MEAN TIME ARCHITECTURE. Or how to deal with trauma in the posthuman era

Drawing on a reinterpretation of Cedric Price’s notion of “mean time”, the research adopts his methodology to identify the transitory space-time fragments generated by the increasing occurrence of man-made catastrophes within our current entropic condition. The work explores, through the entanglement body-trauma-architecture, three mean time intervals: from the short (days), medium (years), and long (centuries) terms, detecting a complex system of case studies. Architecture, impacted by trauma, mirrors the same symptoms of traumatised bodies, simultaneously recording theoretical and physical wounds and activating reacting processes and strategies. The relevance of the design process emerges as a powerful explorative practise to trace possible future scenarios through representation, being unfolded on the paper surface or displaced to shape performative spatial experiences, revealing compelling experimental testing grounds to trigger an operative reconstruction of our contemporary condition.