Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Architecture and temporal transformation


February 13: 5:00 PM, Art Building, Classroom I

Felicity Scott, Columbia University: Groovin’ on Time

Clarence Ward Spring 2008 Lecture Series

NEW APPROACHES TO MODERN ARCHITECTURE


The psychedelic experience of a spatial expansion of “consciousness” and sense of an interconnected “planetary culture” was widespread among the late-sixties counterculture. This identification with a global community and its concern for the entire Earth’s ecosphere was largely a postindustrial phenomenon, a reflection upon new technological potentials that, while apparently euphoric, were haunted by a politics of survival. In addition to this spatial sensation was an equally symptomatic sense of temporal transformation. The psychedelic experience of the “trip” involved an “expanded time phenomenon”, a sense of one’s ability to “dwell exponentially” in time, or to experience not the sequential passing of time but accelerating rates of change.



It was within this historical condition that Ant Farm was founded in 1968 on a platform of educational reform, one intending to bring architectural pedagogy into alignment with these radically transformed space-time relations and in so doing to offer a “turned-on” counterpart to normative models of pedagogy.


from Documenta 12