Patience and Time

I have never been patient. I did not grow up waiting for things, I went after them, sometimes too early, often too quickly. I feel more alive in movement than in waiting, in error than in perfection, in the repetition of a gesture than in the contemplation of a result. This impatience is probably a flaw. It has also become a method.

Collage suits me for this reason. It allows me to move forward without waiting. I place one image next to another, one material against another, one volume upon another, and I observe what the encounter produces. I don't need each piece to be perfect before assembling. The assembly reveals what the isolated pieces do not know. Movement brings errors, and sometimes these errors interest me more than what I was looking for. I sometimes provoke them, pushing a combination I know to be fragile just to see what withstands. A method that would exclude error would also exclude discovery. I prefer to move forward poorly than not to move forward at all.

Yet I admire the patient ones. Those who can spend months on a detail, who accept leaving an intuition to settle for a year before using it. I work on it, slowly. I don't progress quickly toward patience, that's the paradox, but I know it is a strength I lack and would like to have. Working on one's own impatience is probably the most difficult discipline, because impatience by nature refuses disciplines.

I had lengthy conversations with my friend Azzedine Alaïa, for whom time was a passion. He had made the timeless the center of his work. Not timeless as a claim to eternity, timeless as a refusal of the imposed calendar. He didn't want to enter into the rhythm of standard collections, those artificial seasons that compel producing novelty for novelty's sake. He preferred to release a piece when it was ready, whether in six months or three years. Time was not his enemy, it was his material. It took me years to understand the depth of this position. He designed for bodies that would endure, I design for cities that will change. But the question is the same: how to make time an ally rather than an adversary?

This is the question I ask myself with each project now. How to build buildings that are not afraid to age, that allow themselves to be traversed by seasons, that accept patina, that can be modified without being destroyed? How to design architectures that evolve instead of wearing out, that are enriched instead of degrading? The long time of architecture should not be endured as a fate. It can be conceived as a resource, exploited as a material, integrated into the project from the first line.

I even proposed once, for the Taichung library competition in 2013, the ultimate project of this thinking: a scaffolding building. A structure designed to remain in permanent transformation, never finished, never fixed, in perpetual construction. Inhabitants could add, remove, relocate. Seasons modified the envelope. Successive generations would rewrite the plans without destroying the framework. Time was no longer a threat to the building, it became its engine. Its condition of existence was its incompletion. Its timelessness lay precisely in its refusal to ever be completed. The project was not selected, obviously. Too radical, too costly to explain to commissions, too far from the habits of project management. But I have never stopped thinking about it.

There lies the contradiction I carry. I am impatient in my method, I want to move forward quickly, assemble, fail, start over. And yet I dream of buildings that will last a long time, that will have time as an ally, that will dialogue with generations I will not see. The impatience of the gesture in service of the patience of the work. Perhaps that is how it should be formulated. The architect runs fast so that the building can, afterward, take all its time.

Time is the only material the architect cannot order. It comes when it wants, at the speed it wants, and it decides in the final analysis whether the work will hold or not. My profession, as I move forward, increasingly resembles a negotiation with it. I have not yet arrived at stoicism, that tranquil acceptance of what I do not control. But I have at least understood that time is not my enemy. It is the only partner whose name I did not choose, and with whom nevertheless I sign each building.

Rumi said: in the past I was intelligent and I wanted to change the world, today I am wise and I try to change myself. I just add, at 48: if I have the time., Manal Rachdi