ARC 597 | On Speed Situated Technologies Intellectual Domain Seminar, Fall 2014

Architecture; the thoughtful making of space as defined by Khan needs a revision. As space cannot be created, only enclosed, we as architects merely arrange it with our physical divisions within it. I’m referring here to Einstein’s box example, where space is illustrated as a sort of constant. That if the edges of a box close in on themselves, the space that was inside still exists, just now outside the box. No space was destroyed, hence no space can be created-just ordered. And if motion is dependent on time, illustrated by the fact that if we aren’t moving through time, motion in space is impossible, then time is inherently another space architects have ignored. Steven Hawking said this most clearly to me: “All physical objects…exist in 3 dimensions. Everything has a width, and a height, and a length. But there is another kind of length; the length in time.” This is the fourth dimension, the other space we inhabit in our four dimensional world. The problem with time is that we experience it nearly as a constant, and treat it as such because we cannot perceive it’s error. The fact is, if you are moving faster relative to something else (the closer your speed is to the speed of light), the faster you are travelling through time. That is by spatial motion, the law of the speed of light (which cannot be broken) slows down time to keep you moving slower through space and slower than the speed of light. So space and time are forever intertwined. If time is a space, and we as architects claim to be arrangers or makers of space, are we not bound to be responsible to designing in the space of time? How do we even do such a thing?