Form as Chronotope: Learnings from the Igualada Cemetery Park

In contrast to the Modern Movement’s 20th-century assertion of architecture as the art of space, the inescapable spatiotemporal circumstance inherent to the reality in which it takes place—and which is transformed through its presence—makes it inevitable to consider the architectural discipline as a joint practice that unfolds in both space and time. In recent decades, various approaches have challenged spatiality as the sole criterion of architectural validation, forming a theoretical and practical body of work which, though heterogeneous, converges in affirming its indispensable spatiotemporal condition through a profound reconsideration of the notions of space and time. Among these approaches, the application of the concept of the chronotope—as formulated by Mikhail Bakhtin as the inseparable link between spatial and temporal relations assimilated through the form in artistic creation—has been used to describe a chronotopic architecture in which the form of place arises as an inextricable union of space and time. Within such chronotopic architectures, the work of Enric Miralles seeks to overcome the subordination of time to space through a conscious use of form’s capacity to express different temporal conditions in a single place. Among his works, the project for the Igualada Cemetery Park, designed and executed in co-authorship with Carme Pinós, stands as a paradigmatic example of this chronotopic potential of form. Beginning with a trilogic interpretation of the reality of form in the space and time of the world, of experience, and of the mind, this doctoral thesis examines its possible condition as a chronotope within the Igualada Cemetery Park. It extracts a series of characteristics that are contrasted with their use in various artistic interventions, examining the consequences that this interdependence produces on space and time themselves, and posing a response to the question posed by Miralles: Of what time is this place? A question which, though pertinent, cannot have a single answer within the multiple reality of form.