Ethics Archives - Slow Space

March 31, 2021

Searching for Slowness – A Future Paced Ethos

In the fall semester of 2020, Caroline Amstutz and David Pankhurst, a couple of MIT Architecture grad students, researched the theme of Slow Architecture and interviewed several firms around the world, including Todd Williams Billie Tsien Architects, RMA Architects, Studio Mumbai, Aamodt / Plumb, and MASS Design Group. They did a fantastic final project and we wanted to share their work with our audience. Below you’ll find an essay by Amstutz and Pankhurst and images of the beautiful final booklet they made. Here is a link to the Aamodt / Plumb interview.

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PROJECT DESCRIPTION BY AMSTUTZ AND PANKHURST

“Searching for Slowness” is a new architectural manifesto, taking form in a kit, which asks participants to contribute to a common understanding of Slow Architecture. The kit invites readers to fold and assemble a series of conversations into booklet format. Then, readers interact with the recounted conversations by categorizing portions of the text into the “tenets” which we uncovered in our search for slowness. Finally, readers deconstruct, refold, and reassemble the booklet into the second reading of the manifesto – the tenets, a thematic synthesis of principles and values of Slow Architecture.

Linked below are the two different “readings” of the booklet, and above is the time-lapse video of this assembly, disassembly, and reassembly process.

Searching for Slowness Tenet Booklet [Click to download]

Searching for Slowness Conversations Booklet [Click to download]

Booklet Folding Instructions

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ESSAY: Searching for Slowness – A Future-Paced Ethos

By Caroline Amstutz + David Pankhurst, MIT Architecture Department, December 17, 2020

Speed is a hallmark trait of the 21st. century; from fast food to fast fashion, our digital and global moment demands a pace previously unimaginable. But with speed comes compromise at the cost of our environment, health, and culture. An antidote to our fast-paced, technologically driven lives resides in carving out space for deliberateness; for slowness – and nowhere is this more relevant than in the design of the spaces which encircle our lives. If our behavior, well-being, and sense of belonging are tied to how we dwell, how can the practice of architecture allow us to slow down and re-pace our future?

Fleeting a single definition, slowness shifts meanings as it impacts individuals, communities, and environments. Searching for Slowness attempts to quantify and qualify the ephemeral idea of slowness, asking the question: what does it mean to create Slow Architecture? While our understanding of slowness meandered as our research gained more perspectives and nuance, Slow Architecture, like Slow Food[1], can ultimately be defined by three principles: Clean – sustainable for the environment; Fair – equitable for individuals and communities; and Good, which is harder to evaluate, but could be defined as high quality – both materially and experientially.

Initially, our perception of Slow Architecture was characterized as a highly material practice centered on human experience; a literal slowness embraced in the temporal drag inherent to physical mediums as part of the design process. Paradoxically, the deliberate slowness imbued in this process could translate into an ethos which posits a solution to the most pressing issues troubling architecture: sustainability and equity. Slow Architects, we believed, could be identified by several key traits. Firstly, a slowness induced by method through electing to design using haptically transferrable mediums and resisting quick impulse technologies. And secondly, an unconventional practice structure, such as craft and artisan informed ateliers, design-builds, and non-profit firms which encourage higher levels of engagement with constructive processes and communities. Equipped with criteria to identify Slow Architecture, we sought to understand how these models resist the industry trends which distance architecture from material and labor and dissociate the architect from the long-term implications of their design decisions.

Acknowledging these foundational assumptions, we interviewed firms (from here onward called conversations) which fit our definition of Slow Architecture, hoping through conversation to uncover how they understand their work within the context of slowness, how their practice reinforces slowness, and where their definitions of slowness diverge from our own. As we probed our understanding, we compiled these recounted conversations in Searching for Slowness – a new architectural manifesto inviting readers to dwell, reflect upon, and contribute their own ideas about Slow Architecture. Our conception of Slow Architecture evolved as we gained new perspectives from our conversations; our manifesto acknowledges that there is no single or “correct” definition of slowness, but rather Slow Architecture is defined by a series of principles, presented as malleable tenets, which were found resting under the surface of our discussions.

