The Deep Time Project is a multidisciplinary platform of inquiry, research, and investigation that considers architecture through geological time scales, connecting Earth’s past with a dynamic future amid global warming. Exploring deep and shallow timescales, we aim to rethink architecture’s role in a broad constellation of forces—approaching it as a dynamic process shaped by geological and human at multiple timescales.
Who
Cristina Parreño Alonso is a Spanish-American architect, researcher, and educator based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is a Senior Lecturer at MIT Architecture and the founder of The Deep Time Project, a platform that investigates architecture through geological timescales and material experimentation. Her work spans writing, installations, buildings, and exhibitions in art and architecture that investigate the entanglements of matter, time, and design within planetary processes.
Team Members (Past and Present)
Kevin Malca
Christina Battikha
What
Material Event: a process that reveals the interactions between time, matter, and both human and environmental forces. The traces of these material events take the form of texts, videos, buildings, landscapes, material experiments, and exhibitions—each serving as a medium for world-making and world-knowing.
Through these Material Events, we aim to rethink architecture’s role within a broader constellation of forces, understanding it as a dynamic process shaped by geological and human agencies across multiple timescales.
The Deep Time Project is an ongoing initiative run by Cristina Parreño Alonso. Project is supported by the Center for The Arts Science and Technology (CAST), D’Arbeloff Fund and MIT Architecture.