The Island of the Day Before

Theories about temporality underwent rapid transformations in the twentieth century. Philosophers such as Maurice MerleauPonty (1908-1961) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), for example, argued that the past, present, and future are not isolated temporal contexts but instead are interwoven. At the same time, creative disciplines also began to look for new ways to represent time. Paintings such as Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory (1938) and films such as Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) were made to challenge our normative understanding of temporal contexts. Works of literary fiction such as Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Topology of a Phantom City (1976), Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams (1992), and Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before (1994) represent the past, present, and future as interwoven, no longer situated separately upon a linear timeline.

In encouraging architecture to take up this challenge of re-presenting temporality, this design-led research investigation proposes to use Umberto Eco’s allegorical novel The Island of the Day Before as a literary provocateur for an architectural project, interrogating how Eco’s literary devices ‘spatialise’ time and applying those devices to architecture. The thesis investigates how an allegorical architectural project can spatially re-present temporal conditions in ways that challenge and augment our normative understanding of time.

This thesis asks: How can a speculative, allegorical architectural project spatially re-present temporal conditions in ways that challenge and augment our normative understanding of time?