A bathhouse On lake Michigan
ARCHITECTURE IN RELATION OF Time
SHAWN WANG
Abstract
Architecture is very slow: it’s slow in practice, it’s slow in thought, it’s slow in theory, it’s usually intended to last, and it’s usually discussed in terms of the past or present tense. However, contemporary architecture loses the quality of time. Seemingly ‘being fast’ is something all architects want to achieve. We want to be fast in practice. Instead of allowing natural learning curves to take place, we are eager to get our hands on complicated projects. We want to be fast in thought. Instead of proper proportion considerations, we love to directly translate our diagrams into floor plans. We want to be fast in theory. Instead taking the time to develop our own understanding of architecture, we blindly follow famous architectural theories, even if we do not fully agree. As a result, audiences consume architecture in a fast-paced manner. Architecture doesn’t exist as “architecture” anymore. It lives in the cloud and screens. Instead of experiencing an architecture the ‘right way‘, which is spending time to feel the atmosphere of the building, by touching the material, listening to the echo, smelling the aroma and feeling the warmth and chill of light and shadow, we take photos and hurry to the next selfie spot. Art can be only represented in its own media. This Bathhouse was designed in response to this problematic relationship to time. It is where visitors are able to take their time and experience the architecture in the right way. Where they can relax, get lost, and explore. And as the exploration takes place, their perception of time changes with it.
The most important things in art are precisely those which we can’t discuss, the Immeasurable. That is something which I try to achieve. I began this project by making atmospheric drawings to determine how a building should feel like. Because it’s important to me that a building is both physically occupiable and mentally occupiable. The experiencing soul desires more of the ideal than of the real.
Water, as a huge part of the project, is not merely the infinite in the horizon but also an interpretation of the condition of a mother’s womb—the safest place.
Contemporary architectures, just like contemporary music, are fragments. It can be pleasant for a short amount of time, like fireworks, but everybody needs a break from time to time. That’s when they need somewhere soothing and isolated.
XYZ+T, with an added ‘fifth’ dimension that is you lose your orientation because of the way reflection works.
Architecture is an anticipatory practice; the things that we design when we are working don’t yet exist. In many ways, architecture is almost like fiction writing. The works we conceive of exist in the future, especially when concepts get very large, the work takes a long time from conception to realization. So the challenge is not to imagine a work of architecture that will produce certain social conditions, but actually to imagine the social, economical, political conditions in which the work might exist. The architect is no more a miracle-worker than the sociologist. Neither can create social relations. Although under certain favorable conditions, They help trends to take shape. -Henri Lefebvre
The public sauna and ice pool: Where one experiences extremities. Where a person become mentally mature before entering the real world.
The reception building: The first building to encounter in the bathhouse, representing ‘birth’.
Public locker room: Where a person reveals him/her inner self.
The restaurant and bar: Representing the happy time-Childhood.
Psychology
Time perception Time perception is a field of study within psychology and neuroscience that refers to the subjective experience of life: time, which is measured by someone’s own perception of the duration of the indefinite and unfolding of events. The perceived time interval between two successive events is referred to as Perceived Duration. Another person’s perception of time cannot be directly experienced or understood, but it can be objectively studied and inferred through a number of scientific experiments. Time perception is a construction of the brain that is manipulatable and distortable under certain circumstances. These temporal illusions help to expose the underlying neural mechanisms of time perception. Although the perception of time is not associated with a specific sensory system, psychologists and neuroscientists suggest that humans do have a system, or several complementary systems, governing the perception of time. Time perception is handled by a highly distributed system involving the cerebral cortex, cerebellum and basal ganglia. One particular component, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, is responsible for the circadian (or daily) rhythm, while other cell clusters appear to be capable of shorter-range (ultradian) timekeeping. There is some evidence that very short (millisecond) durations are processed by dedicated neurons in early sensory parts of the brain. How we perceive time normally? Our ‘sense’ of time is unlike our other senses—i.e. taste, touch, smell, sight and hearing. With time, we don’t so much sense it as perceive it. Our brains take incredible amount of information from our senses and organize it, before we ever perceive it. So what we think is our sense of time is actually just a whole bunch of information presented to us in a particular way, as determined by our brains: When our brains receive new information, it doesn’t necessarily come in the proper order. This information needs to be reorganized and presented to us in a form we understand. Even stranger, the whole brain is involved in this process unlike our common five senses, of each which can be pinpointed to a single, specific area. When familiar information is processed, it doesn’t take much time at all. New information, however, is slower and makes time feel elongated. So here’s how that process affects the length of time we perceive: it takes our brains a while to process it all. The longer this processing takes, the longer that period of time feels. When we’re in life-threatening situations, for instance, “we remember the time as longer because we record more of the experience. Life-threatening experiences make us really pay attention, but we don’t gain superhuman powers of perception.” The same thing happens when we hear enjoyable music, because “greater attention leads to perception of a longer period of time.” Interestingly though, that doesn’t mean that doing something over and over again, can’t have a significant impact on your brain ---- in fact, practice can fundamentally rewire your brain. So if your brain got hit with loads of new information over the course of a day, and the following day received hardly any new information, the first day would seem much longer than the second, even though they were exactly the same. New experiences improve how we learn and remember information. Neuroscientist David Eagleman described it like this: The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last. “This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older,” Why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we’re dozing. The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.
