The complex relationship between time and architectural design manifests itself in many ways, some of which are emblematic of how temporalities are part of the very concept of architecture. When we talk about time, we frequently think about its consequences on buildings (i.e. generating forms of decay), or how architecture reacts to its cyclical or linear flow - days and seasons, years and centuries - or how architects refer their work to history. Moreover, in the sphere of design, further typologies of temporalities come into play; after all, projecting something into the future is a significant feature of design itself.
In the field of perception and consciousness, some elements allow us to link the notions of space and time. 20th century philosophical literature is full of reflections on this relationship, starting from the phenomenological approach to reality and subsequent authors like Henri Bergson, Martin Heiddeger and Dino Formaggio, who demonstrated how the individual perception of time was influenced by the pure form of space: topics such as duration, simultaneity, instantaneity, endurance and other kinds of temporalities can be read as consequences of the spatial action on individuals.
If space and time are related, then the manipulation of space - the matter of architectural design - necessarily affects the perception of time. Light and shadow, transparency and opacity, sound and silence, solid and hollow (etc.), are the proper tools of architects’ practice to determine different temporalities within spatial design, identifying architecture as the territory where this relationship materialises. In this research paper, references of this concept are investigated through effective examples, which best represents the architectural design capability to determine dilations, contractions or suspension in time perception.
Trying to observe these topics from the research in peri-urban and inner European territories - one of the frontiers of architectural study in Western countries - and acknowledging that architectural design is a modification of time and not just of space, suggests architects to apply time-based design strategies which are tailored to the needs that the 21st century dynamic and unstable context requires
