Time and Architecture (English)
Human beings have always felt
the need to measure everything around them in order to be able to control and
understand their environment. Time is no exception and in times of the Roman
Empire, Vitruvius had already talked about the use of the water clock or
Clepsidra, the air clock or the sun clock as instruments to calculate time.
Egyptians also employed time measurement tools in the Ptolemy era (dynasty
founded by Alexander the Great around 332 B.C.)
What is time really?
Conventional time measurements are used to calculate the natural time around us
(days, years, lunar phases, etc...). Therefore human beings can plan their
lives, dividing it into seconds, minutes, hours and years. Our time perception
relies in something as ephemeral as the time the Earth takes going around the
sun.
The perception of time is very
different in any individual. Although time seems to go very slowly when we are
children, it increasingly seems to go faster as we get older. This is just our
own perception because the Earth spends always the same amount of time in going
around the sun. Every organism, individual or element has their own vital
rhythms.
Geologist Asier Hilario talks
about the rock formations in the beach of Flysch in Guipuzcoa, Spain. This
beach is formed by a series of different rock layers which were deposited on a
deep marine basin. Theses layers surfaced due to the violent crash between the
Iberian and the European plates. The word “FLYSCH” was first used by the
geologist Berhnard Studer in 1827. This word comes from the German “fliessen”,
which means slippery. Each plate, which can go more than 300 meters into the sea,
represents 10.000 years in the planet’s life. Therefore, it is possible to see
a layer on the surface that corresponds to 50 million years of the Earth’s
life. Important events, such as the hot and cold periods or the dinosaur’s
extinction, can be clearly seen. The life of a human being would be contained
in a mere 2 centimeters of these huge formations. This comparison makes us
think about our position in the world and how ephemeral our existence in it is.
Earth’s rhythms are not related to human rhythms at all. This happens as
well with cities.
Cities have been, over the
millennia, living organisms that have evolved slowly, adapting to changing
environment and to human needs. For the first time in history we are
contemplating massive new cities starting from scratch or enormous urban
developments which are two or three times the size of the initial metropolis.
What once was a process evolving throughout centuries is now being made from
one year to the next. At present, we are forcing the natural transformation process
of cities, adapting them to our own individual rhythms. This is forcing our
cities to changes in increasingly shorter spaces of time, creating integration
problems and a lack of resources and facilities.
We can identify today several
examples around the world in which forcing the natural rhythms or trying to
make habitable the inhabitable is creating important problems, mostly economical.
Seseña is a paradigmatic
example in Spain. It is known as the “Ghost city” because in spite of increasing its population from 6.500 citizens in 2003 to 13.000 in 2006, 60% of the 50.000 new houses built before the Spanish bubble burst are still empty today. The lack of equipments and communications has made Seseña a very
expensive city to maintain.
Nevertheless, not all the
cities built in inhabitable places thanks to money are located in Spain. In the
USA, Miami was built over the everglades full of alligators and pitons of the
Miami River. Kilometric extensions of luxury residential neighborhoods have
increasingly stolen land from the natural areas. Every year the policemen and
firemen corps receives progressively more calls from frightened neighbors who
have discovered one of these funny animals having a bath in their pools. Nature
is trying to recover what once was hers.
Another curious example are
the Arabic cities such as Dubai or Qatar, risen from nowhere like Seseña, but
in the middle of the desert. Every year, the local authorities spend thousands
of dollars trying to stop the sand of the dessert going back to the city.
In this current context of
financial crisis it is essential to minimize the resources consume. We need to create
our cities, avoiding unnecessary waste of money. We do not have the right to
speculate with our cities because they are property of humanity. We should let
our cities grow and evolve following their own rhythms. As my mother told me
when I was a child and I was late for school: Less haste, more hurry.
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