Slowness, according to TWBTA

An excerpt from the essay "Slowness" on the Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects website (it's great to have time to browse random firm websites)...

In the United States, the practice of architecture has come to rely on the computer. In offices the word efficiency is always mentioned, and in design schools the capability to create and rotate complex forms in space is lauded. So, with surprising speed, the tools of the hand are becoming extinct.

* clutch pencil, lead and lead pointer
*bunny bag
*pounce
* erasing shield
* lettering template

*soon to disappear

This is a lamentation for lost tools and a quiet manifesto describing our desire for slowness. We write not in opposition to computers- in fact we are in the midst of bringing them into our studio- but rather it is a discussion about the importance of slowness. We write in support of slowness.

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.
In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
Slowness Milan Kundera

Slowness of method

Our desire to continue to use the tools of the hand, even as we may begin to use the computer, has to do with their connection to our bodies. Buildings are still constructed with hands, and it seems that the hand still knows best what the hand is capable of doing. As our hands move, we have the time to think and to observe our actions. We draw using pencil and ink, on mylar and on vellum. When we make changes, they occur with effort and a fair amount of tedious scrubbing with erasers, erasing shields, and spit. We have to sift back through previous drawings and bring them to agreement. So, decisions are made slowly, after thoughtful investigation, because they are a commitment that has consequence. It is better to be slow.

We like to keep the stack of finished and unfinished drawings nearby so that the whole project can be reviewed easily. Their physical presence is evidence of work done, and a reminder of what there is to do. The grime that builds up from being worked over is poignant and satisfying. We see the history of the presence of our hand. To have the actual drawings in reach allows us to understand the project in a more complete and comprehensive way. In the buildings we design, we struggle to achieve a unity and sense of wholeness that can come from a balance of individual gestures within a larger and more singular container. The focus of a computer screen feels too compartmentalized and tight to see and understand the whole. And if every time a change is made, a new printout is made, there is the problem that the printouts are too clean. They don’t show the scrubbed and messy sections of erasure, so there is no evidence to indicate the history of the development of an idea. Crucial to creating wholeness is the understanding of the development of the idea.

Documentation is an aspect of architecture particularly interesting to me, especially after several of the freshman seminar speakers(namely Nonya, Eva, Prof. Jimenez, Casbo...I want my fresh sem sketchbook back!) presented a lot of preliminary hand-drawn sketches in their lectures. We definitely lose something valuable (and beautiful) when we abandon trace for CAD, although you can't ignore the million advantages to designing on the computer. I don't know what things are going to look like by the time I'm working in a firm, but I fully take to heart what Danny meant when he said not to forget about the pencil.

p.s. what the heck is a bunny bag?