56 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
The theme of material gradation, in particular that side of the spectrum inclined
towards friction and sedimentation, is the cornerstone of the emerging London archi-
tectural practice Sergison Bates. Their 1996 essay “Friction” speaks of architecture as
“contributing to an increased atmospheric density of a place and in this there lies an
ultimate resistance to the artificial and the virtual.” (Bates and Sergison, 1996). Their
contemporaries, Adam Caruso and Peter St John, attempt something similar in claim-
ing that anyone expressing an interest in either reality or the material intensity of
architecture is in effect adopting a “resistant” position. (Caruso and St John, 2005).
And both practices of course owe a great deal to Peter Smithson, whose 1987 Manifesto
on “Conglomerate Ordering” refers to buildings as “lumps” with “thick building mass”.
(Smithson, 1993). On a more theoretical note, Manuel DeLanda’s recent Deleuzian-
inspired initiatives seek to rearticulate culture and society in terms of non-linear, friction
based processes. Whilst these documents might not sit together harmoniously, their
cultural proximity at the very least suggests that processes characterised by slowness,
density and mass are important indicators of an emerging pedagogical atmosphere.
This atmosphere becomes more clearly identifiable in the context of other spatial
practices which have joined architecture in its search for slow praxis. The photographic
processes of Idris Kahn for instance use a technique of densely overlaid stills as a way of
recapturing the materiality of a body arrested in a single snapshot, whilst the entropic,
slumping mounds (‘heaps’ of cultural matter) conceived by the land artist Robert Smith-
son remind us of the indomitable gravitational pull exerted on man-made artefacts. We
should also not overlook René Magritte’s perilously hovering boulders - solid fragments
of earth that appear to amplify gravity in the act of defying it. And in acknowledgement
of our hosts here in Portugal, some space must be given to an entry found in Fernando
Pessoa’s Livro do desassossego (‘The Book of Disquiet’), which reads as follows: “Reality,
especially if it is brutish and rough, forms a natural complement to the soul.” (Pessoa,
1991, 13.11). We could go on, but this overtly-dense retrospective shall end with a
philosophical remark, this time by Walter Benjamin, who in The Arcades Project drew an
explicit connection between the act of interpretation, and stoppage or slowness:
“Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well...where
time stands still and has come to a stop.” (Benjamin, 1999, 75)These are strange words from a revolutionary thinker known to have been obsessed
with time!
This truncated genealogy of literar y, philosophical and ar tistic fragments forms a
background scene to our work that architectural historians and critical theorists have
yet to explore, let alone understand. Together they articulate an undercurrent that
revalorises slowness, friction and heavy matter as a progressive state, and not merely
a retrograde action or state. Slowness is not about opposing time, rather, it prompts us
to think of how to delay movement through the introduction of different temporalities
and material states into the project-space; material states which perform at different
rates (from the permanence of mass to the transience of film), enabling architecture to
be imprinted by action, as well as carry ideational load. In addition to legitimising our
agenda, these reference points help identify the genesis of our search for strategies,