As we molded our understanding of Slow Architecture through conversations, we crystalized our conviction of the need for a Slow Architecture through reading and revisiting texts addressing issues of environment and equity. Research beyond our conversations helped to contextualize Slow Architecture within a larger disciplinary discourse. Parallel “Slow Movements”, such as Slow Food [2], or Citta Slow [3] (Slow City) , grounded our critique of Fast Architecture’s unqualified embrace of globalization and homogenization. Borrowing the Slow Food movement’s “Good, Clean, and Fair,” provided productive friction as we expanded their verbiage to fit an architectural scale and positioned the concepts relative to current disciplinary conversations.

“Clean” and “fair” are existential and immediate, often directly intertwined in addressing the challenges of coexistence. Godofredo Pereira’s “Towards an Environmental Architecture” illustrates the interdependence of issues of sustainability and labor. [4] Pereira communicates the imperative “to re-assess the legal, ethical and political limits of architecture’s responsibilities” in order to move “from the position of providing services to that of critically supporting ongoing processes of social transformation.” [5] The social is entangled with the environmental, and Pereira suggests that the “environment” should be reframed as “relations of coexistence.” [6]

Addressing “fair,” Mabel Wilson’s “Who Builds Your Architecture?” highlights the “risk adversity and class divisions that [characterize] the prevailing mentality of the construction and design industries.” [7] Wilson’s text prompted our interest in engaging with alternate models of practice; those with a propensity to take more ownership of the entire production of architecture, from pre-design through post-occupancy. Wilson identifies a disciplinary disconnect wherein “those most intimately knowledgeable about the design and engineering of projects […] likely never set foot on a construction site or interact with the workers for whom they produce instructions about how to build their designs.” [8] Slow Architecture has the potential to bridge this gap. Wilson attributes this disciplinary cocoon to two key factors: an imperative to avert risk and diminish liability, and an increasing focus on “algorithmically created form making […] that concentrate[s] creative energies on articulating the surface of architecture rather than its material impact.” [9] These two concerns are central to Slow Architecture as they expand the principles of “Clean” and Fair” in relationship to the more nebulous “Good.”

Our Conversations reinforced the ideas introduced by Wilson: this segregation of services does not eliminate risk, rather it is aggregated and spread, scattering the responsibility to deploy environmentally sustainable and fair labor practices. The shift of designer priorities from material impact to surface articulation further illustrates how priorities can be encapsulated in the processes and medium of production. Or, as John May articulates in his entry to Log 40, “Technics contain specific models of time, which resonate with lived life […] the structural pace with which any given technical system allows us to record our thoughts and actions is inseparable from the ways of life it makes possible or impossible.” [10] With exception, there is a tendency toward technological dependency to degenerate into solipsistic, parametric “form-making” that displaces the concern for the human experience and material realities. Our conversations engaged with firms whose design begins with a profound concern with materiality and human experience – practices who rely on tactile translations of design through models, material investigations, and true orthographic drawings. While Slow Architecture can transcend media and method, there is a speed ascribed to the techne of production.

In conversation, however, we found these concerns of particular mediums of design to be largely circumstantial; some favored orthographic iteration, others relied on material mockups, and others still conceded that the international nature of their organization necessitated a purely digital design process. This speed-of-medium to speed-of-production relationship which initially framed our understanding of slowness proves to be just one of many critical exchanges, while larger attitudes of “empathy,” “empowerment,” and “ownership” more readily reveal a practice of Slow Architecture.

Not overlooking material or method, our conversations revealed that more important is the appropriateness of its application; using the right tools to interrogate or communicate design decisions. This idea of appropriateness underscores our own process of searching for slowness as we move between definitions and perceptions of what it means to practice Slow Architecture. Without hard rules or boundaries, appropriateness encompasses our principles of “flexibility,” “locality,” and “interdisciplinarity.” Our Conversations outlined appropriateness as a means to derive design from context and root architecture in culture, environment, and time.

