Built form is in the first place a haven, an isolated realm against flux to maintain a continuum (familial, societal.) Internally, most architecture is self-referencing; for example, one room may be understood to be ten paces down the hall and two to the left from another. It does not perceptually move: it is in effect timeless in the context of the abode. This assumed fixed matrix of space is by extension applied to the larger urban context. For example, one may live three streets south and two streets east from building A. A 10 cm vertical swell of the roadbed itself may never be noticed. In effect, one is numb to the constant change that underlies built stabilities.

However, the universe often reminds one of the transitory nature of existence either gently by supplying an unwelcome pothole in the road or more insistently destroying entire infrastructures by means of quaking the earth itself. Nothing lasts forever (in its present state).

The units one effortlessly cites in informal speech are appropriate for the scale of the field described. The paces down a hallway or the street count of city blocks mentioned earlier are adequate for their application. Once the measuring device of the urban grid is absent, time becomes a convenient substitute, the units remaining proportional to the scope described. One would never describe a car trip as being 347 800 inches long, or lasting 108 526 seconds for that matter. The supplied km units of the odometer are not a priori knowledge, but rather an analytical reading at the second level, the first one being time. A country drive took 3 hours, for instance. In the subjective realm, three dimensional space and human time seem to be intermingled as unit-less vector qualities, sensible only relative to something else, such as the lengthening shadows of the setting sun or a heartbeat’s time.

This effortless switching between time and space echoes tenets of relative physics where they converge to form a unified field of time-space (Moser 115). The physical structure of this space-time continuum begs many questions of both the macro and micro levels.. Are they one and the same? Although the thesis does not concern the interpretation of myriad accumulated bits of knowledge, recent findings of science indicate that the universe is a vast, inseparable web of dynamic activity, a fathomless sea of energy that permeates every activity and object. This is a posthumous confirmation of what mystics have been conferring for millennia (Kehoe 14).

It is often said that necessity is the mother of invention. Time has continuously been reconceived to correspond with the rhythm of an era, its cultural timbre and important events.

During the dawn of human consciousness time was measured in annual cycles, corresponding to the hunt. Later, time was differentiated into the various seasons, the annum divided by four, of import to the agricultural era. Later still seafaring people conceived of time as related to the lunar cycle, critical to planning a journey that may perhaps take a fortnight (the increment between the full and the new moon) and accounting for both the high and low tides of the oceans. The organization of Judeo-Christian societies recognized the day as the unit of labour and repose: indeed creation itself took seven to accomplish. One arose at first light and slept at nightfall.

Guiovanni de Dondi de Padua

As time measurement has become increasingly refined so has the measurement of physical properties such as mass and length. The immediately accessible units of the stone and the pound, understood relative an arm’s effort or measured easily by a balanced scale, have given way to a mathematically-derived system of international units of the gram and its subdivisions (centigrams, milligrams, ...attograms.)

Ingenious devices have been invented and implemented to augment or overthrow predominant world-views. The Ptolemic notion of an earth-centric universe was derived from observing the heavens with an unaided eye; the mythological model of the near-east and ancient Greece was as a consequence overthrown. Aristotle himself believed that the heavens were perfect, immutable, unchanging.

The questioning of assumptions, heavily censured, in turn allowed for the upheaval of the Ptolemic model of the universe by such astute observers as Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543), who placed the sun in the center. Later, the medieval invention of the ground glass lens by a Dutch spectacle-maker reached Venice, leading Galileo Galilee to construct his first telescope in 1609. He was spurred on by the astronomer Tycho Brahe of Denmark who negated theories concerning "the unchanging fifth element" (believed to be everything that lay outside the moon’s orbit).

Like Tycho Brahe, Galileo used the supernova as a pretext to challenge the Aristotelian idea that the heavens were unchangeable, immutable, perfect.

Galileo’s drawings of the moon’s phases, 1610

(http://bang.lanl.gov/video/stv/arshtml/galileo2.html)

OCTANT

The octant is a navigational instrument designed to measure the altitude of various celestial bodies by calculating the angle between a target object and the horizon along the meridian. The latitude of the observer can be found, by adding the highest point of altitude (90° ) at the precise moment a heavenly body passes directly overhead. to it's declination, as revealed in the tables for that particular day.

This navigational device consists of two major components, the sphere and the stand. At the heart of it lies the sphere itself, which was often made and used alone. The central body in the sphere represents the Earth, which was considered at the time to be the center of the universe. The rings defining the sphere represent the firmament where the fixed stars were thought to reside. The band around this sphere is the ecliptic, defining the path the Sun traces through the sky. It also includes the constellations of the Zodiac

These tools were derived from attempts to organize, order and measure the universe that we are a part of. These precision devices have served their purposes well and have since been relegated into artifacts with the advent of modern measuring devices.

Recent findings have resulted in the devaluing of the human in the overall scheme of things; I contend that architecture has the potential of reconciling the alienating objectivity of hard theoretical physics with the richness that defines the lived human experience. Is the universe unfolding its secrets to us, or are we as the structuralists would say (Levi-Strauss 7), transposing our own inherent qualities upon the vast unknown? Architecture, in addition to providing a contextual frame of reference for the constant changes that abound may also serve as a mechanism to further understanding by accumulating knowledge itself.