In antiquity, architects sought to defy the passage of time through their solid constructions. This chimera was challenged at the beginning of the 20th century by the Futurists' concept of planned obsolescence: “Houses will last less time than we do... Each generation must build its own city.”
This text explains how time has become an active material in the work of the contemporary architect. Architecture, like music, literature, or film, is a temporal discipline. We will see how, during the Renaissance, architecture became aware of its own history. We will also see how, with Palladio, the printed page became a more effective medium for conquering the future than the built reality itself. However, the true shift arrived in the 20th century, when a new temporal consciousness—infiltrating from the sciences, the arts, and the media—began to transform architectural discourse in the second half of the century. From the assimilation of space-time to the cinematic time-image or the spectacular time of capitalism, the author proposes a journey through the multiplicity of time, which inevitably reverberates in contemporary architecture.
