The relationship between passing time and architecture is reciprocal, not only does time provide a realm for architecture to be, but architecture also endows time with spatial intelligibility. In his short story “Funes el Memorioso,” Borges tells us of a young man who, after falling from a horse and momentarily losing consciousness, finds himself entrapped by perfect perception and an inability to forget. Unable to ignore unnecessary details to be able to generalize, he cannot think. He commits his time to an attempt at harnessing the overwhelming reveries into a private language. Resolving to reduce each lived day in his past to approximately 70,000 memories, he assigns numbers to each of them, but soon, he surrenders the plan realizing it would consume more time than he has left in his life. Past experience constitutes a layering upon which our lives are made meaningful, but Funes understands that memories do not suffice, and that to become meaningful they demand an organizing armature, an architecture.

If forgetting is a defense mechanism, then to reach deep into the pocket of memory we must relinquish rational control and give in to reverie as we give in to sleep after a hard day of work. Early in the design of an architectural project, ideas are in flux, progress remains erratic and possible outcome uncertain. Forms seem too diffuse and unstable to be effectively handled by efforts of the intelligence. But the project does not wait and encourages a way forward that puts action in the place of thinking, action then is freed from thinking, and enters a realm similar to that of dream, both rationally incomprehensible and liberating. It is at such moments that the projects undergo decisive transformations, assuming lives of their own. Becoming increasingly independent from our conscious desires and original hopes, they begin to incarnate the future.