maintenance, people don’t want to constantly be repainting and replacing. 

This thesis aims to challenge our perceptions of the unassuming scuff, chip, and scratch – all forms of a human patina, as anchorage points of intimate tactile moments of humanistic connection. 

So if wear and tear is inevitable, how can we design in a way that is conducive to these trace and make them desirable?

It is through the responsibilities as a practitioner to mediate our relationship with time. And so our design choices should encourage a haptic relationship between the fabric of architecture and the lived everyday, as it has the ability give us a sense of place, belonging and connection to those that came before us. Allows us to participate in a kind of collective humanistic reading and understanding of our built environment and world.  

By bearing witness to the traces of the past and by engaging with those traces, they, in turn, allow us to participate in a collective time that can give us a sense of place, belonging and connection which can soothe our existential anxieties.

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