AN ARCHITECTURE OF SLOWNESS

Contemporary society faces ever-increasing complexity from globalisation, TURBO-CAPITALISM, urbanisation AND NOW DEGLOBALISATION, etc. We find ourselves, as individuals,needing to slow down and re-engage with Nature IN AN EFFORT to redeem an element of ‘spirituality’. We need to preserve our mental health but not to do so by withdrawing from the world around us.

day, the iron rail represents a timeless agent of cultural metamorphosis. In that sense, it remains both functional in a modernist sense as well as an industrial ornament, static in visual terms but uniquely representing an accumulation of cultural change.

The cultural context is, arguably, reminiscent of the period towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. In Henry M Seiden’s book ‘Motive for Metaphor’, he refers to the works of matthew Arnold such as ‘Dover Beach’ and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘God’s Grandeur’ remarking how they mourned spiritual beauty in the face of the world’s despoilation. Even earlier, William Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey (1798) reflected on the ‘fading communion with Nature’.