Revolving Around ‘Temporality’. Contingency as a Means to Question the Stability of Space Through the Flowing of Time

In our sensorial experience of reality, time stands as a primary category through which we mark the pace of our life. Besides its importance in our existence as human beings, when it comes to architecture time has always been considered a subsidiary mean that might – or more often might not – be taken into account concerning its capacity to lead and critically analyze design processes and their outcomes. No less, in the discourse on architecture, the main interest has always been oriented towards the pure spatial aspects of architecture and the idea of space, especially regarding modern thought, has never been questioned outside the realm of objective knowledge. This is also due to a bias toward the ease of recording, and tracing, architecture’s spatial aspects through common traditional representation techniques. Cartographically, we determine our position on Earth whilst, phenomenologically, we understand our body concerning what surrounds it and imaginatively we place ourselves in the places that are dear to us. Temporal-based phenomena erode the understanding of architecture as a singular, stable object, sharply contrasting traditional architectural notions arising from the stability and permanence of Platonic idealism and classic philosophy and architecture can be analyzed not anymore as a singular, isolated, and autonomous realm, but throughout its engagement with everyday dynamics and the real world. This leads to the impossibility to construct a totalizing view of the world using a universally accepted system of principles towards a more complex system of heterogeneous experiences that are not grounded on a predominant central point of reference or architecture as an exception within the flowing of time. This essay, through a comparative analysis that stands on a specific intersection within architecture and art, aims to explore the possibilities disclosed by incorporating and interpolating the notion of temporality into architecture through the understanding of the reciprocal relationship existing between body and space and some spatialized representations/projections of it. To do so, the exploration will revolve around the word ‘contingency’ - a future event or circumstance which is possible but cannot be predicted with certainty – as a means to question the normative interpretation of space and, quoting Jeremy Till (2009) “contingency situates us in the real world, providing opportunities for transformative change while avoiding the siren calls of ideals” and question the positivist emphasis on certainty and objective truth when looking at space and its physical reifications.