The recurring themes of the conversations we had, and will continue to have, shape our perspective of a future-paced ethos of architecture. We will perhaps never be able to pin down the fleeting experience of slowness, but in starting to evaluate what constitutes Slow Architecture, we stride towards a more sustainable and equitable future.

1 “Good, Clean and Fair: the Slow Food Manifesto for Quality.” (Slow Food International, 2016) 2.

2 Good, Clean and Fair: the Slow Food Manifesto for Quality.” (Slow Food International, 2016) 2.

3 Citta Slow: International Network of Cities Where Living is Easy.” (Cittaslow International, 2019)

4 Pereira, Godofredo Enes. “Towards an Environmental Architecture.” (e-flux: architecture, 2010)

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Wilson, Mabel, Jordan Carver, and Kadambari Baxi. “Who Builds Your Architecture?—An Advocacy Project.” The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor . (OR Books, 2015) 100.

8 Ibid, 110.

9 Wilson, Mabel, Jordan Carver, and Kadambari Baxi. “Who Builds Your Architecture?—An Advocacy Project.” The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor . (OR Books, 2015) 110.

10 May, John. “Everything Is Already an Image.” Log 40. (Anyone Corporation, 2017) 10.

Bibliography

“Citta Slow: International Network of Cities Where Living is Easy.” (Cittaslow International, 2019)
“Good, Clean and Fair: the Slow Food Manifesto for Quality.” (Slow Food International, 2016) www.slowfood.com/about-us/our-philosophy/
May, John. “Everything Is Already an Image.” Log 40. (Anyone Corporation, 2017)
Pereira, Godofredo Enes. “Towards an Environmental Architecture.” (e-flux: architecture, 2010) https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/positions/205375/towards-an environmental-architecture/
Wilson, Mabel, Jordan Carver, and Kadambari Baxi. “Who Builds Your Architecture?—An Advocacy Project.” The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor . (OR Books, 2015)

August 16, 2018

Slow Space Movement Calls for an Immediate Ban of Asbestos

Asbestos is a naturally occurring material that is widely known to cause significant and irreversible health risks such as cancer, mesothelioma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Its fibers are microscopic, so they cannot be seen, smelled or tasted. Furthermore, it does not cause any immediate symptoms, so it is easy for a person to consume asbestos dust without even realizing it. Once in our bodies, these fibers never dissolve. Over a period of twenty to fifty years, the fibers cause inflammation, scarring and eventually disease. The World Health Organization estimated that in 2014, 107,000 people die each year because of asbestos related diseases. Worldwide, it is responsible for half of all work-related deaths from cancer.

Overwhelming evidence of the dangers of asbestos lead to heavy regulation of the material in the 1970’s. But it was never banned. Many common building products still contain up to 1% asbestos. The US is only developed country in the world that has not outright banned asbestos. Then on June 1st, 2018, despite the known dangers, the EPA announced that the Signification New Use Rule (SNUR) would allow manufacturers and importers to seek the agency’s approval to reintroduce asbestos into their manufacturing or processing of certain products on a case by case basis. This would allow for huge loopholes for big businesses.

The Trump administration has certainly supported these policies. His fortune was made in real estate development and he was a known fan of asbestos as a build material. In his 1997 book, The Art of the Comeback, he said that asbestos was 100% safe. His main concern was probably just having to remove asbestos from his buildings, a process that claimed was a scam that started with “the mob”.

So while asbestos is highly toxic, it is also highly profitable. It is cheap and easy to source from American mines and can be used in a variety of building materials, such as cement sheets, roof sealants and adhesives for floor and ceiling tiles. The University of Kentucky put out a useful fact sheet on asbestos.

The Slow Space Movement condemns the EPA’s new ruling allowing more asbestos into commonly used building products and calls for an immediate ban of all asbestos and asbestos-containing products.

