Concepts
At the same time that we dream of eternal life through images of timeless beauty and perfection, we need experiences that mark and measure the course of time; we need to be convinced of the depth and availability of time. Traces of erosion and water remind us of the ultimate fate of the physical and biological world – the “horizontal death”, to use the notion of Gaston Bachelard – but they also situate us concretely in the flow of time. Time turns into a haptic sensation; time becomes a perception of the skin. Matter expresses time, whereas shape, particularly geometric form, expresses space.
Juhani Pallasmaa, Encounters 2