Invention of the future in project-time. An imaginary “encounter” between Georg Simmel and Henri Bergson, and its significance for architecture

Abstract

The article addresses the reconstructed dialogue with the texts of G. Simmel (G. Simmel “Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung”; “Über räumliche Projekten sozialer Formen”) and H. Bergson (H. Bergson “Histoire de l’idée de temps”) in order to analyze the question of how the design/creation of the future was understood by these philosophers, and how this question can be interpreted today. We would like to present some conditions and difficulties in revealing the future and the temporal nature of any project. First, we would like to insist on a weakness in languages spoken by a great number of people, which is that the future is difficult to linguistically stabilize and document: German and English do not have a future tense, using instead auxiliary verbs, “werden” (to become), “will”/be going to”. The study of the project as an intellectual (intention, idea, concept) and social phenomenon (design as a social action) allows us to illustrate how the future (project) becomes a task of activity in the present. The project transfers or shifts (Simmel) the future time to space which is always ready for the perception of projections, and is also an opportunity to organize future joint actions. We will argue that when the project is executed, when it is no longer — there is no longer any future. The project thus ensures the future. Or, to achieve complete circularity, we will introduce a third element: without the future, a group or a “we” cannot possibly exist. In our text, we would like to unreservedly insist that the idea of a project, or perhaps a sketch of any future theory of the project (or concept), has already been provided at the beginning of the last century within an imaginary encounter between Henri Bergson and Georg Simmel.