Slow – fast
It is difficult to know how to behave in these difficult times.
On the one hand, our art demands a certain ‘slowness’; on the other, our commerce expects speed. Interruptions are now a way of life and so people expect that in a day of work they will be interrupted many times.
And so, we are expected to complete work in a very fast way in order that we can make money and which work being completed is constantly interrupted in order that we can communicate in a contemporary world.
These things are dysfunctional and can lead to very little of any merit; indeed they don’t. Abundant is the world of mediocre outcomes; of unfiltered thoughts; of half-baked and half-executed ideas.
The potential in humanity is only manifest if people slow down; take a quiet moment to contemplate what they are doing; to draw a building slowly and once; to hear the currents of society and to read.
There is little virtue in immediacy. And brevity only exists for those that do not wish to enter into the world of detail.
Our world as architects is the world of detail; the world of looking slowly at things and the world of standing back. We are the observers of universal themes and the universe itself. We must have patience in order to exist.
Our work as architects must embody in it a keen sense of observation; listening to our clients and each other; an open mind; ideas; a capacity to articulate and communicate those ideas with words, drawings and models; a desire to give the world an example and finally; all the love we have to give to the given task before us.
After all, the task is not usually of our making; and the making of our work is always of our making.