Many architects seek to make ‘timeless’ buildings. Too bad, says Robert Adam – it can’t be done
Architects and others frequently claim that their work or what they like is ‘timeless’. This unites all architectural camps. In the accolade for the Pritzker Prize in 2013, Toyo Ito is called “a creator of timeless buildings”. One of Christopher Alexander’s most influential books is called ‘The Timeless Way of Building’.
Does this mean that there is something that goes beyond 13.8 billion years to the supposed origin of the universe before which, according to some physicists, there was no time? Or do they think that a particular building would have been just as admired by our hunter-gatherer ancestors a mere 300,000 years ago? Even if the latter, it would not be timeless. Or do they mean that there is something about it that has nothing to do with time at all?
As time and change are coextensive – if there was no change there would be no time – ‘timeless’ must mean something that doesn’t change. This is a problem for those who wish to be up-to-date. When Maccreanor Lavington claims to “make architecture that is both contemporary and timeless”, they are just contradicting themselves. Frank Gehry seems to recognise this, stating that “architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness”. But what is this ‘timelessness’ and why is it so important?
For the philosopher Karsten Harries, “architecture is… a deep defence against the terror of time”. The way a building or place can, without any significant physical change, over time move from being admired to being despised, can be disconcerting to designers.
For Darryl Reanny, microbiologist and author on mortality, the fear of how time takes us to death underlies creativity, and “most of civilisation is a by-product of the quest for immortality”. This terror of time – of decay, mortality and oblivion – is a fundamental neurosis in the human condition on which is built religion and myth. As the designers of long-lasting structures, it is not surprising that architects seek to find ways to overcome this phobia with their work.
Top: Michael Graves’ NCAA Hall of Champions, Indianapolis (1997). Graves received the 2012 Driehaus Prize, and gave a lecture on his life’s work, recalling that he had come to understand the “timeless grammar” of architecture as a scholar at the American Academy in Rome in 1960.
Above: ‘Timeless Architecture & Interiors’ is among many architectural books claiming timelessness for buildings.
Many religions are founded on the promise of an eternity beyond death. As it says in the book of Daniel, “multitudes who sleep in the dust of earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to everlasting contempt”. Since Augustus Welby Pugin, however, with the exception of outliers like Quinlan Terry, no-one subscribes to the idea that God favours any particular architecture.
The idea of timelessness in architecture persists, nonetheless, and defies any useful definition. Christopher Alexander unhelpfully tells us in guru-speak that “the timeless way is, in the end, a timeless one”. Roland Wahlroos-Ritter tries to narrow it down, informing us that “white has the allure of timelessness”.
In absence of religion, many turn to a modern Pythagorean view that mathematics is timeless – surely two and two will make four forever. We might ask, two and two of what, and to whom? Mathematics is a highly developed abstraction of raw reality to provide reliable predictions, but the philosopher of time, Raymond Tallis, describes it as “colourless, odourless, weightless… whose instantiations are seen from no angle or distance” – unlike architecture which must have these qualities and be seen from precisely these places.
In absence of religion, many turn to a modern Pythagorean view that mathematics is timeless”
The final refuge of the quasi-religious idea of timelessness is the golden section. Enthusiasm for this proportional system is shared by architects as diverse as Le Corbusier and the New York classicist Richard Sammons. A belief in almost magical powers for this interesting mathematical proportion has grown into something resembling a cult.
The gradual approximation of the ratio of 1.618 between an additive sequence of numbers and the rectangle of 1:1.618 does have some remarkable qualities, including some rational aspects of progressive biological growth (Fibonacci first worked it out in the twelfth century based on rabbit reproduction). But these do not approach the extravagant claims made for this proportion: that it is found in prehistory and antiquity, that Leonardo da Vinci took it from the mathematician Luca Pacioli, that it is found in paintings and natural features, that it is the timeless nature of beauty and so on.
Cover of Robert Adam’s new book, ‘Time for Architecture’ (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 365pp, £35).
The fact that no-one mentioned the use of the golden section in architecture until it was claimed by a retired German school-teacher, Adolf Zeising, in 1854, does not dent the belief that great artists and architects had used it for millennia because, as one of its acolytes Scott Olsen claims, “they were forbidden to reveal it”. Evidence comes from, literally, joining up imaginary dots or putting rectangles on pre-selected places on small-scale elevations. Its very close approximation to a whole-number proportion, 3:5, is ignored although we do have good written evidence for the historic use of whole-number proportions. The golden section is found because enthusiasts want to find it.
While it may be constructive to use any proportional system as a unifying factor in design – and the golden section has some useful complexities and correspondences – it is quite another to claim that it exists in an ethereal non-place where time stands still and nothing changes.
In the end, ‘timelessness’ just translates as the more prosaic ‘relatively long-lasting’, but this lacks the beguiling hint of something more esoteric”
Architecture, only ever the product of humanity, a minute part of the history of one planet, itself only a minute part of the history of the universe, cannot claim anything more than the timespan of the history of mankind, and probably very much less. Human perception, the only means of understanding architecture, is a product only of humanity and is intimately tied to the passage of time. In the end, ‘timelessness’ just translates as the more prosaic ‘relatively long-lasting’, but this lacks the beguiling hint of something more esoteric.
Without religious, supernatural and metaphysical meaning, all reference to architecture is thrown back to a world where time moves forward, change happens, old ideas are replaced with new, what people like today they may not like tomorrow, and appreciation of beauty can be transformed by social conditions. In architecture, and indeed in the material world in which we live, there is no such thing as timelessness.