The AIA has also strongly condemned the EPA ruling in a press release, stating:

“The EPA has offered no compelling reason for considering new products using asbestos, especially when the consequences are well known and have tragically affected the lives of so many people. The EPA should be doing everything possible to curtail asbestos in the United States and beyond—not providing new pathways that expose the public to its dangers.”

Learn about healthy building materials.

June 26, 2018

New Urbanism Communities Align With Slow Space

Recently, I have been reflecting on a debate that I attended as a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in the 1990s. It was about New Urbanism, a human-scaled urban design development approach. The debate was between Rem Koolhaas, one of the world’s most important architectural thinkers, and Andres Duany, who co-founded the New Urbanism Movement and developed a community called Seaside, Florida based on its principles. As a devout modernist who considered Koolhaas’s book, SMLXL, to be my bible, I remember siding with Koolhaas. I thought that New Urbanism was nostalgic, idealistic and not relevant. I dismissed it completely. These days however, I keep pondering the similarities between New Urbanism and The Slow Space Movement.

Seaside, Florida is a private development on the Gulf Coast and is the best-known example of New Urbanism. It is a relatively small community incorporating residential buildings, mixed use buildings and public space. It is known for its pastel-colored houses featuring porches and white picket fences. Rem Koolhaas criticized New Urbanism, and Seaside in particular, as manufactured quaintness. It lacks the grit of a place that develops organically, as well as the diversity and intrigue of a real city.

I see his point, but when compared to most typical suburban developments, especially from the 1980s, with McMansions and no place to walk, New Urbanism developments are actually appealing. For example, in Seaside, everything is walkable and within easy reach. There is more vegetation than lawn and private outdoor space is intimate in size, encouraging residents to utilize communal outdoor spaces. In addition, the community includes a variety of sizes and building types. While they seem to mostly be vernacular in style, they aren’t identical, and in fact many different architects, such as Robert A.M. Stern and Deborah Berke, have designed homes there. Now, I have never been there myself, but from everything I have read and seen through images, it seems like a nice place to live or take a vacation, and slow down. In the 1999 debate, Alex Krieger asked Koolhaas if he had ever been there. His response: “Every year”. Was he joking?

Over the past 20 years, New Urbanism has accomplished more than just create quaint communities. It promotes walkability, green transportation, public spaces, quality architecture and mixed use neighborhoods, all values in line with the Slow Space Movement. These communities have also created change by developing projects that address low income housing, neglected urban spaces and improving suburbs.

The spaces where we live, work and visit have a huge impact on our lives, health and mood. It might be time to take a second look at New Urbanism in the context of The Slow Space Movement.

See also “Slow Space, Slow Cities” by Mette Aamodt.

January 10, 2018

Empathy in Architecture: The Kasungu Maternity Waiting Village by MASS Design

In her recent essay “Designing with Empathy,” Slow Space founder and architect Mette Aamodt writes, “Empathy is putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and feeling the emotions they feel.”

What if this “someone else” is a pregnant woman in Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries? As an architect, how do you put yourself in that pair of shoes, in which she walked the long journey from her village to the district hospital in Kasungu, where she hopes to receive essential medical services that will give her a better chance of surviving childbirth?

Only slightly more than half of the children in this Southeast-African country are born under the care of a medical professional. Malawi has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the world — 634 deaths per 100,000 live births (est. 2015).

The University of North Carolina (UNC) had already been working with Malawi’s Ministry of Health on a larger initiative to help address maternal mortality through medical practices and protocols. As part of the project, the Ministry had quickly and with very limited resources created a prototype maternity waiting home; a bare-bones rectangle, housing 36 beds and a small bathroom at its core. Outside, a small, unshaded space for washing laundry. They planned to build 130 more maternity waiting homes across the country, based on that model.

At the time, Boston-headquartered MASS Design Group (MASS) already had an office in Kigali, working on projects in Rwanda. The firm was invited to Malawi to contribute a design that could improve the mothers’ experience and help to mitigate that country’s unfathomably high maternal mortality rate. Women waiting until they are too close to labor for making the distance and women who had planned on giving birth at home in their village but encounter complications, far away from the nearest doctor, are at a particularly high risk. Thus, a maternity waiting home is a facility in the proximity of a hospital or health centre, where expecting mothers can stay toward the end of their pregnancy and await labor.

