Table of Contents

Introduction
1: Making Space for Time

Part One: The Time of the World
2: Day Time
3: Well-Timed Openings
4: Tempered Terrain
5: World Rhythms

Part Two: The Time of the Body
6: Taking Steps
7: Pacing and Spacing
8: Wandering Sites
9: Pedestrian Rhythms

Part Three: The Time of the Project
10: Past and Present Possibilities
11: Proposing Precedents
12: Recalling Future Projects
13: Project Rhythms

Bibliography
Index

Promotional Information

Exploring the concept of time in architectural design

About the Author

David Leatherbarrow is Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught architectural design, history, and theory since 1984. In 2020, the AIA and ASCA awarded him the prestigious Topaz Medallion for excellence in architectural education. He lectures widely and holds guest professorships in Denmark and China. His previous publishing includes 20th Century Architecture, Architecture Oriented Otherwise, Topographical Stories, Surface Architecture (with Mohsen Mostafavi), Uncommon Ground, Roots of Architectural Invention, and On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time.

Reviews

Building Time is based on the author's own physical and mental experience of the objects examined, as well as an almost intimate knowledge of the architect's work, the processes of creation, the craft, the spaces and the details. One senses that this is an architecture that occupies Leatherbarrow, in which he is deeply committed. And perhaps this is precisely one of the explanations why his descriptions and interpretations manage to hit so precisely.
*Arkitekten (Bloomsbury translation)*

Leatherbarrow focuses his meditative attention on lasting works of architecture and art. Discussing projects and paintings with particular sensitivity to light and material, he works like a clockmaker, patiently disassembling architectural mechanisms into their component parts, and explaining how buildings operate in time.
*John Tuomey, O’Donnell + Tuomey Architects, Ireland*

When Leatherbarrow writes about time he is also writing about the slow and then ever faster passage of our own lives. Even as we visit the Pantheon to watch time literally move before our eyes and we are reminded that it also measures the span of our own existence. This is a dense, lyrical, and heartbreaking book about our lives and our buildings.
*Billie Tsien, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, USA*

Linger, return, and remember rhythm this meditation on the interactions of time, space and place for both author and reader. Not since the romantic writers of the early 19th century has the temporal dimension of architecture been viewed patiently from so many facets.
*Barry Bergdoll, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History, Columbia University, USA*

Building Time suggests that architecture matters partly because architecture weathers orienting and grounding us: by keeping its identity amidst contextual change, inevitable decay, and eventual renewal, as well as recording its own creation and survival. The world stage, the active body and the project script frame the close reading of chosen modern masterpieces in time and as time. Sound, serviceable, and delightful.
*Carlos Eduardo Comas, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil*

Building Time is a graceful, timely, and purposeful walk through a garden of architectural knowledge, offering an account—in all, a theory—not just of human spatial experience through time (first we go here, then we go there...), but of the world experiencing itself through the medium of buildings, especially buildings which, in having long-term ethical projects as well as complexities of their own, are works of architecture. With Proustian intimacy and often dizzying insight, Leatherbarrow enlarges the very language we use to understand architecture. Buildings are indifferent only apparently. In marking time, in accommodating the fleeting, in witnessing and in suffering, they bring up the future.
*Michael Benedikt, The University of Texas at Austin, USA*

The range of examples that Leatherbarrow brings together in Building Time is rich, stimulating, and rooted in the tangible ... He is a patient, knowledgeable, and observant guide to particular buildings and places, and their particular times.
*arq: Architectural Research Quarterly*