RHYTHM ARCHITECTURE : ON SEQUENTIAL ASPECTS OF MATERIALITIES IN URBAN SPACE

Sammanfattning: 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. How are these events architecturally enacted and articulated? How are different materialities put into use, and how can this use be conceptualized and represented? The methods are based in a series of timelapse photos and observations in Värnhemstorget, which is a square in Malmö in the south of Sweden. The project also entails more experimental studies and exercises, including two workshops with master students in architecture. Three main concepts have been developed – rhythm figure, rhythm network and rhythm architecture – as well as a series of methodological explorations and different forms of representations. Together, these become tools that enable a discussion of the more transient and fluid aspects of the built environment.