Cátedra del Prado Colloquium 2025.
The Shape of Time: Aspects of Temporality

Eduardo Prieto (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)

Vitruvius crystallized the aspiration of buildings to endure through the concept of firmitas, but time has always been present in architecture, at least since the moment humans first sought shelter in nature and learned, through their buildings, to leave a memory of their time on earth. The modes of time in architecture are diverse and complex, and this lecture will attempt to briefly explain them through four concepts that could be associated with more or less mythological personifications. On the one hand, the Time of Cronus, “the god of the spaces of time,” which alludes to the ways in which architectural historians have represented the genealogical evolution of buildings, architects, movements, or styles through diagrams. On the other hand, the Time of Mnemosyne, mother of the nine muses, which describes architecture as a repository of human memory. Alongside them, the Time of Entropy, a contemporary divinity,  which points to the future that erodes matter and compels our constructions to transcend themselves in a disturbing aesthetic of destruction. And finally (like the friendly face of these temporal personifications), the Time of Zephyr, which speaks of architecture as an imago mundi, as an atmospheric resonator and an environment we inhabit in search of certain essential pleasures.

Arkadij Koscheew (Freie Universität Berlin)

The utopian architecture of 18^th century French architects Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Etienne-Louis Boullée, in whose visual language the timelessness and sublimity of human existence crystallize, has been widely discussed under the term “Revolutionary Architecture.” In particular, their designs for architectures of death,  such as cenotaphs and cemeteries, have drawn attention and have often been regarded as expressions of a Newtonian cosmology. Revolutionary Architecture between Cosmic and Republican time questions this interpretation by showing that, embedded in the depictions of the buildings in question, lies a cosmological understanding that is closer to that of René Descartes than to the theories of Isaac Newton. Furthermore, the work of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Etienne-Louis Boullée will be discussed in relation to the endeavors of measuring time and space in light of the stratification of the république after 1789.

Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt (Freie Universität Berlin)

History flows, as a multi-linear process, in one sole direction. An intuitive image, one that allows to faithfully render the idea of a temporal directional passing, is that of the path. In temporal maps, it graphically traces the sequence (be it in a straight or in a stratified or in a sinuous line) of events of the past. Processes may be conceived as such – indeed, sometimes, in their very nexuses. In order to make understanding possible, the great distances down the path are divided into tranches (times, epochs, eras…). This conference addresses two different types of historical paths of the 19^th and 20^th centuries: river ways and country lanes. On the basis of a free reformulation of the Kantian maxim “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind,” I shall establish the correspondence between those chronological maps with concepts of the temporary as signified by Niklas Luhman, philosopher of social science and systems theorist. And this, for one reason: because intuitive representations and theoretical concepts are linked by a relationship which, while based on deep tension is, nevertheless, most clarifying!

Henar Rivière (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

A fascination with time was a driving force behind the intermedia artistic experimentation that nurtured actionist, performative, and conceptual practices from the 1960s through the 1980s. Working under various banners such as Fluxus, Zaj, and Mail Art, among others, the exponents of this experimentation also showed a widespread tendency to use writing as an artistic medium. This lecture aims to explore how they employed formats specific to writing to develop complex aesthetic reflections on time: books, letters, diagrams, or scores, where temporal notation unfolds across space. That space is, first, the physical space of writing itself—the page, the notebook, the book—following the path opened by Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés. But it’s also the broader space of artistic practice as a catalyst for collective processes, at a time when global connectivity still seemed to offer the possibility of imagining alternatives to the geopolitical status quo.