Timelessness

Definition

Timelessness is the claim that a work of architecture transcends its historical moment; Goldberger denies it while retaining a weaker, defensible substitute. "Nothing is timeless. Everything tells us something about the age in which it was made and in some way signals us as to what that age was." What great buildings possess is not exemption from time but meaning that outlasts it: they "have meaning that lasts far beyond [their] time, but that is not the same as saying that [they] transcend [their] time." A building must bear the mark of its time to communicate across time. The concept is the counterpart of style-for-the-time: where the modernist doctrine asserts that only the authentically contemporary can be true, Goldberger asserts that the historical building remains legible as its own time and can still speak to later ages. The corollary is a theory of reputation: buildings and careers pass through cycles of reception — resented when new, tolerated, then revived — so that significance is determined not by timelessness but by time itself. The Art and Architecture Building at Yale (Rudolph, 1963) passes from scandal to tolerated relic to cherished monument; Wright's and Soane's reputations sink and rise; Art Deco and cast-iron SoHo are dismissed and then cherished.

Key Thinkers

• Paul Goldberger — denies timelessness and offers "meaning that lasts beyond its time" in its place.
• John Summerson — "all architecture has to die before it can touch the historical imagination"; reputation follows disfavour.
• Le Corbusier — the "style for the time" doctrine against which Goldberger's position is framed.

Related Concepts

• style-for-the-time — the doctrine of authentic contemporaneity, disputed here.
• temporality — the time-dimension that no building escapes.
• memory — the reception-history through which meaning is accumulated.
• historic-preservation — the institutional bet against the short cycles of taste.
• modernism — a historical style that once claimed timelessness and has become history.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• source-notes/goldberger-2009-why-architecture-matters — ch. 6 (pp. 137–38) denies timelessness and develops the reputation-cycle account.

Open Questions

• If nothing is timeless, does the phrase "lasting meaning" name a real property of buildings or only the durability of a canon?
• Whose receptions constitute "time": the profession's, the public's, or the market's?