MASS’ mission

MASS Design Group’s mission is to design environments that promote health and dignity. The firm, founded as non-profit organization, aims to advance a movement that fosters public awareness of the way architecture can hurt or heal. Empathy in architecture, trying to understand the feelings of their design’s future users, is woven into the fabric of the firm. “It’s not just the Maternity Waiting Village for us that embodies empathy in design,” says Director Patricia Gruits, LEED. “That is really part of what we as a firm bring to all of our projects. We claim that entire process as an opportunity to ensure dignity and empathy across the continuum of design and construction.”

We claim that entire process as an opportunity to ensure dignity and empathy across the continuum of design and construction.

Empathy in architecture: The Kasungu Maternity Waiting Village. Photo: © Iwan Baan, Courtesy of MASS Design Group

Immersion first

Before beginning to design, the MASS team traveled to the site of the future Maternity Waiting Village, set adjacent to Kasungu’s district hospital, where pregnant women from the surrounding villages came to deliver their babies. “We always start each project with what we call ‘immersion’,” Gruits notes. “It’s about immersing ourselves in the community, so we understand the needs, the context, any opportunities of the project — not sort of drop in a solution.”

It’s about immersing ourselves in the community, so we understand the needs, the context, any opportunities of the project — not sort of drop in a solution.

On his first site visit, her colleague Jean Paul Sebuhayi Uwase, design associate in MASS’ Rwanda office, was shocked to find these mothers under the rain, without shelter. Some stayed in tents, others slept outside under the trees. “What if this was my mother?” he remembers thinking. “For you to go through the experience of giving birth, you deserve to have this space that treats you well. That was pushing us to design, to go outside of the normal things, for this to be a special place for these mothers to give birth, but also a special space for people to change their mindset of not always delivering at their homes or in their villages.”

During the immersion, the MASS team quickly observed how social the Malawian women were, spending most of the time gathered together outside, sitting on the ground, around a tree in the shade or under the overhang of another building. The current prototype design clearly was not responding to the Malawian way of life.

The Kasungu Maternity Waiting Village, empathy in architecture

The design of the Kasungu Maternity Waiting Village is inspired by the way of life in a traditional Malawaian village. Photo: © Iwan Baan, Courtesy of MASS Design Group

Researching the setup of typical Malawian villages, the team found that even as younger generations start their own families, they all stay in the same area, near the houses of their parents and grandparents. The family life extends fluidly. “That creates a social cohesion within the family,” Uwase says. How could they recreate aspects of the mothers’ village life through design? By allowing empathy to influence their architecture. The common spaces in particular were designed to encourage gathering and interacting. “That creates a friendship that extends beyond the Maternity Waiting Village,” Uwase says. The hope for the Village is to encourage the women to carry on a social life and normal friendships. Gruits references the project’s main goal: “We really wanted to transform this maternity waiting experience from something that was seen as a negative experience for mothers, something that disempowered them, to something that was empowering.”

We really wanted to transform this maternity waiting experience from something that was seen as a negative experience for mothers, something that disempowered them, to something that was empowering.

The architect speaks of a local nurse’s vision for these women to come and learn a skill, so they can return to their villages not only with a healthy baby but with new potential and opportunities. Classes on gardening, nutrition, cooking and family planning are crucial to the program. “All of that is about really impacting and empowering her to make better and different life decisions that are right for her and her family.”

The Kasungu Maternity Waiting Village. Photo: © Iwan Baan, Courtesy of MASS Design Group

Empathy in architecture: Design for dignity

36 women sleeping in one big room was not the right answer to fostering solidarity. Based on their research on social interactions and social networks, MASS instead designed small huts that sleep four women each. Clusters of three huts surround a core of washrooms, showers and a laundry area 12 mothers share. A total of three clusters is complemented by a room for classes, several outdoor areas and a kitchen.

