Jonathan Hill:
Architecture is a Time Machine

Assembled from materials of diverse ages from the newly formed to those centuries or millions of years old and incorporating varied rates of transformation and decay, a building is a time machine, transporting us to many times separately or simultaneously. Like a history, a design is a reinterpretation of the past in the present. Equally, a design is equivalent to a fiction, freely moving backward and forward in time and between types of time. Temporal understanding is a means to learn from the past, reassess the present, and speculate on future models of practice and discourse.

Jonathan Hill is Professor of Architecture and Visual Theory at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where he directs the MPhil/PhD Architectural Design programme and tutors MArch Unit 12. Jonathan is the author of The Illegal Architect (1998), Actions of Architecture (2003), Immaterial Architecture (2006), Weather Architecture (2012), A Landscape of Architecture, History and Fiction (2016), and The Architecture of Ruins (2019); editor of Occupying Architecture (1998), Architecture—the Subject is Matter (2001), and Designs on History: The Architect as Physical Historian (2021); and co-editor of Critical Architecture (2007).