Temporal Dimensions

When analyzing the six temporal dimensions – sequential structure, duration, planning, rate of occurrence, synchronization, and temporal perspective – my thoughts have circled back again and again to repetition and synchronization as having the greatest change throughout the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Our invention and adaptation to the technology around us have greatly affected the way we value and experience time, and more specifically through these two aspects.

The way that we experience repetition throughout the last couple of centuries has shown significant change as we have made technological leaps. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the repetition that defined significant events in time revolved around nature. The seasons were important for harvest, farmers awoke with the sun and turned in once night came, and so on. The Industrial Revolution marks a significant change in what repetition meant and how that repetition defined time. Machines can work at any time of the day, and all day. We then defined shifts, which occur at regular time intervals solely based on the clock, not on the position of the sun or the season. Days were now split into chunks of time in different ways, rather than the simple night and day, and they were the same no matter if the sun rose sooner or night came earlier. As we became more and more aware of how difficult factory jobs have an effect on the human body, the work week became more defined. In nature, there is not a difference between Saturday and Monday, but we now have a definition of the weekend, greatly anticipated each week.

Synchronization is when a group of people agrees upon at least an aspect of time. With synchronization, I see more of a trend coming toward our present time and into the future. However, this is still related to the above concept, in that our dependence and fetish for machines has affected our notion of time. Through the Industrial Revolution, being on time became increasingly important, as is seen through things like train schedules and coordinated shifts. There is also this synchronization of body and machine when one pictures men working along an assembly line. As the United States has made a shift into the service industry, synchronization has made a shift, as well. We are often synchronized with other countries, such as China which is 10-13 hours ahead of the United States. There is also this thought of individualistic synchronization versus organismic. As economy of time becomes of greater concern, the thought of functioning – in all aspects of life – as unified group becomes more and more desirable.

Both rate of occurrence and synchronization are key elements of residential housing. College students must adjust to a new schedule of repetition with their course load while getting used to studying on a regular basis and the regular meeting of clubs or meetings. Anticipating the way groups synchronize is important when community is such an important aspect of a project. With cell phones being so tied in to the human body, and increasing so with each generation, the question is whether that is also tied into the architecture or if the architecture, somehow, attempts to break that tie in exchange for a connection with fellow humans.