Fixing the future? How architects make time in buildings for later life care

Abstract

Drawing on scholarship that explores the making of time, this article aims to develop sociological understandings of architecture’s relations with temporality. Commentary from within and outside architecture has often suggested that a sensitivity to time is missing from its practices (and indeed, that time is actively excluded from architecture). We argue that, rather than attempting to rectify a perceived absence of engagement with time in architecture, it is more fruitful to explore architecture as inevitably implicated in the making of time(s). Mobilising empirical material from a qualitative study of building design for residential care in later life in the UK, we illustrate various relations with, and visions of, the future that are produced through architectural practice. Rendering architecture’s time-making practices explicit, we suggest, makes it possible to reflect on whether, and to what extent, its time(s) could be done differently.