Time is up! Speed, rhythmn, and the politics of (s)pace
The seventh International Circular Strategies Symposium addresses the temporal dimensions of circularity, exploring how architecture negotiates different rhythms of growth, construction, adaptation, and obsolescence and the politics of deciding what should endure, transform, or disappear.
International Circular Strategies Symposium 7
18-19 November – 2027, Vienna Austria.
Auditorium of the University of Applied Arts Vienna Vordere Zollamtsstraße 7, 1030 Vienna Austria.
Time is an underlying condition of architecture, yet rarely its explicit subject. Every act of building establishes a relationship with time, from material extraction to the rhythms of use, maintenance, and obsolescence. Circular design involves multiple temporal logics unfolding simultaneously: slow growth, biological cycles, rapid adaptation, planned disassembly of building components. These timeframes reveal tensions between a building’s projected lifespan and its constituent materials and systems. Their tensions with a building’s projected lifespan show that sustainability depends on the timeframe assessed.
Planetary boundaries are being crossed, irreversibly. Time is up! questions the acceleration paradigm shaping contemporary building culture. If time is perceived as a dimensional axis, such as space, what would it mean to design for temporal differences rather than impose a singular horizon of permanence? Can architecture embrace the rhythms of growth and decomposition, accepting decay as process rather than failure? How might repair, adaptation, and reuse offer alternatives to demolition? Between urgency and patience, recovery and impermanence, architecture becomes a negotiation of temporalities and of power: who holds claims on the future?
Themes and keywords:
- Layered lifespans: shearing layers, phase difference, layering time, materials and flows
- Slow architecture: navigating time, self-build, the unfinished, redundancy
- Patience of materials: biological growth, mineralisation, geology, speeds of biology
- Ageing & decay: patina, weathering, decomposition
- Repair, reuse & adaptation: maintenance, transformation, alternatives to demolition
- Acceleration & pace: speed, tempo of construction, the acceleration paradigm, deep time?
- Urgency & planetary boundaries: irreversibility, ecological crisis, time left for action
- Timeframes of assessment: sustainability, durability, long-term thinking
- Who owns tomorrow?: governance of time, obsolescence, ownership of the future, unforeseeable futures
- Rhythms & temporal logics: simultaneity, sequence, time as a dimension
The seventh International Circular Strategies Symposium invites architects, landscape architects, urbanists, designers, researchers, and practitioners from adjacent fields to explore how time shapes the design, construction, use, transformation, and afterlife of the built environment. Through built projects, material experiments, research, and critical perspectives, it seeks to open up alternative ways of navigating time and imagining more circular futures.
The event is organized by the Department of Building Construction, I oA, University of Applied Arts Vienna, Petra Gruber and Camille Breuil.
Event format:
The symposium is public and open to everyone. Lectures and panels will be recorded and made available online via the University of Applied Arts Vienna’s YouTube channel.
Cooperation Partners:
BOKU University Vienna, University of Innsbruck
Contact: circularstrategies@uni-ak.ac.at