Living In Crip-Time: Between transcendence and immanence

Abstract

This research project explores the relationship between architecture and its conditioning possibil­ities particularly as found in two opposing not.ions of transcendence and immanence. The research begins by considering issues of thinking about architecture and design in these two terms by the means of concepts like Crip-time, salvaging and recovery. Implicated in this framing this project argues design is not purely practice of creation or evolution, but rather it engages with the conflict and strife between them that will eternally return to deficiency - in need, as 'destructive enabling'. Hence, we are always already cripple (deficient) and the practice of 'design' is attending to our Crip-Time. To further explore the concept of Crip-Time in relation to transcendence and immanence, a symbolic figure or rather mythical tripartite narrative is considered, trajectory)' span­ning the fall, judgement and salvation, but one that is necessarily complicated by an intermediary)' mechanism of survival and continuance - the Ark prepared by Noah. Forestalling the Omega of fallen time, the ark provides a powerful image of resilience and human endurance in the face of divine will of 'destructive enabling' (the flood). To the extent the Ark amounts to a bridging device that invests hopefully in the continuance of time, it suggests certain non-chronological mechanisms within temporality itself, for which practice of architecture can be thought as an exemplary carrier within the large design agenda where the designer or the architect is closely engaged within insufficient milieu between transcendent and immanent.