Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life

While certain elements of Henri Lefebvre’s work have been credited with placing him at the centre of current architectural thinking—most notably, those contained in The Production of Space—it remains the case that his work on rhythm has yet to receive much attention. Intended as the fourth volume of his monumental Critique of Everyday Life, Rhythmanalysis distils Lefebvre’s lifelong concern with time, bringing together the posthumously published Éléments de Rythmanalyse with two essays coauthored with Catherine Regulier: ‘The Rhythmanalytical Project’ and ‘Attempt at the Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities’ (published in 1985 and 1986 respectively). Indeed, it may well be that this expressed concern with temporality accounts for Rhythmanalysis being overlooked in favour of more obviously spatial books. Even the most recent reassessment of Lefebvre’s explicit dealings with architecture and architects, Łukasz Stanek’s Henri Lefebvre on Space, Architecture, Urban Research and the Production of Theory (2011), omits any consideration of rhythm, preferring to focus on other, no less important, concepts such as ‘concrete abstraction’, ‘right to the city’ and ‘urban revolution’. As Stuart Elden suggests in his succinct and perceptive introduction to the text, to neglect Lefebvre’s concern with time is to risk misreading him and to neglect his unique contribution to the consideration of space: the refusal to partition the temporal from the spatial, and instead to see time and space in conjunction with one another (indeed, the clue is in the text’s subtitle: Space, Time and Everyday Life). What this does for architecture is to insist on the processual nature of time-space and to resist the reduction of space to Euclidean proportions: architectural space is fourrather than three-dimensional. Equally, abstract notions—generalised and philosophic conceptions of temporality and spatiality— are replaced with concrete instances: ‘localized time... and temporalized space’. One of Stanek’s key observations regarding Lefebvre’s treatment of space can, nevertheless, be extended to the rhythmanalytical project: Lefebvre was no abstract thinker nor was he content with mere theoretical reflections on the urban and rural landscape. If The Production of Space is grounded wholly in empirical, concrete encounters—dialogue with planners and architects; experiential contact with buildings—then what is especially striking about Rhythmanalysis is its comparable refusal of philosophical projection and speculative musing in favour of an approach marked entirely by ‘practical consequences’. Bodily experience (and specifically the body moving in and through space) is placed at the forefront of the research agenda, which makes for a methodology that promises to be capable of navigating some of the exigencies of moving from concept to case study, from abstraction to concrete situation, and from the particular to the general. 550