Time Out: The Built as a Refuge from the Temporal
Abstract
1. The Present as an Escape from Time
We live from that which is no more toward that which is not yet through a slender, fragile boundary called now that is too fugitive ever really to be laid hold of. Where, then, is time?… The present alone exists, located in the mind, and having three foci: a present memory of past events, a present attention to present events, and a present anticipation of future events[6] (pp. 63)
2. The Duration of Now
Chronos is the objective view of time… In the world of chronos, the present instant is a moving point in time headed only toward the future… It is an almost infinitesimally thin slice of time during which very little could take place without immediately becoming the past. Effectively, there is no present.
The problem with chronos is that if there is no now long enough that something can unfold in it, there can be no direct experience. That is not intuitively acceptable. Also, life-as-lived is not experienced as an inexorably continuous flow. Rather, it is felt to be discontinuous, made of incidents and events separated in time
The Greeks’ subjective conception of time, kairos, may be of use here. Kairos is the passing moment in which something happens… It is the coming into being of a new state of things, and it happens in a moment of awareness… It is a small window of becoming and opportunity[15] (p. 7).
3. Fascination
There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hand. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revelry, amidst the pines and hickories and sumacs, in undiluted solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveler’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time[16].
Perhaps the human fascination with fire stems from the totality of its sensory stimulation. The fire gives a flickering and glowing light, ever moving, ever changing. It crackles and hisses and fills the room with smells… It penetrates us with its warmth. Every sense is stimulated, and all their associated modes of perception, such as memory and awareness of time, are also brought into play… Together they create such an intense feeling of reality, of the “here and nowness” of the moment, that the fire becomes completely captivating[18].
4. Natural Change in Built Environments
5. The Perpetual Present
6. Timeless Forms
This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes.
[instincts] form very close analogies to the archetypes, so close, in fact, that there is good reason for supposing that the archetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves, in other words, that they are patterns of instinctual behavior[29].
7. Isolation
8. The Presence of the Body
9. Initiating Change
10. Implications
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Data Availability Statement
Conflicts of Interest
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Nute, K. Time Out: The Built as a Refuge from the Temporal. Architecture 2025, 5, 90. https://doi.org/10.3390/architecture5040090
Nute K. Time Out: The Built as a Refuge from the Temporal. Architecture. 2025; 5(4):90. https://doi.org/10.3390/architecture5040090
Chicago/Turabian StyleNute, Kevin. 2025. "Time Out: The Built as a Refuge from the Temporal" Architecture 5, no. 4: 90. https://doi.org/10.3390/architecture5040090
APA StyleNute, K. (2025). Time Out: The Built as a Refuge from the Temporal. Architecture, 5(4), 90. https://doi.org/10.3390/architecture5040090