Building for Time

Join us for this exciting lecture at F'AR, organized by two laboratories from EPFL Architecture:

Building for Time examines architecture not as a finished object, but as a material process unfolding across multiple lifespans. Drawing from ancient practices of reuse, cannibalization, and ritualized demolition, Brandon Clifford explores how past cultures anticipated the afterlives of their buildings—and what those strategies can teach us about designing structures that expect transformation, disassembly, and reuse. The lecture proposes future architectures that are conceived with their second (and third) lives already embedded in their form, material logic, and construction.

Brandon Clifford mines ancient construction techniques to envision transformative architectural futures. He is the director and co-founder of Matter Design and an associate professor of Architecture at MIT, and is known for animating megalithic structures to perform acts of construction and assembly. Clifford has pioneered projective archaeology—architecture’s version of magical realism—which blends historical practices with speculative futures to rethink material lifecycles, ceremony, and architectural afterlives. He is the author of The Cannibal’s Cookbook and a recipient of the American Academy in Rome Prize, TED Fellowship, MacDowell Fellowship, and the Architectural League Prize.