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.

From the slow food manifesto

“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.”

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

  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.

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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

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

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

Architectural models as

cakes

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

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