SPEED AND TIME

“The English travel writer Bruce Chatwin wrote about a group of white explorers who were trying to force the pace of their African porters. The porters, within sight of their destination for the day, sat down and refused to move. As they explained to their frustrated employers, ‘‘we are waiting for our spirits to catch up with our bodies.’’-  John Thackara, In the Bubble: Speed

From the invention of the spinning jenny onward, the Industrial Revolution has concerned itself with speed and efficiency. We wanted to "make products efficiently to get the greatest volume of goods to the largest number of people, turning labor to mechanization…" as William McDonough aptly stated in Cradle to Cradle. Without criminalizing technology and our desire to improve our quality of life, I think it’s worth questioning the effects of efficiency on our lifestyle.

Thackara raises many important questions and ideas:

• Speed is not free.
• Chronos, absolute time, is different than Kairos, qualitative time.
• A speed society might create the precondition for psychosis
• Italians have an expression for the ‘sweetness of doing nothing’; dolce far niente. Do we have a word for that?
• We have moved into REAL TIME ENTERPRISE, a rapid pace of business that used to be determined by the speed of hand delivered mail. 
• We are ‘always on’. Does this give us time to reflect?
• Nemawashi is a Japanese term that means the creation of trust through time. It is thought to be the groundwork for understanding. If we skip this step, how do we understand one another?
• Social capital takes time to grow.
• Slowness doesn’t have to be a drag on civilization.
• In Israel schools, time is taught as a concept and a way of understanding other cultures. Do we consider time enough?

Speed and time are related to architecture, though it seems counterintuitive. Architecture is not frozen music, no matter how still it appears to be. For instance, intimate spaces all of have a sense of time. At my own house, we haven’t owned a television in years. It’s not that we don’t enjoy it, or that we judge those who have one, but the temptation to be drawn into hours of semi-conscious watching is too strong. By design, we wanted the furniture in our living room to be arranged in such a way that encourages conversation—something articulated to us by a good friend one day and we adopted. How many people arrange chairs around their wide-screen tv, with no sense of a communal circle in which to engage? By design, spaces can encourage slowness even on a small scale.

Industry poses a larger question; how can a factory support slowness? Should it? In business and industry, constant acceleration is unsustainable. Whether we consider the draining of oil wells, over-fishing, clear-cutting, or massive monoculture farming, it’s clear that there needs to be a balance and moderation in order to support the replenishment of natural resources. It’s redundant and overstated, but true. Acceleration through 'brute force' is ripe with negative consequences, but we are a system based on growth.If we slow down, we also need to remain prosperous (see above, `slowness doesn't have to be a drag on civilization').

The site of my inquiry is a peninsula that cradles Prince’s Cove, Eastport, Maine. There have been generations of fishery buildings at this site. The earliest structures (at the height of sardine and fish-based fertilizer production in the region) were large and rambling. There were a series of small outbuildings that created a kind of village, a testament to the level of activity that once took place. Eastport at one time had the largest sardine factory in the world. Clusters of sardine packing plants were scattered over the island. As time went by and the fishing industry flagged, the buildings at Prince’s Cove became fewer, and today, three uniform concrete structures are the last remnants of a golden age. As the proposals for new commercial fisheries roll in, plans to demolish the remaining structures are in full swing. What could these new forms be? How might they consider the speed of sustainability, the temporality of enterprise, and their place among the ghosts of buildings past (or to come)?