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economies. In exploring the spatial implications of our changing work life, she puts forth a sharp commentary on the now ubiquitous hot-desk environment. In a hive of infinite connectivity and productivity, our work life is increasingly held in a state of temporality and placelessness, resulting in a nostalgia for permanence. Christine Bjerke examines the digitalisation of the home and the subsequent effects of destabilisation: breaking down perceived boundaries of domesticity and privacy. Whilst technologies have transformed the social space of the domestic, she posits that the physical space of the home remains largely unaffected, and subsequently questions how the materiality of the home might respond.

      An enquiry into architectural permanence is not only an exploration of physical and material endurance, but also of cultural and symbolic persistence. It prompts an investigation into what our architecture says about our collective psychology across time and cultures. Never intended to be permanent, initially considered irreparably ugly and out of character in its romantic surroundings, the Eiffel Tower has since come to define the ‘concept’ of Paris. But of the 18,000 iron members which make up the tower, each has been replaced at least once. The Eiffel Tower as it stands today is a facsimile both of itself and of the culture it has come to represent. So when it comes to architectural heritage, do we seek to preserve the buildings themselves or rather the ideals, souls and epochs by whom they were conceived? As creatures with imperfect memories, perhaps the practice of designing, building and restoring enables us to convert urgent shortterm phenomena into physical recollections thereby cheating our fated collective anterograde amnesia.

      Taking Brutalism as a case study, Kaylene Tan uses a movement in a kind of architectural limbo, neither contemporary nor solidified in the past, to question the role of heritage protections. How do we decide what to preserve when our definition of ‘heritage’ changes from person to person, from age to age? Heritage should be considered a verb rather than a noun. If undertaken merely as a formal exercise concerned with hermetic histories and aesthetics, heritage fails to serve modernity. Rather a building’s ‘permanence must be earned rather than merely assumed’ through continual use and appreciation. In a close reading of the current situation surrounding Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower, Aki Ishida delves into the broader cultural and historical beginnings of Metabolism to find answers to the Tower’s preservation conundrum as a building designed to evolve. In The Memory of Loss, Eleni Bastéa poetically explores the symbiotic relationship between buildings and memory. Physical reference points act as a backdrop for the recollection of one’s life, and so these buildings in our memory maintain a legacy and life form after their demolition. Only when physical heritage fails and buildings are wiped away is permanence ultimately achieved. Like our ancestors, buildings are untouchable in death.

      Preservation through memory is not confined to introspection. Often, the decision to demolish a building provokes a social and political commentary which can continue well after the dust settles. A tension exists between the need to develop and the need to value cultural history. The 2014 demolition of the 15-year-old American Folk Art Museum in New York is one such example which has sparked a polemical discourse amongst the architectural community and the greater public. To this day, the lingering effects of MoMA’s decision are still at work as the institution continues their plans for expansion. The journal presents a multivocal view on the situation. In an interview with the architects of the Folk Art Museum, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, they expound upon their design approach which involves a deliberate slowing down in a world which prioritises speed and efficiency. Elizabeth Diller from interdisciplinary design studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro, chosen to lead the development and expansion of MoMA, provides an alternative perspective, acknowledging our contemporary culture of obsolescence.

      Through these voices, Inflection Vol. 4 extrapolates the permanent and the temporary as a spectrum to be navigated at each stage of architecture’s unfolding narrative. Through each of the responses presented in this year’s edition, Permanence provides a critical voice as architecture continually seeks an enduring foothold in an ever evolving landscape.

      01Cedric Price, Re:CP, ed. Hans-Ulrich Obrist (Basel: Birkhauser Verlag AG, 2003), 11

      Photograph by Mark Strizik.

      Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

      BREAKING AND

      MAKING

      TEMPORALITY

      TIME AND TEMPORARY

      ARCHITECTURE IN

      POST-QUAKE CHRISTCHURCH

       Barnaby Bennett

      What makes one thing permanent and another temporary? Can objects, buildings, or landscapes be understood through other forms of temporal status? And how might these different forms affect our experience of the objects? This essay seeks to answer these questions by complicating the normally tidy division between the permanent and the temporary by articulating an ecological understanding of time that encompasses a broader range of temporal conditions.

      The difference between temporary and permanent things appears self-evident: the former exists for a discrete and measurable amount of time, whilst the latter extends into the future. This is one of the binary divisions we use to understand the status of objects in the world, and we build relationships with things based on these assumptions. This essay is based on information gathered whilst living in Christchurch between 2012 and 2015. Assumptions of permanence and temporariness were particularly evident when dealing with the built environment after the earthquakes in 2010 and 2011. At 12:51 p.m. on 22 February 2011, a large earthquake shook Christchurch, New Zealand’s second largest city.

      Between September 2010 and the end of 2012, over 13,000 earthquakes jolted the city of 342,000 people, but the February 2011 quake was different. The city was devastated— buildings and infrastructure were damaged and 185 people were killed.¹ A national state of emergency was declared the following day: the core of the city was shut down and cordoned off as a public exclusion zone. It would be over two years before citizens could return freely to the shattered city centre. In this context, the temporary became necessary and the permanent visions of the city a topic of controversy and debate.

      In his 1997 essay ‘Trains of Thought’ Bruno Latour compares the experiences of two twins.² The first is moving slowly through the jungle. Latour says ‘She will remember it because each centimetre has been won through a complicated negotiation with other entities, branches, snakes and sticks that were proceeding in other directions and had other ends and goals.’³ A second twin is travelling on a fast TGV train from Paris to Switzerland. ‘… he will remember little else except having travelled by train instead of plane. Only the articles he read in the newspaper might be briefly recalled … No negotiation along the way, no event, hence no memory of anything worth mentioning.’⁴ Latour uses these examples to contrast experiences—to show the sweat, exertion and suffering of establishing a new path through the jungle against the ease and relaxation of sitting on a train. The infrastructure of the train—the tracks, signals, workers, tunnels and so on—enables the second twin to focus and develop thoughts away from the work being done to carry him. Hers is an experience of effort and his, ease.

      Aerial photograph of Christchurch, 2013.

      Photograph by Becker Fraser Photography

      The experience of each twin is defined by the length of their travel and the number of entities supporting them. The twin cutting her way through the jungle has few allies—she is part of a small gathering of objects. The twin on the train has a huge array of supporters and helpers that participate in an assemblage linking large parts of Europe together. Latour uses this story to argue that a different temporality, a different type of time is being brought into being in each case. For Latour, ‘time is not a general framework but a provisional result of the connection amongst entities.’⁵ In this way, time is produced or performed by different types of assemblages and networks. In relation to designed things,

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