Slow

urbanism
Slow food + slow architecture
Marco Frascari
Arhitecture Week ORSA
In many urban bodies,
the devising and
nurturing of urban
happiness has been
prevented by the fusion
of fashionable elations
with financial
gratification and speed.

This fusion has changed

the thought process of
many architects and
urbanists: they do not
think anymore within the
body of the city, but
merely think about the
body of the city.
 The fast rules of modern
urbanism have generated an
incredible number of places
for urban existence.
There are fast places for
buying, selling, banking,
cooking, eating, sleeping,
washings, playing, working,
practicing sports, learning,
and so on.
There are no places to slow
down and think
Cedric Price, the
most epicurean of
the English architects
believed that
cooking is a good
model for
architecture, where
ideas can be tested
—and given
immediate user
feedback—within a
single sitting
 The problem:
fast food, fast architecture, fast buck
In Praise of Slowness, Carl Honore examines the
consequences of our antagonistic relationship with
time and highlights the benefits of slowing down,
pointing to the fact that in Italy the voraciousness of
fast food and loud cities are being countered with
slow food and quiet city initiatives.
 Speed in itself is not bad.
Speed has its place in the modern
world. Often you have to move
quickly. The problem is that speed has
become a way of life. We do
everything in a rush. We are stuck in
fast forward and that is unhealthy.
 Fast food generates trash
the fast culture of the city generates
trash
 Fast Food Pollution
Doctors at Duke Medical Center retrieved this piece of plastic
from a Wendy's utensil out of a man's left lung.
On Sept. 17, 2009, Steve Mallie, owner of Mallie's Sports Bar
and Grill in Southgate, Michigan created the new World's
Largest Hamburger. It weights 185 lbs and took 15 hours to
make. Mallie plans to sell the burger for $499.
“We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to
the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits,
pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat
Fast Foods. In the name of productivity, Fast Life has
changed our way of being and threatens our environment
and our landscapes. So Slow Food is now the only truly
progressive answer.”

From the slow food manifesto

 I want to tell you of beautiful
houses,
the walls are of Parmesan cheese
and whitewashed with ricotta.
Anonimo Romano 12th Century

The Land of Cockaigne

The Sensorium and the urban
form
 A realm of architectural delight:
the gastronomical analogy as a novel tactic to
achieve sustainability
• Slow food and slow architecture

  The claim is that eating and drinking, as

sources of creative imagination and
aesthetic pleasure, are connected to the
creative process in architecture, and hold a
double denomination integrating the good
with the beautiful.

  Gastronomic and architectural creations are

mutually enhancing and mutually inspiring in
their common pursuit of beauty.
Festina Lente

Our motto will be

“Make Haste Slowly.”
 Festina Lente, `

a call for `SlowArchitecture

 The Slow Food Manifesto
The Slow Food international movement officially began when delegates from 15 countries endorsed this
manifesto, written by founding member Folco Portinari, on November 9, 1989.

Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life
model.

•  We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits,
pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods.

•  To be worthy of the name, Homo Sapiens should rid himself of speed before it reduces him to a species in danger
of extinction.

•  A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life.

•  May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the
contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.

•  Our defense should begin at the table with Slow Food.

•  Let us rediscover the flavors and savors of regional cooking and banish the degrading effects of Fast Food.

•  In the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our
landscapes. So Slow Food is now the only truly progressive answer.

•  That is what real culture is all about: developing taste rather than demeaning it. And what better way to set about
this than an international exchange of experiences, knowledge, projects?

•  Slow Food guarantees a better future.

•  Slow Food is an idea that needs plenty of qualified supporters who can help turn this (slow) motion into an
international movement, with the little snail as its symbol.
 Slowness (French: La Lenteur),
1993, a philosophical tragi-comedy novel
by Milan Kundera.

  Kundera connect slowness to remembering, and

speed to forgetting. When one wants to savor,
remember, or prolong a moment, one moves
and acts slowly. On the other hand, one travels
fast in order to forget a past experience.
 From Kundera’s Slowness

  “The man hunched over his motorcycle can

focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is
caught in a fragment of time cut off from both
the past and the future; he is wrenched from the
continuity of time . . . in other words, he is in a
state of ecstasy; in that state he is unaware of his
age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he
has no fear, because the source of fear is in the
future, and a person freed of the future has
nothing to fear.”

  “Why has the pleasure of slowness

disappeared?”
technology has given us

speed as the form of ecstasy

Delmonico construction kitchen
 Slow architecture refers to the process of building
structures gradually, taking not only function but
other factors into account. The resulting buildings
are not just aimed at economic efficiency but
value cultural and historical characteristics as
well. The architects and designers use unique and
natural materials if possible to minimize an
artificial feeling and to be assimilated by the local
culture

http://www.archinect.com/news/article.php?
id=P2852_0_24_0_C

Slow Architecture
The slow drawing of architecture

  Without drafting sapience, there is not architecture and drafting

sapience originates within architects’ compelling material imagination.

