This chapter explores the material temporal work involved in protecting a radical artistic innovation, conceived ahead of its time, from incomprehension and projecting it into the future in search of receptive audiences. Inspired by the trajectory and recent rediscovery of the pioneering abstract artist Hilma af Klint, we suggest that it is temporal agency (i.e. anticipating of and acting upon one’s future significance) and material temporal work (i.e. influencing, sustaining, or redirecting interpretations of time through materiality) that enable the radical artistic innovation to reach receptive audiences, spanning over a century. We distinguish two processes of material temporal work: bifurcating time by working in parallel along established and unknown temporalities, and bridging time by narrative construction, waiting time, and emotional resonance with distant-future artists, museum curators, and critics. Taken together, these two processes power time as the ultimate organizer of a radical artistic innovation’s comprehension and appreciation, i.e. engage time in the politics of meaning.

Drawing on a combined ethnographic and historical case study of BLOX, a landmark building in Copenhagen, this chapter advances a processual understanding of buildings by exploring the intersection between materiality, temporality, and politics. We analyze organizing processes unfolding between the material building and public, private, and philanthropic organizations. We distinguish between three dimensions of the building’s material temporality, which we analyze drawing on an event-based approach: historicizing the building through time, projecting the building over time, and enacting the building in time. While the ‘projecting’ and ‘enacting’ dimensions are inspired by prior work on material temporality, our study adds the ‘historicizing’ dimension. We develop an empirical model showing the interplay between these three dimensions. A main implication of our study is to show how the organizing effects of material buildings emerge not only from their material durability, but also from their temporal malleability. In closing, we discuss implications for a temporal understanding of affordances and propose a temporally relational view of affordances.