Comments on: In Praise of Slowness

By: bradley pavlik

bradley pavlik — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 08:12:58 +0000

Time is the ultimate revelator. . . as is hindsight. Some of the most profound reviews of design have come after 50 or more years.

If we choose to learn from ecology and systems thinking, we should be critiquing the resilience of landscape/architecture situated within a social-ecological system. If we want to design for resiliency we must not only consider, but engage time, as a catalyst.

There is much fodder within these ideas you’ve presented. I concur with faslanyc . . . . write another!

By: faslanyc

faslanyc — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:51:04 +0000

I think the author’s interesting point is not “old” v. “new” but rather his emphasis on temporal scales. That is an excellent point (evidently totally missed by Mr. Zacks) and I would prefer that to be explored more fully. I wonder if there are patterns in these temporal scales that could inform policy and design?

The ecological metaphor thrown makes this weaker. Everyone understands that connection drawn but as Mr. Josephson pointed out, it can’t be simply applied. I would like to hear more about the temporality of buldings including how the materiality changes, in addition to use, context, etc. Write another!

By: Matico Josephson

Matico Josephson — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 17:00:00 +0000

Andrew, thank you for this. And thanks to the responders for sketching out a few more dimensions of this issue. I think that in order to understand the advantages of the ecological perspective we have to ask what kind of interventions this approach makes possible. Ecological and naturalistic metaphors for the city are fine and dandy, but they will be just as ineffectual as the romantic naturalism of Earth Day unless we use them to represent and work on the real city out there.

Representing the “ecology” of the Grand Army Plaza neighborhood really means sketching out its economic and social aspects on a physical plan. This kind of work is not as straightforward as it might seem: Framing the question carelessly, for instance, focusing on Park Slope alone, without taking the adjacent lower-income areas into consideration, leads a false perception of the working of the neighborhood. A more comprehensive view, in which individual works of architecture (conventional or exceptional), could play an important role, might be able to redistribute the opportunities for profitable private development in a rational way that could lead to the enhancement of the life of the whole city. I imagine that an ecological model could be useful for representing the relationships between landlords, tenants, speculative investors, and urban space, and for designing a “game” by which these categories of actors could interact within certain boundaries, to improve the future of the city. The overall point is that ecological thinking is not just for hippies with dreadlocks on Earth Day.

Thanks again.

By: Daniel Gregory

Daniel Gregory — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:48:00 +0000

I finally read this essay and enjoyed it very much, and Don Lyndon’s response also! I think parsing the new and novel from the timely and timeless is what we as observers of design and the built environment should always be doing. It’s a sort of dynamic symmetry (I was trying to remember that Northrup Frye book Fearful Symmetry). And your title aptly recalls the Slow Food Movement, since slow appears to be the foreseeable future anyway. I’m also reminded of George Kubler’s wonderful book The Shape of Time, where he talked about fast time (cities) and slow time (everything else.)

By: stephanie

stephanie — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:04:57 +0000

Andrew,

I really enjoyed this article, especially the comparison of the ever evolving cityscape to a forest’s ecological succession.

From an advocacy perspective, I found your comparison motivating: if we see the city as always changing and evolving, we are more likely to jump into the fray and find opportunities to shape and direct the inevitable evolution.

By: Robert Campbell

Robert Campbell — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:29:23 +0000

Hey Andrew, Hi, good solid piece, thanks. I loved “spit out one-liners” as opposed to “slow drip.” All best Robert

By: Stephen Zacks

Stephen Zacks — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 00:42:30 +0000

I take Mr. Lyndon’s word for it, no doubt an expert on crummy old things, but maybe Andrew would be willing to clarify his disposition toward the Richard Meier building in its current state of slow evolution, since I apparently misunderstood-at the risk of alienating himself from all of Park Slope. In any case, the developer-shadenfreude that has warmly greeted the economic collapse-the slight resonance of which in Andrew’s piece is probably more a reflection of his trying to find a silver lining than a real desire to halt or slow development-is lately always appealingly cloaked in ecological concern, whereas in truth, as a dense, upscale product of a period of rapid urban development and consolidation of power in cities- regardless of the particulars of its design-the environmental defaults of the building and a thousand more like it are nothing compared to the scale of ecological and economic disaster that California tract housing hath wrought. Tend, perhaps, your garden.

Regards.

By: Donlyn Lyndon

Donlyn Lyndon — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:17:39 +0000

Thanks, Andrew, for the thought-filled, reflective article and the (timely) call to rethink “eventizing”

No thanks, Stephen Zacks, for the whiplash “my way or the highway” response.

Or maybe thanks….. for illustrating what has become of the state of discourse…..be with it (us) or else you may be “soft” or (heaven forbid) “prematurely old” “clinging to crummy places”, “not digging for new things”….

Perhaps Andrew, you might even be caught trying to understand what does and does not matter, what’s new and worthwhile, what’s not; what we can learn from the past or present, as well as imagine for the future.

Then, Andrew you’d really be out of the pack. Watch out!….but, you see, this kind of belittling stuff is infectious.

Yes do “stay strong”, and stay thoughtful
Donlyn