Reuben J. Brown
An Architecture of Time It is difficult to imagine the 1980s designers of the Grafton Centre giving any consideration to how the building might be used should its status as a shopping mall be jeopardised. 40 years on, the site is in an uncertain purgatory, likely requiring an overhaul as radical and violent as the Centre’s original imposition 40 years ago. Hannah Arendt described this utilitarian condition as the ‘unending chain of means and ends which never arrives at some principle that could justify the category, that is, utility itself.’ And so we are left with ‘meaninglessness in the midst of usefulness’. How do we avoid such an interminable chain? This year I have sought a philosophy of architectural meaning drawn not from the matter of space, but from time. A choreography for the Grafton Centre’s demolition created a temporary performance from material destruction to define a new spatial permanence. In a bridge for a tram network to ameliorate the city’s congestion, made worse by the same 1950 planning document responsible for the Grafton Centre, Saint Augustine’s philosophy of memory was developed into a consideration of infrastructure as human-made geology: an architecture of time. 16