“Time is this rubbery thing,” “It stretches out when you really turn your brain resources on, and when you say, ‘Oh, I got this, everything is as expected,’ it shrinks up.” The best example of this is the so-called oddball effect—an optical illusion. It consisted of a series of simple images flashing on a computer screen. Most of the time, the same picture was repeated again and again: a plain brown shoe. But every so often a flower would appear instead. To my mind, the change was a matter of timing as well as of content: the flower would stay onscreen much longer than the shoe. But all the pictures appeared for the same length of time. The only difference was the degree of attention that I paid to them. The shoe, by its third or fourth appearance, barely made an impression. The flower, more rare, lingered and blossomed, like those childhood summers. Slow down time? Look back and remember when time seemed to stretch on forever? When a week seemed like four, an hour seemed like it went on for days? Chances are, you were probably doing something that was brand new to you and demanded your attention. The funny thing is, by focusing on what you were doing, you actually slowed down time (this is how your brain perceived that time). Eagleman used this example: Look in a mirror. Now move your eyes back and forth, so that you’re looking at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left eye again. When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and land on the other location. But here’s the kicker: you never see your eyes move.” There’s no evidence of any gaps in your perception—no darkened stretches like bits of blank film—yet much of what you see has been edited out. Your brain has taken a complicated scene of eyes darting back and forth and recuts it as a simple one: your eyes stare straight ahead. Where did the missing moments go? How to make your day last longer? Research has suggested that the feeling of awe has the ability to expand one’s perceptions of time. Awe can be characterized as an experience of immense perceptual vastness that coincides with an increase in focus. Consequently, it is conceivable that one’s temporal perception would slow down when experiencing awe. We can use this effect to our advantage fairly easily if we feed our brains more new information, the extra processing time required will make us feel like time is moving more slowly. And supposing it’s true that perception is reality, we’d effectively be making our days longer. Keep learning Learning new things is a pretty obvious way to pass to your brain new information on a regular basis. If you’re constantly reading, trying new activities or taking courses to learn new skills, you’ll have a wealth of ‘newness’ at your fingertips to help you slow down time. Visit new places A new environment can send a mass of information rushing to your brain—smells, sounds, people, colors, textures. Your brain has to interpret all of this. Large changes, like travel, or small changes, like a new office, will have similar effects. Meet new people Unlike objects, people are complex and take more effort to process and understand. Special interaction offers us lots of new information to make sense of, like names, voices, accents, facial features and body language. Try new activities Doing new stuff means you have to pay attention. Your brain is on high alert and your senses are heightened, because you’re taking in new sensations and feelings at a rapid rate. As your brain takes in and notices every little detail, time seems to stretch out longer and longer in your mind.
Instead of being representative of designed spaces, these drawings are meant to take certain feelings and be represented through spaces. These drawings served as a design process, as more drawings were produced, the more the building was revealed to me. They are unusual as architectural drawings, without convention or scale, and this is intentional. This allows them to be interpreted in different ways as the thesis continues to develop. Drawing as a tool helps me to be ‘slow’, unlike computer software, which is forgiving and able to produce renderings rapidly. Drawing demands time to carefully consider where to land each line, where to add more shade, and so forth. There is enough time to think about propositions of the thesis while planning and making each drawing, a process that became more important than the actual drawing of the time. Perhaps the space in a particular drawing won’t appear in the final building, but the only way to find out is to draw it out. These drawings attempt to convey the feeling of the ‘sublime’ in a way that conventional ‘references’ are taken away. Usual reference: sense of scale, nature light, building materials, smell, temperature and texture, are absent, situating the viewer into a space that dematerializes, forcing the viewer to realize the tininess of him/herself. The viewer becomes present in the drawn space in order to become part of the space. This feeling can be compared to a bolt in a functional engine – it becomes more than just the singular person.
Drawings
Models
The floor plan was a direct translation of an olive branch. When I think about time, I thing about how time shape things. The twisty nature of the olive branch resonates,with me, with how a curvy path a person can take through their lifetime.