Architectures de l’impermanence.6 jeux du temps chez Cedric Price.

Architects have to face constant transformations. Our projects must adapt themselves to the uses of tomorrow. But how can we perceive theses metamorphosis?In contrast to space taught in architecture, the angle of this research is time: it would be needed to learn to inject the passage of time in projects, in order to make them malleable to change. The architect could play with time by taming and forging it in its project.Just as space, time is a primitive world impossible to define. However, numerous philosophers, historians and scientists have described its qualities, like Henri Bergson painting the “mobile reality”, Georg Friedrich Hegel “the rhythm of the organic whole” or yet Reinhart Koselleck the “past future”. And if few architects confronted themselves with it, one British stood out from the others in the 1960’s. The society was rapidly transforming, the moderns’ theories turned down by the critique. Seeking an architecture in agreement with its period, Cedric Price took time as a factor of conception. Its radical structures make up suitable study cases for this conceptual deciphering. Going back and forth between the philosophical texts and the architect views, three characteristics of the time emerged: the mobility, the rhythm, the present. Six projects from between 1960 and 1980 have been studied in accordance with these themes, with the support from the archives of the Canadian Centre for Architecture of Montréal.The thesis unveils six “time designs”: those of renewal and opportunity, planned obsolescence and immediacy, conscious distortion and calculated uncertainty. The words are proper to Cedric Price and they show its singular experience with time, as well as the context of this period. On each, the temporal approaches have been crossed with the pictures of the fourteen categories of his last exhibition Mean time, giving an illustrated lexical. Reunited in three big sections, they reveal the passage between the time of the world and the one of the architecture: from the “mobile reality” to the mobile, from the tempo from the middle to the temporary, from the present to the presence. The diagrams used by the architect are respectively deciphered as means to catch, create and narrate time. Thus, that’s how is the produced architectures too. Indeed, it appeared along the research that they were firstly settings to understand change. They are flexible and open plans. Without form, they per-form themselves. They assert themselves as processes.This concept does not produce a strong and unique aesthetics but aesthetic experiences, revealing the ordinary interactions of the man and the environment to architecture. Faced with the uncertainty that produces the unavoidable passage of time, architecture can cultivate the “joys of the unknown”, as Cedric Price liked to say. The thesis suggests some variations with realizations from the early twentieth century, the avant-garde of the years 1960 to 1980 and today. Openings are proposed with the Japanese architecture, of which the artificial landscapes unveil the same attention to impermanence and complete Cedric Price theatres.The six time games suggested are guides to tame time and live it, and not control or suffer it. They illustrate ways of designing with time, of different intensities. Then it is up to the creators to try it, by coming up too with their own architectures of impermanence.

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