Chronocopia is the “abundance of time”.

It is commonplace to use “events” that we have inherited through time to deduce broad cultural renderings of the world (eg. ice-age, post-war, Trumpian) as a mechanism of comprehension. Now, after the freezing abstraction of computation, our shared Real is quickly becoming a sequence of constructs which are divorcing themselves from our human capacity to comprehend. Estrangement is our commune.

In CHRONOCOPIA, we will instead pile those often disregarded, misinterpreted, or simply missed moments as creative material to give new renderings to our current state and as a means to crystallize them as architecture. The studio will rewrite the stories that prevail during times of massive world expansion in media, economy and social relations to help us decipher what we’re witnessing now. And given it is no coincidence that cultural rendering is tantamount to a human capacity to perceive, the studio will actuate rich group sequences to, for example, stretch our common empathies; aid perceiving deep compounds of meaning; and above all enact local endeavours of architectural worth.

Could there be a way to document how we personalize the patterns of our civilizational histories to act out a new continuum of architectural scenarios? What have the forms of behaviour been like in moments of radical cultural expansion?

Beyond imagining the architectures where time is no object as chronocopia suggests, the studio will take every kind of temporality: of different lengths, speeds and character (eg. man-made, natural, planetary etc.) and patterns (eg. cyclical, oscillatory, absolute or linear) to collapse them into their own Chronocopias as architecture. We imagine projects that may unravel the Time Relations found in, for example:

~ The permanence of right to be forgotten and the non-stop saturation of realtime News.
~ The indeterminacy of knowing when creative work is “done” vs. the hourly targets of Wells Fargo's high-pressure sales culture.
~ A Greek fir that can live up to half a millennium, and the 2018 greater Athens wildfires leaping over hills in seconds.
~ The instant of a selfie taken by mars rover, Curiosity and the life-work of Galileo designing the first basic thermometer.
~ The secret 3-day meetings in March 2018 of Kim Jong-un and Xi Jinping; and the Chinese invention of gunpowder and fireworks around 700–900 CE.
~ The painful ratification adopted at the third session of the Conference of the Parties of the Kyoto Protocol in 2005, and the daily growth of drive-less cars.
~ The processed emergence of Bitcoin and discovery of new reserves of helium in Tanzania in 2016 useful for creating an inert atmosphere for manufacturing semiconductor chips.
~ The couple of hours at the Vienna Chemical Society in May 1888 in which botanist-chemist Friedrich Reinitzer’s unveiled his discovery of liquid crystals; and the afternoon bike-ride home on LSD that Albert Hofmann took after first synthesizing it in Basel in 1938.

The composition of individual projects become effective when combined with local scenarios (site(s), details, authors). The word “Scenarios” derives from the Greek skene: the space for the changing of masks and costumes. The skene was the original space prior to where drama is played out, and took the form of a detached building. In CHRONOCOPIA, “scenarios” are considered specific locations granted with their own time speeds, but that are also operative within their own territories at large.

It is through the personalization of time(s) as though a cascade of event-realizations that flow into succeeding ones, that we will be the means to comprehend then navigate our not-yet-deciphered tributaries to conceive of new architecture of the present.

Time spent laughing is time spent with the Gods. ~ Japanese Proverb

Time is the longest distance between two places. ~ Tennessee Williams

Time flies like an arrow. ~ Ghanaian Proverb

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. ~ Steve Jobs

Greetings are the patron gods of our time. ~ Japanese Proverb

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years. ~ Abraham Lincoln

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. ~ Albert Einstein

The unscrupulous succeed every time. ~ Japanese Proverb

Time is that in which all things pass away. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Time is the wisest counsellor of all. ~ Pericles

All that really belongs to us is time; even he who has nothing else has that. ~ Baltasar Gracian

Time will explain. ~ Jane Austen

I confess I do not believe in time. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The past is never dead. It's not even past. ~ William Faulkner

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. ~ Andy Warhol