Chronosophy

We know where the future is. It’s in front of us. Right? It lies before us - a great future lies before us - we stride forward confidently into it, every commencement, every election year. And we know where the past is. Behind us, right? So that we have to turn around to see it, and that interrupts our progress ever forward into the future, so we don’t much like to do it.

It seems the Quechua-speaking peoples of the Andes see all this rather differently. They figure that because the past is what you know, you can see it - it’s in front of you, under your nose. This is a mode of perception rather than action, of awareness rather than progress. Since they’re quite logical as we are, they say that the future lies behind - behind your back, over your shoulder. The future is what you can’t see, unless you turn around and kind of snatch a glimpse. And then sometimes you wish you hadn’t, because you’ve glimpsed what’s sneaking up on you from behind . . . So, as we drag the Andean peoples into our world of progress, pollution, soap operas, and satellites, they are coming backwards - looking over their shoulders to find out where they’re going.

Constant’s New Babylon project (1959-1974) sought to try to artificially imitate the effects of historical change and chance upon the design of cities based on freedom from typical situations. Colin Rowe’s picturesque and formalistic use of Lévi-Strauss’ term “bricolage” introduced faux-vernacular complexity into architecture as an aesthetics of chance bereft of political agon. Both Constant and Rowe worshipped a sort of automatic complexity in design, complexity that imitates the historical, economic and social forces that creates richness in cities. But their complexity is formal complexity only; complexity without dialectics, without political agon, without anything being at stake.