The first photographs allowed the capture of a moment for endless study. Present-day high-speed cameras can capture 100 billion frame, or 130 years worth of standard-speed video, in one second.

Slowing time in this manner has precipitated advances in myriad fields of study. The architect's study, however, is largely the inverse: to understand the course of a day, season, or lifetime in a moment. 

This workshop is an introduction to time-lapse photography & videography as valid diagrammatic method. It begins with video examples demonstrating how time-lapse has been and can be a tool for architects, and continues with an overview of pertinent capture, motion, and editing technologies. Students used their smart phones, GoPro's, or DSLR cameras to investigate the value of compressing time as it pertains to architectural design disciplines such as urban planning, transportation, space planning, ergonomics, daylighting, and others. These studies were paired with traditional graphic and rhetorical diagram exercises to complement and eventually layer with their captures. 

Learning to see through the lenses of altered time states, students gained an understanding of the flow of unseen processes around them. The intent of the studio was for each student to not only gain a new marketable diagrammatic skillset, but that their own perception of time, space, and how we all move through them is expanded.

Scaling Time is a seven week Bacholor of Design Architecture (BDA) workshop in the school of architecture at the University of Minnesota, led by Andrew Blaisdell