メキシコ人建築家、フリーダ・エスコベド（Frida Escobedo）の作品集。今日のスマートフォンのように、中世のヨーロッパでは時祷書（the books of hours）が個人的な必需品だった。持ち主にとって意味を持つ文章が集められた手書きの写本には、毎日定時に行う祈祷の時間が示されており、祈りを中心に一日を構成する系統立った方法が記されていた。
2018年、ロンドンのケンジントンガーデンズで毎年開催される「サーペンタインパビリオン（SERPENTINE PAVILION）」の設計という栄誉ある指名を受け、当時最年少の建築家としてこのプロジェクトを手がけて以来、作者は自身の名を冠したスタジオの名声が世界的に広がっている。2022年には、ニューヨークの「メトロポリタン美術館（The Metropolitan Museum of Art / The Met）」の新しいモダン＆コンテンポラリー分館を設計する建築家に任命され、同美術館の建物を設計した最年少かつ初の女性建築家となった。
Perhaps as ubiquitous as smartphones today, the books of hours were a private necessity in Europe during the Middle Ages. These manuscripts contained collections of texts that were meaningful to each owner, as well as an organized method of structuring the day around prayer by marking the passing of the canonical hours. Although highly personalized, with intricate miniatures and illuminations, all books of hours contained sections to be recited at regular intervals throughout the twenty-four hours of the day. In them, the public and the private timescales converged, crystallized into a material, perdurable form not devoid of beauty.
“The Book of Hours” by Frida Escobedo is a modern exegesis of this extinct devotional practice: a project in which twenty-four objects were photographed at different intervals of time to capture their evolution, making a new calendar of matter and light. As humanity has transitioned to a secular understanding of time in which hours are organized and conceived in terms of productivity, “The Book of Hours” interrogates the place of contemplation in our era, its possibility and necessity. Through this book – a public display of a private collection of objects – readers are invited to contemplate these arrays of matter and experience the ways in which they once interacted with light, that burning needle in time’s template.