  Sapience stems from thoughtfully sensible considerations on how

matter transforms itself into material and this is the foundation of
thinking in architecture.

  Sapience comes from sapere (a savoir which is at the same time a

savoring) and operates in the same manner by which the sense of taste
discerns different tastes or flavors. During the drafting of a building and
its constructive details, a fine architect discerns and savors architectural
things and their causes.

  Unfortunately, Sapere and sapore are not anymore cognates in

imaginative thinking.
Virgil of Toulouse, grammarian of the VI Century, has beautifully shown
the connection between sapere e sapore
 Cosmopoiesis

Food is an ideal poetic “icon” that

allows architects and designers to
uncover hidden levels of meaning in
human and technological
relationships and arrive at new
understandings of the architectural
experience.
 The relation between cuisine and
architecture is not merely physiognomic,
but there is a deeper homology
 The gastronomical analogy

"Cooking, like architecture,

manifests itself in building. The
cook, like the architect, draws
on an infinite array of creative
resources, which make it
possible to create wonders from
basic construction materials.
But even using the finest marble
or the best caviar, success is not
guaranteed. Architecture, like
cooking, evolves and lasts in the
form of memories, tastes, and
temperatures."
  Ferran Adrià, Head chef,
El Bulli Restaurant,
Barcelona

Designs by Marie Antoine (Antonin) Carême

 MARIE ANTOINE CARÊME (1784 - 1833)
“architecture the most noble of the arts and pastry the highest form of architecture”

Architectural
models as
cakes
Real Cake Architecture
 Food, food preparation, and the desire that drives the
conceiving and the making of cuisine creations have been
thought to be too corporeal for being of pure theoretical
importance, only cultural and anthropological studies have
focused on food, but only as material record of a culture not as
source of epistemological understanding.
 Sapience, the ability to think about
apperception, sensations, feelings
and inspirations. Sapience, a sapid
word, is related to the Latin verb
sapere, meaning to taste or to know.
In Italian has generated a small change in spelling
 Architecture and cuisine are cosmopoietic feats
able to fashion signifying universes out of the
sensual material of the world. The world of
senses begins in the periphery of our bodies and
moves to inner and higher levels of perception.
From there, in analogical manner, the senses rule
the way we willfully and wittily act in our world
is at the basis for a sated human sapience.
A Graphic Clue of Gastronomical Analogies in Architecture
Carpaccio Scarpa &
Cipriani
 VI aphorism
One can become a cook, but one is born a rotissier

Brillat de Savarin
 EDIFICE

  cultural acknowledgement of the relationship

between eating and building dates back to medieval
times, when Isidor of Seville, in one of his resourceful
etymological plays, locates the origin of the house in
the making of the dining room.

  “The ancients used the word aedes for any edifice.

Some think that this word was derived from
‘eating,’ (edendo) citing as example Plautus: ‘If I had
invited you home (in aedum) for lunch.’ Accordingly,
‘edifice’ (aedificium) because originally was made
for eating (ad edendum factum).
  ISIDORI HISPALENSIS EPISCOPI ETYMOLOGIARUM SIVE ORIGINUM LIBER
XV, III. DE HABITACVLIS, http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/isidore/15.shtml.
 Tastefully and wisefully conceiving of architectural and
culinary products is based on the
merging of knowledge and sapience.

Individuals assimilate buildings and dishes and these

assimilations are acts of proper cognitive musing, a
procedure of incorporation by which we ingest
sinestheticly the outside world into ourselves and
transform it by
cosmospoiesis, i.e., an undertaking of world-making
which always starts from worlds already on hand
since
the making of a novel dish, a new building, or a new town
is always a remaking of a remaking.
PETER COLLINS
 four analogies for
understanding architecture:
mechanical,
biological,
linguistic,
and
gastronomic
 “The process by which a hut to shelter an image is refined into a
temple, or a meeting house into a cathedral, is the same as that
which refines a boiled neck of mutton into côtelettes à l’impériale or
a grilled fowl into poulet à la marengo. So essentially is this the case
that if you wish to acquire a knowledge of the true principle of
design in architecture, you will do better to study the works of Soyer
or Mrs. Glasse than any or all of the writers on architecture, from
!
Vitruvius to Pugin.” James Fergusson
  Fergusson does not compare the alpha and omega
of architectural theory of his time, Marcus Vitruvius
Pollio, author of the only surviving Roman treatise on
architecture, and Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin,
an English architect, who contrasts medieval and
neoclassical architecture to achieve modernity, with
possible corresponding characters in the history of
food preparation, such as Marcus Gavius Aspicius,
author of a Roman treatise on cuisine art, and Marie-
Antoine Carême a sustainer of a modern approach in
cuisine. Fergusson prefers to contrast the two selected
architects with Alexis Benoît Soyer (1810-1858), a
flamboyant French chef who became a renowned
cook in Victorian London, and Hannah Glasse
(1708-1770), the mother of the modern dinner party
and the most successful cookery writer of the 18th
century.
Alexis Benoît Soyer (1810-1858),
 Hannah Glasse (1708-1770)

