Abstract
Historically, ‘trade’ has been understood as the mechanism by which territories exchange goods for
currency, usually conducted in spaces specifically designed to facilitate the process (banks, stock
exchanges, market places, bazaars and ports, for example). In contemporary times, the importance
of the physical location (geography) and the material (structure/form) of spaces of trade is becoming
increasingly irrelevant as new forms of exchange, communication and control emerge which are
dependent on other conditions such as time and the virtual space provided by global digital connections.
Drawing on McGrath’s writings on time and architecture, this proposal argues that time is an essential
component of trade and exchange, where users (buyers/sellers/consumers) are also co-creators of their
built environments. In our current consumer age, time is emerging as a scarce and valuable commodity.
This proposal attempts to recast time as both commodity and experience, producing an architecture that
encourages us to better understand its value and place in a world that appears to be constantly shifting,
morphing, changing and mutating.
The project identifies Johannesburg as a territory of ‘dynamic’ consumption, looking specifically at
‘moments of exchange’ such as taxi ranks, pavements and urban trade retail arcades. These, I argue,
are temporally-driven environments where the processes of exchange shift and change according to
the needs of the market or consumer: a passenger waiting for a taxi suddenly recalls something he/
she forgot and leaves the queue; a woman buying groceries meets a friend and goes off for a coffee; a
‘sale special’ sign on a shop window results in a rush on goods These minute and detailed observations
suggest a parallel ‘space’ that shadows the world of supply-and-demand which is largely unseen and
therefore unplanned.
My Major Design Project proposes an architecture that builds on these observations and multiple
scales, from the mapping of Noord taxi rank to Johannesburg trade arcades transport interchanges to
hand-to-hand transactions on urban pavements. The Time Bank draws on the traditions of banking
(derived from the Latin word for “bench” where money handlers sat in medieval marketplaces) and
the concomitant spaces built to accommodate the practice, from stock exchanges to mobile phones
where the majority of financial transactions in Africa occur at the person-to-person scale and level. The
Time Bank not only examines the relationship between time and money (value) but more importantly,
encourages new modes of compensation (barter, for example), locating these moments in public spaces
that have historically been overlooked as potential spaces of interaction and connection. Following
McGrath, the work explores ‘architecture, not as a stage set for known sets of behaviours, but [as a
stage set] for producing pure optical and sound images and experiences emerging from deep personal
and collective memory.’ (McGrath 1994:91). The Time Bank is both physical and virtual; located here
(Johannesburg) and there (online cell phone applicationour mobile phinesphones). Its architecture is
both time-dependent and timeous. It is experienced over, in and through time. It is a bank for all time.
M.Tech. (Architecture)