EDBERT CHENG
  • CV
  • Digital + Web
  • Architecture
  • Visual Design
  • Drawing
  • Blog
  • CV
  • Digital + Web
  • Architecture
  • Visual Design
  • Drawing
  • Blog
EDBERT CHENG

architecture and time travel

6/8/2017

0 Comments

 
Everyone as a child dreams of time travel. You can visit the dinosaurs! Or see the Romans! You can even ride flying cars and visit the future! 

With architecture, you can time travel everyday.

An 18th century colonial church.
A late-20th century, modernist skyscraper.
A 5th century temple in the desert.
A 19th century train shed.
A 16th century palace for the emperor.

The city is a dynamic history book, which is constantly unfolding, constantly looking backwards, and constantly making new histories. 
We are constantly moving through the third dimension of another time (the fourth), occupying and transforming spaces, leaving traces of our lives behind.

Every building in the world has a history. There was a builder, a developer, or a person who dreamed of building and made it happen. There were people who occupied the building before you, and then there will be people that will use it long after you die. Countless decisions, agendas, values, lives, and dreams make up a building, and by extension compose a city. When we occupy buildings, we are constantly moving through our ancestors' hopes and dreams of the future. Every handrail, every stair, every building cornice - someone manifested their values into concrete form. 

Architecture is about constantly looking forward to predict the future, and also about looking into the past to understand where we are going. You can say that architecture is a form of "near-time archaeology", in which studying buildings allow us to study what came before us, in the past decade, past century, or even past millennium. What makes a city authentic is its history, and how it captures the highest culture of a place, at different time periods and generations.

Golden and Silver Age skyscrapers in Chicago.
Brutalist concrete buildings in Boston.
Art Deco buildings in New York.
Metabolism in 1970s Japan. 
Baroque Rome, with the small churches of Bernini and Borromini.
Mid-Century modernism (and its descendants) in Los Angeles. 
Turn-of-the-century Vienna Ringstrasse.
The Belle Epoque of Paris. 
Tang Dynasty China.

What will we value in 10 years? 100 years? 
Will we still value technology? People? Corporate power? 
What is the tallest building in your city? What does it say about your city's wealth?
What about cities that don't have a past, like colonial Hong Kong? Did the past even exist? 

How are we as architects shaping the future? What is timeless and what is only a passing fad? 
What does your culture value, and what will you be remembered for?

Thinking about Generational Architecture, not simply "of the moment" -- that is the question for our uncertain times.
Isn't sustainable architecture also about time, and not only the planet and the Now?
0 Comments

    Archives

    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    December 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    August 2017
    June 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017

    Categories

    All
    Architecture
    Components
    Computation
    Crash Course
    Design
    Education
    History

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.