Temporality

Across my scholarship and disciplinary advocacy, I have been seeking to reorient modern architectural and art history towards a more critical engagement with temporality. This is understood not primarily as a chronological category but as the historically contingent orientations of any given moment towards the past and the future: the anachronic displacement of time.

 

Far from being a marginal phenomenon, I contend that responses to the past—spanning questions of reception, revival, and engagement with the pre-existing material world—are pervasive across the history of architecture and art. Foregrounding temporality over style reveals that Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance are, for instance, far more present within modernity than is often acknowledged. Such an approach also reclaims a central place for architectural and art history within fields such as medievalism studies and the broader field of reception studies, while highlighting our disciplinary responsibility to confront the politics—and, centrally, the politicisation—of time.

 

Above all, this framework complicates the operative dimensions of form and individual agency and offers more nuanced understandings of the material world and its relationship to social, political, and cultural processes.