Architecture by necessity, seems to operate in a position that is endlessly mediatory; between different world's, material modes, translation's and transformation's, attenuated legislative codes, the rational and expectational (a middling). It gets itself involved in things it should otherwise ignore (a sort of meddling). Yet, it must also induce these things to act in a way that is resists entropy, and thereby capable of folding themselves over into dynamic a mix- analogous to Michel Serres’ image of the folding of baker’s dough in his Rome: A Book of Foundations (1991) whereby 'Time enters into the dough, a prisoner of its folds, a shadow of its folding over’(Serres 1991:81). There are however opportunities for architecture in the (re)reading of this image; what type of vision might this trapped shadow-time resemble or could possibly be pictured as?, and how might it be constructed spatially?- particularly in an anglophone world that is the centre of time and obsessed with the keeping-of-time. Not only that, but might we begin to situate something other than progressive time- perhaps its ‘double’, in the form of delayed time- with all the associations of being unable to move through time?
These questions are posed for the purposes of mediating the spatio-temporal structures developed in the side-notes, diaries, texts and drawings of other current-day ‘Masters’- architect John Hejduk, and author Samuel Beckett. They represent the conceptualisation, construction and (re)contextualization of Hedjuk’s and Beckett’s oeuvre, requiring the development of its own inter-textual and intra-mediated constructions; both textual and physical ‘elements’ in Hejduk’s own words. It is considered analogous to what Stan Allen has argued about Hedjuk’s own work in Hedjuk’s Chronotope (Allen 1996) (Hays 1996:85), whereby ‘distinct practices improperly occupy the same ground’.
This paper aims to reveal the way in which these practices operate ‘fly-like’; producing a field of ‘debris’ – consisting of altered time construction’s (that are both punctual and late), and a series of extra-territorial conditions that seek out, claim, and mediatise other territories beyond themselves.