  The Art of
Cookery
 Week urbanism

  The dominant western way of life aspires to

supremacy and ascendancy. This pursuit
characterizes modern western cooking as well,
where gastronomy seeks a powerful image and
impact. Introducing an approach of
philosophizing that does not totalize the
multitude of human discourses into a single
scheme, the Italian and ironic philosopher Gianni
Vattimo elaborated the concepts of “weak
ontology” and “weak thought.”
 Regional Architecture

  If Kenneth Frampton, a theoretician and historian

of architecture, Ware Professor of Architecture at
Columbia University, New York, is correct, in
advocating “critical regionalism” in architecture,
a supreme circumstance for architects to
develop such intelligence is to understand fully
the relationship between regional foods and
regional buildings
 produit du terroir

  A gastronomic analogy further elucidates this

point. In France, regional products are called
"produit du terroir," it is a reference to a product
presently made or sold in that particular locale,
with geographic specificity given to culture and
cultivations. Terroir defines a “maternal region”
that is a stable entity, founded on an authentic
horizon defined by an enduring trade with
tradition in opposition to the imaginary
transformations and cycles of market economy
modes. Terroir, based on edenic humus, is an
ethos, the genius loci.
 Bel Paese

  In a metonymical mirroring, the locution “Bel Paese,” means

Italy or a beautiful village, but is also the brand name of a
cheese a typical product of a Northern Italian terroir.

  The concept of “paese” is a renaissance invention for dealing

with a landscape enclosed within a clearly defined
environmental horizon of material and maternal culture. The
array of definitions of the genetic dominion of a paese ranges
from stones to cheeses, from time-honored liturgies of social
events to habits of private rituals. This cultural and physical
amalgam is based on a phenomenology of place, where the
horizon is defined not geometrically but by overlapping areas of
built culture and cultivated areas
 “il Bel Canada.”

  The tradition of tagging the “Pensioni,” small lodges

located in Italian summer or winter vacation resorts,
with urban and regional culinary labels recalling the
paese of the owner or the possible patrons interest in
the materiality of a tradition.

  A parallel condition of the vacationlands of the Bel

Paese is found in Canada where the overwhelming
number of restaurants that are serving ethnic food
indicates how the immaterialities of traditions can
become sources of new traditions. This parallelism is
not merely physiognomic (kanata=paese=village) but
it is a way for discussing critically the manifold
Canadian Genius Loci.
 DOMUS CAFÉ

  . The Ottawa Chef, John Taylor recognizes:

  In Canada the diversity of our heritage brings a

variety of different products, styles and flavors to
choose from. This is young country and our
culinary landscape is just starting to take shape -
yet we have some of the most dedicated
artisans in the world, from our small independent
farmers to our great Canadian winemakers. Our
mission is to find those unique Canadian grown
or artisans produced products and create a
cuisine to be proud of
 Daily Market Frittata

  One of the “mains” of the seasonal menu at the

Domus Café includes a “Daily Market Frittata …
with roasted potato, house chutney & organic
greens.” Canadian architects are similarly
creativity responding to the same challenge by
also integrating frittatas with chutney, in other
words, Western and Asian architectural qualities.
Shim-Sutcliffe Architects, an architecture firm in
Toronto, for example, attempts to integrate local
materials with architecture and landscape, and
is achieving such feats in their constructions.
Cosmopoiesis, a non-instrumental world making

  Architects and cooks through devising

construction and cookery make something out
of unrelated ingredients. In other words, they are
capable of converting what already exists into
something that it was not before. This is a
powerful act of cosmopoiesis. Cosmopoiesis, a
non-instrumental world making, is the very
foundation on which our own humanity is built.
We live in a constructed world which is a fusion
of amalgamating gods, people, stars, places,
markets, foodstuff, and building stuff, and it is
duty of cooks and architects to turn it into a
poetically ordered whole, a cosmopoiesis.
Tell me how you eat and I will tell
you in which city you live in.
 Festina Lente
Nowadays the world is fast. Architecture is fast,
during medieval time the erection of a cathedral
took easily a couple of centuries to be completed,
nowadays a couple of years.

Acceleration, in temporal terms (speed) and in

material terms (growth) is the orthodoxy of our age
and progress has become synonymous with speed.

Indeed speed itself has evolved from noun to

adjective and, because speed (ie fastness) always
implies progress, slow seems to imply stagnation and
inertia. We live in accelerating times and
architecture no longer stands still.
In 1531, the city of Verona was raged by a terrible famine, the
result of some disastrous flooding of the river Adige and the
devastation made by the German Landsknecht during the
war between Charles V and Francis I in Lombardia.
The physician Tommaso da Vico, as "governor or restorer" of
"Bacchanal of the dumplings," since he made his initiative to
distribute free to the Veronese bread, wine, butter, flour and
cheese during the last Friday of Carnival.
The End
Gnocchi