A whole new (old) way of looking at homes.
The Slow Home Movement
the legendary story of the founding of the Slow Food Movement, Carlo Petrini planted his feet at the Spanish Steps in Rome and declared that he would not stand for the introduction of McDonald's into the historic area. Fast food would not squelch the rich traditions of Italian culture. And indeed it did not. Petrini not only succeeded in elevating resistance against that McDonalds, but against fast food the world over, by providing appetizing alternatives through the Slow Food Movement.
In the years since, slow has become something of a meme in its own right, applied to numerous other fields and issues as an understood strategy of peaceful but active resistance to harmful trends and changes. Whether it's in food, medicine, or urban planning, slowing down is a decidedly noble form of 21st century activism.
The newest slow kid on the block is the Slow Home Movement, a web-based design community and resource library dedicated to taking residential architecture back from the grip of the "cookie cutter houses and instant neighborhoods" churned out by community-blind development corporations, to revive the presence of good design and empower individuals to create homes that will support and fulfill them for a long time. It's a sustainable approach in that -- like with all products -- a commodity that is longlasting both in terms of material quality and evolving personal taste can prevent waste and produce trusting relationships between people and their environment.
In introducing the new community, founder/editor John Brown, an architect, real estate broker and Professor of Architecture at the University of Calgary, says:
I know that there are pockets of resistance to this industrialized ready made approach to housing. There are architects, landscape architects and designers around the world who are creating beautiful projects that sensitively respond to their location, respect their materiality and seamlessly support the daily life of their inhabitants. There are also product designers, craftspeople and manufacturers who care about the things they make and create functional objects of beauty and grace. Most importantly, there are many people who aren’t design professionals who have rejected the system and discovered new ways to create their own great places to live. Unfortunately, these projects, products and people usually exist in isolation and fail to register as viable alternatives to the conventional residential production industry.
Fast food and fast housing are shaped by one of modernism’s core philosophies - the promise to make life better by making it easier. This powerful promise continues to capture the imagination of the majority of people, despite the mounting evidence of just how much harm it has wrought...Most of the development created by the fast housing industry has resulted in environmentally unsustainable, culturally homogenous neighborhoods of single family detached houses and strip retail malls.
Naturally, Brown makes the increasingly known correlation between suburban living and obesity, indicating that fast food and fast housing not only have comparable results within their respective industries, but literally the same result: a declining state of health across a huge swathe of the North American population.
But the site isn't a platform for raging against the machine; far from it. It's a positive, constructive and informative collection of resources meant to cohere disparate allies and establish a network for those wishing to see a change in the way we build and live in our homes. Registration is free (but required in order to access some areas of the site), and Brown maintains a blog with a videocast/webTV series that includes a number of interesting interviews. You can also view profiles of the projects, products and people currently involved.
Brown boils the movement down to 10 principles, which lay out the approach and set a staging ground for the first steps toward action. With the involvement of the community and the growth of the network, though, it's inevitable that the movement will be shaped and defined further over time, and Brown's first call for slow homes might be canonized like Patrini's -- a nucleus in the center of a massive network of engaged advocates.
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