The local nurses and UNC saw additional opportunity to pair experienced mothers with first-timers, so they can coach each other along and answer questions. “There is now this much more communal approach to giving birth and to the pregnancy process,” Gruits says. Her colleague agrees: “The way it has been designed really helps to facilitate all of those relationships and connections.” The team even renamed their maternity waiting home Maternity Waiting Village, for its many chances to encourage relationship building through design.

The designers also had to address Malawi’s extreme climate of very strong rain seasons and very hot dry seasons. The mothers needed protection from the rain throughout the village, including covered walkways. But they also needed shaded areas where they would be protected from the sun. “So we really focused on the roof of the project,” says Gruits. “We looked at the roof to create those overhangs to shade and to protect from the rain.” Ample outdoor spaces now facilitate education programs and cooking classes or simply for the women to cook and gather together more comfortably.

What’s more, the mothers are typically accompanied by family members, who cook for them, keep them company and help them through the delivery process. So the designers doubled the number of toilets and added large benches under the overhangs. “If we couldn’t provide a bed for the guardians, at least we could provide protection from the rain and the sun,” Gruits says.

In the quest to combat maternal mortality beyond the Village, a key design objective had been to inspire the mothers to return to their villages and in turn encourage other pregnant women to make their way to the Maternity Waiting Village in Kasungu.

Building for a future

Malawi suffers from extreme deforestation, and high-quality building materials are hard to come by. “When you fire bricks, you use a lot of wood,” says Uwase. “So on this project, they were interested in us testing alternative building materials that would be more sustainable and would be solutions to combat deforestation.” The group implemented CSEBs — compressed stabilized earth blocks, which use very small amounts of cement and no firewood. Local laborers made the bricks onsite.

Uwase speaks passionately about the opportunity to train the local carpenters in reading technical drawings, and to influence them to think differently about materials. “Part of our model at MASS is that we are not just designing a building and dropping it off,” Gruits adds. “We train wherever we can, which not only ensures the stewardship or the repair or the maintenance of our own buildings but also that those same workers may go off and use that skill on another job and make more money.”

Uwase has returned to Kasungu three times since construction finished and women have moved into the Maternity Waiting Village he helped to build. One of the doctors told him that word-of-mouth is spreading about “one of the best places to wait when you are attending the maternity services.” If anything, too many mothers from the area surrounding Kasungu are coming. “It’s a good sign,” says Uwase. “It shows a response to one of the concerns we had when we studied the design, and how the design can change the mindset and attract more mothers. And that’s happening now, which makes me happy.”

The design aims to encourage more women from the surrounding villages to come to the Kasungu Maternity Waiting Village. Photo: © Iwan Baan, Courtesy of MASS Design Group

More mothers are waiting

The MASS team knew from interviewing mothers beforehand that there would be more than 36 mothers at a time wanting to come. “There is a bigger demand for this Maternity Waiting Village,” Gruits notes. “Part of it being well designed is that we’ve been successful in encouraging more mothers to come, but we need more of these facilities to actually accommodate the demand.” The district hospital itself is currently adding on to their maternity ward. “It’s a huge success that they would invest in that infrastructure.”

The Malawian Ministry of Health is now considering implementing the MASS-designed Maternity Waiting Village prototype on a larger scale. “We’ve had conversations as well with NGOs and other leaders in Zambia and even in Uganda about maternity waiting homes,” Gruits says. “People are interested in using our model, and we see this as an opportunity for other countries that are also looking at maternity waiting villages as a solution to their maternal mortality issues.”

