Our Place and Our Time: Architecture and the Temporary

Temporary architectural installations are all around us. The houses we live in, the roads and bridges we traverse, and the places we worship and mourn. Human constructions can last thousands of years, but on some level we quietly acknowledge that constructions are simply a stage for culture that will one day see an end. Our constructions serve us through their temporality and locality. Our diversity of shelter mirrors our diversity of culture; a panoply of houses for the body and soul. To locate ourselves in this vast temporality, we can identify our own communities. We are linked by time and space to our dwellings.

How do you define your community? It could be where you were born. It is more likely where you live, work, learn, play, raise a family, or have close friends. Through a loosely defined process, I located for myself eight communities that I call home. And in one of those communities, there is a sister community; one that has breathed it’s temporality with the changing landscape and the rising and falling tides for twelve or thirteen thousand years before colonization. 

The town of Eastport and the Passamaquoddy Pleasant Point Reservation in Maine share a road, a landscape, and a vast ocean bay; not to mention a storied past. Blogs upon blogs could be dedicated to the swift march of European colonists claiming lands, fighting each other, sickening, converting, and oppressing the native people of Maine. The Passamaquoddy were the indigenous tribe of this particular region, traveling in small family bands between fishing grounds of summer and winter camps slightly inland for hunting game. The temporality of their architecture reflected the seasons and their uses—highly transportable and lightweight, the summer structures came apart easily. Winter dwellings sometimes incorporated a heavier foundation of logs much like the log houses of today, as a base to keep snow out. But the upper portions of the winter dwelling were every bit as temporary, a physical manifestation of an embrace of change.

Today, we build with less of an embrace of the unknown. Colonists built to settle and lay claim. Foundations are a mark of this attitude. While it is true that Native Americans in Maine had territories—and sometimes fought over these lines—ownership of land was not considered in the same manner. The resources of the land were considered to be communal. In suburban and rural communities today, we deny change as much as we deny death. Family homesteads are cherished, belongings are stockpiled whether or not they are useful, and resources are compiled to ward against uncertainty. This is a much safer, more comfortable lifestyle for us. We have our assets gathered against misfortune. But in reality, these are temporary also.

Temporary does not mean lightweight (though it can). To design or plan with a sense of temporality is to acknowledge being HERE. Active participation is the genetic marker for your existence. Your active awareness expressed through design is the quality and inherent order of a space. Temporary architecture might just be architecture with a greater awareness for its life (and death).