Darren Deane, Eleanor Suess Kingston University, United Kingdom 55
Slowness baffles and confuses us at the same time. We find ourselves irritated by
traf f ic congestion whilst welcoming the contemplative stillness of the bathtub! This
helps explain why some writers have combined both sensations (friction and stillness),
such as Alfred Jarry’s fictional scientist of 1897 Dr Faustroll, who experienced time by
standing still against the tide of chronology and sequence. Moments of stillness also
encourage critical distance, hence the relevance of Faustroll’s character, who severs
his connection with the life process, thereby deconstructing his situation into present
and non-present (past)time. By following a different temporality, Faustroll’s actions
represent the inverted cultural process of distanciation: moving against (contra), rather
than with the flow of time and matter.
So could it be that slow thinking, or apparently backward actions, can actually stimu-
late a type of architectural perception, in particular that branch known as the material
imagination, and if so, how might this work? Consider the following statement made by
Hannah Arendt in 1958 suggesting the act of making itself constitutes an interruption
in temporal flow.
Fabrication, the work of homo faber, consists in reification. Solidity, inherent
in all, even the most fragile things, comes from the material worked upon, but
this material itself is not simply given and there, like the fruits of fields and
trees which we may gather or leave alone without changing the household of
nature. Material is already a product of human hands which have removed it
from its natural location, either killing a life process, as in the case of the tree
which must be destroyed in order to provide wood, or interrupting one of nature’s
slower processes, as in the case of iron, stone or marble torn out of the womb
of the earth. This element of violation and violence is present in all fabrication.
(Arendt, 1958, 139)Arendt’s point is that slowness, solidif ication and interruption aids the construction
of durable works of architectural intelligence, a method which perhaps eludes those
always caught up in the thick of things.
Shif ting our attention to architectural practice, one can detect a growing chorus of
voices that, perhaps out of disenchantment with the mainstream rhetoric of fluidity
and flowmania, have similarly turned their attention to slow culture, and the resistant
grain of creativity.^3 Our own thoughts on slowness and mass are attuned to an historical
and contemporary horizon that includes the work of practising artists, architects and
writers, such as Adolf Loos’ languorous domestic retreats – rooms where matter can
retreat and safely “enjoy a certain period of molecular rest” as he put it (Loos, 1988,
138). ‘Languid atmospheres’ was also a subject of Man Ray’s photography, which cap-
tured dust-covered artefacts kept in a dormant state for long periods. A slightly earlier
statement articulated by John Ruskin, takes our understanding a little further by setting
out a spectrum of material gradation, one side of which is determined by slow, heavy
matter and viscous time: “The loosest weed that drif ts and waves under the heaving
of the sea, or hangs heavily on the brown and slippery shore, has a marked strength,
structure, elasticity, gradation of substance.” (Ruskin, 1880, 112).