The House at the End of Time

Architectural theorist Peter Schneider wrote a seminal article in 2001 about an allegorical architectural project by Douglas Darden called “The House at the End of Time: Douglas Darden’s Oxygen House”. In this article, Schneider posits that: In making a building and thus making a life, one inevitably shapes the end of that building, the end of that life. Within the compelling idea of the first house—the house at the beginning of time—is buried the equally compelling image of its shadow: the house at the end of time. This is a place for dying in. (1) Schneider’s article postulates that the ‘house at the end of time’ is shaped in the shadows by the lives we lead. He allegorically reflects on this house as an archive of memories accumulated throughout one’s lifetime—a portrait of one’s inner life. Schneider proposes three principal techniques that come together to define such a house: oppositions and dualities, temporal simultaneity, and memory fragments.

This design-led research thesis investigates how Schneider’s written description of the ‘house at the end of time’ can be re-interpreted and re-presented through design as an allegorical architectural project. It intends to translate Schneider’s three allegorical techniques into a framing device for conceiving an architectural design representation of ‘the house at the end of time’. The thesis investigates how architectural theory relating to dualities and oppositions can re-present the house at the end of time as a shadow of the house at the beginning of time; how architectural theory relating to temporality can convey the co-existence of the beginning and end of time; and how the allegorical program of such a house can be understood as an archive of memory fragments. Fragments, which are harvested and filed away throughout our lives, even as they disappear, condense, reorient, and transform over time.

The thesis outcome takes the form of an allegorical architectural project as a way to challenge the nature of conventional architectural outcomes and traditional modes of representation. It re-presents Peter Schneider’s literary portrayal of the house at the end of time as an allegorical architectural outcome, an archive of memories that constitute a portrait of one’s inner life.