ABSTRACT
The practice of architecture is not usually seen as a critical laboratory for reflection; it is more often seen as problem-solving solutions to real world questions in real time. It might re-assemble the social, engage with thoughtful and novel forms or ideas, or design participatory practices, but it still labours to communicate new knowledge. This chapter looks through constructions of time—event-time, lifetime, and deep-time—using ethnographic methods and by mapping the building—of a cow barn in Derbyshire—as a significant historical artefact where ideas of the everyday, of conversation, and of endeavours on site become a transformative tool for the design and re-use of future buildings. Here, archaeology, anthropology, and ethnography illuminate the complexity of human entanglement with the maintaining, sustaining, and re-making of material worlds. Both the past and our present attitudes to the past are vital, because if we lose interest in the past, we lose interest in the beauty and understanding of our material world. To place a remade project as an artefact of both contemporary and historical events prevents it being misinterpreted and co-opted. It, too, presents a case for being at home on site, within an expanded field of architectural practice and research.
