Take Your Time
by Terry Ratzlaff
portfolio winners call 'URBANAUTICA INSTITUTE AWARDS 2021', 2021
Category: Representations of Space, Architecture, and Conflicts
In Take Your Time, I explore the ways trains connect worlds. In looking at the railroad’s vast and interconnected systems of travel, commerce, telecommunications, and information, I perceive trains as meaning-making-logic machines; a structural device that threads seemingly disparate worlds together. Inspired by the train’s innate ability to signify time, order, and desire, I examine the philosophical relationship between collecting and obsession within the railfan community. Most common in retired males, lifelong obsessions with train watching and railroad modeling transform suburban spaces into scaled-down constructs of time and space. In this form of simulation, the disparate collapse into each other; work and play, fantasy and the real, the young and old, and the miniature and the large. These re-constructed spaces activate prolonged simulations of nostalgia, where the past, present, and future occupy space simultaneously in a seemingly endless loop of manipulation and control.