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.
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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)
