Suspended time, lost space: architecture and dwelling in the regime of presentism

Abstract

This study examines suspended time and lost space as two faces of a single predicament of modernity, asking whether dwelling remains possible in a world thoroughly mediated by technology and capital. The first part argues that when the tension between past experience and future expectation is stretched to breaking point by the accelerating logic of contemporary society, the production of historical time enters a state of suspension. What remains is an infinitely expanding present that ceaselessly renews itself yet moves nowhere. This temporal structure finds its perfect spatial counterpart in modern architecture, which has been progressively stripped of its temporal depth and degenerates into a smooth conduit serving immediate circulation. The energies of modernization no longer project forward into time but fall back entropically into space. The second part turns from diagnosis to action. Rejecting the gesture of returning to a pre-technological origin, the study argues that technology is the constitutive condition of human existence rather than its antithesis. The reinvention of dwelling lies in discerning, within each specific technological configuration, the distribution of toxicity and curative potential, and in preserving the conditions under which the subject can still be touched by the world. Miyashita Park in Tokyo is taken as a case study of such a pharmacological space.