Gazans have been living in and amongst ruins since at least the early twentieth century. Their continuous conflicts with Israel have piled layers of ruins on top of each other that are difficult to tell apart. Following the Palestinian democratic scene of the 2006 Legislative Council elections, and the victory of Hamas over Fatah, a series of destructive wars have taken place accumulating three new layers in less than a decade. During these years, Gazans have also been suffering from severe trauma, without sufficient time between the subsequent wars to heal. Today, Gaza is a stratified urban space of both material and immaterial ruins. By the latter, I am referring to the psychological condition that results from conflict, and which is often coupled with a lack of resilience, along with a drifting socio-ecological system.

The material and immaterial ruins of Gaza, as overlapping layers, form a laboratory for exploring concepts that lie at the intersection between architecture, conflict and emotions. Whereas many efforts are either put into developing sustainable reconstruction methods or enquiring into post-war psychological conditions, less attention is paid to the intricate interlocking relationship between the two.

This article aims to disclose this entangled relationship by using time as an unfolding element. Time is thus no longer addressed as a dimension of space in which different events take place, but rather as a navigational tool by which the intimate link between architecture, conflict and emotions is revealed. Moreover, time becomes a medium through which reconstructing buildings and reconstructing emotions are reconsidered as a single process.

A different perception of these historical events in a vertical timeline, read in relation to the ground, gives another dimension to understanding the context. After the Nakbah in 1948, Palestinian refugees who make up to 70% of Gaza’s population built many of their houses without foundations. This has materialised the perception of their life in refugee camps as a temporary solution until they acquire their right of return. Following that, Gazans have continued to build and are still building fragile temporary structures, always considering the constant possibility of destruction in a coming war. Temporariness, in this case, holds a political statement that would be lost otherwise.

It is of no doubt, that Gaza, with its permanent temporariness, inhabits a liminal condition. It is continuously positioned at a threshold between a traumatic past, which it can never entirely overcome and a blurry future that it hopes to be brighter. The liminality and fragility of this condition make it almost impossible to plan. As Brian Massumi explains in his interview ‘The Space-Time of Pre-emption’, this is because living with threat entails a posture of pre-emption. Whilst danger lurks in the present from a past chain of events; threat lurks from the future as a surprise – it is always there but never clear.³ Those who live with threat are therefore constrained to a pragmatic posture of preparation for what is yet to happen.

With such an understanding of Gaza’s context as one of pre-emption, we can read the constructions of Gaza as what artist Robert Smithson refers to as ‘ruins in reverse’, introduced in his article ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’. Unlike the romantic ruin, Smithson argues that some newly constructed buildings, such as those found within the forgotten suburbs of the United States, ‘don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise as ruins before they are built’.⁴ Smithson thus makes an important shift in our understanding of the ruin as requiring a different relation to time, since such areas ‘exist without a rational past and without the “big events” of history’.⁵ In relation to Gaza, whose history has been, and continues to be in, an incessant process of destruction, perhaps its reconstruction needs to be considered through a reversed lens of time – constructing to rebuild an obliterated past, which in turn will create the space for future imaginings.

Between the Imaginary and the Real

If we turn the horizontal (chronological) and vertical (spatial) timelines of Gaza into a Cartesian x and y axes, where do emotions lie in relation to time and space?

In his essay ‘Time and Dimension’, architectural designer, Cecil Balmond, describes time as a nonlinear concept and draws an analogy with complex numbers in mathematics. Whereas complex numbers are a compound of a virtual y-axis, and real numbered x-axis, time, according to Balmond, may be compounded in a similar way between the emotional on the y, and the body on the x. Body-time is biological time, which humans have quantified into hours, minutes, and seconds, but which is fundamentally buried in our cells, chromosomes, and is the reason behind our decay. Emotional-time, on the other hand, is subjective, accelerated or decelerated by feeling.⁶

Time’s graph is a plot of mixed moments, body-time with emotional-time. Such a plot of time’s duration and experience would be like the signature of a fractal, amazingly varied, yet self-similar and somehow ordered by hidden rules. Cecil Balmond ⁷

Such a compounded experience of time is subject to continuous fluctuations, and according to this plot, ‘when the experience lies completely on the y-axis of emotion, time as duration becomes zero. ‘Feeling’ is everything. I am not aware of measure’.⁸ In other words, when emotions are all-encompassing, time vanishes.

Trauma and threat, as discussed, create a permanently liminal condition in which postures of pre-emption are the only possibility. The past is obliterated and future imaginings are inconceivable with the continuous threat of destruction. In this scenario, affect is everything and time is lost: trauma is the thief of time. But with this realisation comes another: that the reconstruction of buildings and emotional recovery should be thought of as a single process. If we are to design in contested territories such as Gaza, where a history of destruction also reflects future conflict possibility, it is important to consider time as the hidden link between architecture and emotions. In these spaces of pre-emption, where emotions of trauma, grief and loss are highly embedded, perhaps architecture can also build time – restructuring the past, which despite its traumatic memories, houses the space for projected blurry futures.