All buildings contain two main channels of experience: diachronic experience, the linear way we see and experience space over a period of time; and synchronic experience, where each moment of the diachronic experience exists simultaneously. Only when one channel is particularly active over the other do we become directly aware of it, but this is rarely a conscious decision on the part of the designer. How can a building, once built, create moments displacing users in time and space yet maintaining their involvement in the narratives of its creation and existence?
This thesis examines how we perceive and conceive time and space in architecture, using comic books as an important structural corollary. Comics typically progress panel to panel, page to page; yet while each panel exists as a singular, self-contained point, collectively they comprise a non-linear continuum wherein every point exists simultaneously with every other point. Connecting events requires a “closure” process of conceptual input from the reader to fill in the gaps, thus directly involving the reader in the progression of the story and outcome of events and accommodating infinite different subjective experiences within a set of fixed conditions. An examination of two chapters from the comic book Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, will serve to illustrate this concept.
The goal is to merge synchronic and diachronic, so the readers becomes aware of their role in conceiving architecture. The outcome will be a design process for a building in which readers can conceive the synchronic plan from their diachronic perceptions and vice versa, applied to the design of a self-contained graduate school of architecture for the University of Cincinnati. Louis Kahn’s Phillips Exeter Library, containing equally active synchronic and diachronic channels, serves as the primary point of departure for design.