CALIPER JOURNAL: SHIFT/TIME 07-08
Caliper is an independent architecture journal based in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia. First published in 2017, it was born out of a desire to have a messier and more meaningful discussion about architecture and its place in the world.
This a unique double issue (07-08). There have been 10 issues published to date: Agency, Identity, Power, Sample, Collapse, Love, Shift and Time, Faith, Permission.
07. Our public spaces lie abandoned. Our rituals severed, forced to be rebuilt.
Our homes become the boundaries of our new world – for some, comforting, for others isolating and cruel.
What do our public spaces become when unused?
How does our definition of home and life begin to shift in this new condition?
What does it mean to practise and study architecture while stuck in the confines of only one building? This issue asks – what will change when this is all over?
What will stay the same? And what does SHIFT mean when we live in a constant state of limbo, a space of the in-between, uncertain and ever-changing?
What will be there in the end?
08. Time flows through Architecture, through concrete walls and white picket fences, through the multitudes of families who move through the same building. Time is the ruin, architecture’s obsession with the corpses of what we have created. Time is the meeting at two o’clock, the errand at three, and the forbidding law that dictates our lives.
Time is the now, frozen through a continual, scrolling exposure to the lives of others in a present that never ends.Time is memory, the areas of our past that continually shape the present. It is a collective consciousness, a false nostalgia, consuming a culture that we never experienced. Time is that which is yet to come, stretching out before us. It is some brighter tomorrow, some unrealised betterment, and unlimited possible worlds under construction.
Time is the present.
By the time it is spoken, it is over.
This issue of TIME asks you to remember memories you have forgotten, and dream up futures you never imagined.