May 1, 2017

Built with Blood – Labor Exploitation in US Construction

I am Mette Aamodt. I’m an architect and founder of slowspace.org, which is a community of architects, designers, builders, artisans, activists, and lots of other people who care about our built environment. Together with my partner Andrew Plumb, we are starting a movement and we call it Slow Space. It is slow food for the built environment, and we have a manifesto. “Our world is covered in junkspace: bad buildings that are ugly, poorly designed, and unpleasant to be in, composed of cheap toxic materials that make you and the planet sick, and built by unskilled workers that are exploited, enslaved and endangered on the job. Every day more of these buildings go up, but we say, ‘Enough is enough.’ The Slow Space Movement aims to end the mindless proliferation of junkspace, to educate the public on the physical and psychological dangers and to inspire architects, designers, builders and artisans to stand up for buildings that are good, clean and fair.”

In today’s video, I’m going to talk about the issue of fairness in the construction industry and I’m going to tell you the story of Luis. This is a true story. It was reported in The Boston Globe by Beth Healy and Meg Woolhouse in September, 2016. Luis was a 15 year old boy originally from Ecuador and living in Brockton, Massachusetts, attending high school there. One summer a couple of years ago, he took a summer job for a roofing company to make some extra money for his family. The job was in Maine. He was working on a house in Portland helping to fasten roofing shingles.

One day he fell, and he tumbled down two stories and he severely shattered his leg. His employer did not call an ambulance. Instead, a coworker transported him 75 miles across state lines in the back of an old construction van to a Massachusetts hospital where he received emergency care. Luis was in severe pain. I don’t know how long it took them to get back to Massachusetts, but 75 miles in traffic takes a long time in these parts. He said, “I couldn’t breathe, much less talk. It’s pain you don’t forget.” The general contractor on the job said it wasn’t his responsibility because Luis was being paid by a subcontractor by the name of Force Construction. The JC had run regular background checks on Force and had confirmed at the time that they hired him that they had liability insurance and Workers’ Comp.

Luis was actually being paid by another subcontractor called Twin Pines Construction and this was a company owned by the same person that owned Force. His name was Fernandes. That summer, Fernandes had let his Workers’ Comp policy lapse a month before Luis fell off the roof. This was not an isolated incident, by the way on the jobs of Fernandes and his companies. He and his companies have been cited for more than 100 violations and have racked up $1.5 million in fines from OSHA. Luis did eventually receive the medical care that he needed. He was transferred to Boston Children’s Hospital and a rod was surgically placed in his femur. A workers’ advocate helped him navigate all of his medical appointments and paperwork, and a Medford lawyer helped him to sort through the tree of subcontractors until they finally found one who had insurance to cover him.

Luis is one of thousands of people, many undocumented, many children, who fill the need for cheap labor in Boston’s booming construction industry. They hold slabs of sheetrock and climb rooftops and dusty scaffolds, doing often dangerous work for contractors looking for cheap labor. They’re not on the books. They’re paid illegally in cash and for much less than the prevailing wage. The workers advocate who helped Luis said this is not about catching a few bad apples. We have evolved a system for providing subsidized labor to build our houses and it’s based on the vulnerability of the workforce.

Luckily, at least in the US, we have laws aimed at preventing this type of thing, but enforcement is difficult and there are many ways to get around it. For example, many contractors would prefer to just pay the fines rather than to change their ways. Everyone complains about the cost of construction, but actually the true cost is not even being counted. If you take the example of Luis, his suffering subsidized the cost of the roofing job on that project.

Many prefer to look the other way and I’ve been guilty of that in the past, but this is an issue we want to bring into the light. If you care about these issues, if this is something that’s important to you, that you’re interested in, and you care about good, clean and fair buildings for all, then please join us by subscribing to our mailing list at slowspace.org and/or liking us on our Facebook page. Thank you. I look forward to seeing you there.

April 7, 2017

Slow Space and the American Folk Art Museum Demolition

In 1999 Architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien wrote an article entitled “On Slowness” referring to the slow speed of hand drafting, the slow careful thought process of designing and the slow perception and experience of space. They quote Milan Kundera’s novel Slowness and the powerful relationship between time and memory.

