I came across this passage and was struck with its concise assessment of the experience of architecture in spacetime:

“The flatness of today’s standard construction is strengthened by a weakened sense of materiality. Natural materials — stone, brick and wood — allow our vision to penetrate their surfaces and enable us to become convinced of the veracity of matter. Natural materials express their age and history, as well as the story of their origins and their history of human use. All matter exists in the continuum of time; the patina of wear adds the enriching experience of time to the materials of construction. But the machine-made materials of today — scaleless sheets of glass, enamelled metals and synthetic plastics — tend to present their unyielding surfaces to the eye without conveying their material essence or age. Buildings of this technological age usually deliberately aim at ageless perfection, and they do not incorporate the dimension of time, or the unavoidable and mentally significant processes of aging. This fear of the traces of wear and age is related to our fear of death.”

Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses