The Deep Time Project on Climate Change

Effectively acting upon our most urgent crises requires a profound understanding of how to mentally inhabit the timescales at which they operate. This paper discusses the Deep Time Project on Climate Change, a new pedagogical experiment that aims to radically expand architecture’s time sensibilities under the premise that, as the geological actors that we have become, we must develop the deep time literacy demanded by the great challenge of becoming true planetary stewards. The argument is that the unprecedented global challenges we are facing today demand a paradigmatic shift in time perception by which deep (global) and shallow(planetary) timescales are acknowledged as entangled and as equally integral to the human condition. This shift, which starts with the recognition of deep time as part of human nature, will inevitably bring about new—and urgently needed—levels of consciousness to our ways of being in this planet. The DTPoCC aims to develop a new vantage point to rethink architecture’s agency in the current constellation of human and environmental crises and within the largercontext of the deeper history of this planet.The narrower perspectives of mainstream architectural pedagogies have encapsulated the discipline within the boundaries of the global, limiting its agency to only what humans are capable of doing. The DTPoCC aims to incorporate the dimension of the planetary by which the agent of architecture expands, becoming a complex formation that involves humans and more-than-humans—from the technologies involved in the production of a building, for instance, to the geological substrate that supports it. By acknowledging the dimension of the planetary, the DTPoCC aims to unearth new conceptions of architecture in a world of entanglements between geological, technological, human, animal, and viral bodies co-producing the “web of life.”

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Teach.2021.12

Volume Editors
Jonathan A. Scelsa & Jørgen Johan Tandberg

ISBN
978-1-944214-38-8