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Staff of Aesclepius // Hermes: Patron of Commerce : also Mercury, wings // 2 snakes: diligence and prudence // God of transitions and boundaries : protector and patron of travelers, invention, and trade //

fact of duration vs architectural time)

 To speak of an architectural temporaneity - there had been a gap in recent history for the appearance of architectural time.  Bringing built forms into reality had always been over durations lasting generations.  Common dwellings had not often been considered architecture in the past: one factor for this had always been that they were not deeply considered in each instance and they were raised quickly at a small cost.  Built forms serving public purposes always ranged in duration for construction depending on the scale and grandeur envisioned.  Factors relevant to the duration of enactment were not limited to the form of patronage, the collective purpose of the citizenry, the society's conditions, the tendency to include the past and the motion towards the future...

The everyday phenomenal experience of time has had a correspondence with the tick-tock of the clock, evolved over centuries and reached a certain culmination with the introduction of the clock and second hand.  The matter of architectural time is that it is grounded in the duration through which commonly beheld buildings are enacted.  It is too grounded in the scale of time through which a city is raised or is rising, assuming that through time...

The endurance of a vision and the multitude and coherence of its meaning can hold a people together.  No less, in that it can raise a city or a country, in that it is shared upon some basic consensus, it is known that we have grown of the same ideals and the same dreams.  For these to be found in the act whereupon the vision is upon the enactment of an architectural formulation, over its manifestation...

what shared metric could mark the duration of this act we call the measure of architectural time.

 

 

 

When I came across this today on spacexarch, I was reminded of how art has always be emblematic of the creative spirit. It seems often to arrive first on a scene and is the optimistic harbinger of many great things ahead. And I am also reminded of a piece of work displayed within the window on 11 Av, the artistic imagining of our imaging distant stars with our instruments. I was stricken with great joy that such undertaking as with the Hasselblad cameras on the Apollo missions and the photos produced could be once more grasped within the recognized sphere of art work. That night I had gone out onto the street roaming as though in an urgent search for something not yet disclosed for the moment. After arriving directly and viewing this work, I went back to my place feeling that perhaps I had gone home to the city where my grandfather was from or that it had serendipitously come to me?  I will return soon, I promised myself again, or I already have arrived.