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time. In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”

They describe how as their work has evolved its essence become more difficult to capture in photographs. The spaces need to be experienced, quietly, slowly, particularly as the buildings relate to the landscape. It is difficult for them to describe their work as well. “So there is no quick take on our work; no singular powerful image that is able to sum it all up.” Perhaps this makes the work more difficult to appreciate in the sound-bite and media driven world we live in.

There is no singular powerful image able to sum it all up.

In 2001 Williams Tsien inaugurated their biggest work to date, the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. Opening to critical acclaim and numerous awards the exquisitely detailed building embodied all of the aspects of slowness that they wrote about. Michael Kimmelman wrote in a New York Times piece “Those bespoke, domestic-size spaces, like the building’s sober hammered bronze facade, share something with the handicraft of the folk art museum’s collection; the building has a rootedness, a materiality, an outsize claim to significance.” The hammered bronze facade even included a panel inscribed with the names of all the workers who helped to build the museum showing their respect to the craftsmen who gave the building their love.

The Folk Art Museum was located on a small site surrounded on three sides by the Museum of Modern Art. Kimmelman writes “It stands proudly on the street, the unfashionable antithesis of generic, open-ended modernism, the opposite of what Diller Scofidio now envisions in its place, with its paradigm of indefinite and perishable culture.” He is referring to the fact that in 2014 the MOMA swallowed up the Folk Art Museum and demolished it to make room for its own never-ending expansion. After only 13 years the building was consumed by fast growth and a gem of Slow Space was lost.

Update: I just learned that so many architects and others were upset by this and the hashtag #folkMOMA was created in protest of the demolition of the Folk Art Museum and the MOMA in general (also Diller, Scofidio & Renfro).

Image: “NYC, 45 West 53rd Street” (CC BY-ND 2.0) by Detlef Schobert

April 6, 2017

Architecture Has Become Disposable

With every new innovation architecture is creating its own obsolescence. The race for taller, greener, more cutting edge building narrows the window of time each preceding iteration can be marveled. If every few years there is a new city chasing the Bilbao effect won’t there be a point of diminishing returns? Will tourists race to one city only to find they then have to turn around to get to another?

If it is the newness that is so exciting what happens when these iconoclastic buildings become old? Do they retain any value? Or do they quickly become passé?

This is not just the case for “it” buildings. In many parts of the US people don’t want to buy a “used,” I mean old, house. It’s like a car. There is always a newer model. So instead of maintaining, renovating and adapting their homes to their changing life circumstances, they trade up. Vast tracks of spec homes will be abandoned after they are no longer new. Instead of increasing in value these homes are losing value. As they should be actually. They are usually built of such poor quality that they are not meant to last more than 30 or 40 years. Then what happens? Are they demolished? That costs money too. Not to mention the waste. THE WASTE. That is the real issue.

We see it in fashion. The world is covered in our discarded garments. There are not enough needy people in the world to give them too, and most are of such poor quality that many don’t even want those hand-me-downs (Samson). Then there are the waste byproducts of clothing production as well as the enormous water use.

Starchitecture has been terrible for architecture and the built environment.

Every building is an ICON, so then none of them are. The explosion of architecture blogs and publications has been feeding the frenzy of consumption, with every day a new batch of exciting buildings being published online. Design is tailored to the image it will produce, the “money shot.” Because perhaps that is all that really matters in the end? Very few people will actually experience the building and very few people will care after the initial glow has worn off. The media cycle will have moved on to something else. The trend will pass and when the newness has worn off it will likely be replaced with something else.

Design and construction is moving faster and faster to keep pace with technology. But Starchitect Rem Koolhaas still laments its slowness (Koolhaas). But it is speed that is the problem. Architecture can and should not be fast and should not compete with technology. Architecture has a 3,000 year history. It is the (second) oldest profession. The Great Pyramid at Giza took 20 years to build by 100,000 workers. Chartres Cathedral was built over a period of 30 years. Both of these structures have survived more than 1,000 years and are celebrated as world treasures. That’s not likely to be the case for anything built today.

Image: “Demolition” (CC BY 2.0) by MICOLO J Thanx 4, 3.1m views

Browsing category: Ethics

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