People have long searched for ways to reduce the time it takes to construct buildings but instead we should be trying to slow architecture down, writes Phineas Harper.

Everything is speeding up. Fast food, fast fashion, breaking news at breakneck speed, 3G, 4G, 5G. Instant messages and instant gratification.

We're a culture hooked on quickness. So much of AI's guile, for instance, is not the quality of the material it spits out, but the unbelievably short amount of time in which it is produced.

Does the pursuit of acceleration have us hurtling towards a crash?

Speed sells. In architecture, as in wider culture, pace is persuasive.

For decades, finding faster ways to build has been a widespread ambition of engineers and designers. The world's first prefabricated hospital, for example, was built for the Crimean War in 1855. Less than five months after Isambard Kingdom Brunel accepted the commission to design it at the instigation of Florence Nightingale, the hospital could accept 300 patients (2,200 a few months later).

The entire high-tech movement was founded on a similar feeling that factory-produced architecture could be bigger, better and faster than reliance on traditional, slower wet trades. Even today the UK's housing minister, Matthew Pennycook, speaks continuously about "modern methods of construction", a synonym for speedy pre-fabrication.

But like speed-freak adrenaline junkies chasing high-octane fixes, does the pursuit of acceleration have us hurtling towards a crash? Brunel figuring out it could be quicker to produce timber hospital components in Gloucestershire then ship them to Turkey for speedy erection in the thick of war is one thing, but the state of fast architecture today is something else entirely.

Take, for example, Georgetown, Texas where 100 brand new homes now make up the largest 3D-printed neighbourhood in the United States. Co-designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, the homes are printed using a cement-based aggregate mix which Austin-based robotics startup ICON insists is not only faster to build, but more sustainable than traditional American timber construction.

The claim is based on research comparing an imaginary timber house with a 3D-printed one. The authors, mostly ICON staff, conclude that the embodied carbon of its 3D-printing method is 0.5 per cent lower than timber.

The real goal of ICON's speed-based construction innovations is simply maximising shareholder profits

However, closer inspection reveals a questionable methodology. For example, the ICON team assumed both homes sit on the exact same foundations despite radically different wall designs, and modelled the timber home as if it were clad in high-carbon cement panels rather than wooden boards, giving their concrete structure an unfair advantage.

But if ICON's carbon modelling is in doubt, the speed of its construction process is not. Each of the houses in its new 3D-printed neighbourhood was erected in three weeks or less, with 4.75-ton industrial printers cutting construction costs by roughly 30 per cent.

With such striking efficiencies ICON could have used the money saved to build fantastic communal facilities, or sold the homes at hyper affordable prices. Instead though, the houses are only slightly cheaper than local averages and the surrounding streetscape is just as banal, car-dominated and starved of public generosity as any other sterile American suburb.

For all its talk of solving housing needs, like many "disruptor" tech startups, the real goal of ICON's speed-based construction innovations appears not to be creating great architecture, but simply maximising shareholder profits. No wonder the company's carbon accountancy looks undercooked – inevitably the main appeal for its multimillion-dollar investors isn't sustainability at all, but the promise of using speed to slash costs without reducing revenues.

The craze for speedy 3D-printing in construction is yielding disappointing results elsewhere too. The makers of a concrete train station shelter in Japan boasted, for example, that their building was completed in just six hours. But the design is so exceptionally clunky – bulbous, unresolved and bland – that it would have been better not to build it at all.

When architecture is shaped by the pursuit of speed, its capacity to hold character and variety seems to instantly evaporate. Like fast food and fast fashion, fast architecture is inevitably less fulfilling.

Demands for slowness are gathering momentum

Perhaps, instead of speeding up, we should be slowing down. Ironically, demands for slowness are gathering momentum.

The Copenhagen Architecture Biennale, which opened last month under the banner "Slow Down", has become the latest in a chorus of institutions calling for radical change in the pace of architectural production. "We need to slow down," biennale director Josephine Michau told Dezeen. It echoes the 2017 Oslo Architecture Triennale exploring degrowth, a strategic slowing not just of architectural production but of the entire economy.

Calls for slow architecture can no longer be written off as fringe thought experiments. Instead, they feel like the vanguard of an increasingly confident international movement.

But what would a slower approach to architecture mean in practice? And how would it be richer and more ecological than ICON's 3D-printed suburbs?

Compare that quickly made, emaciated Texan enclave to a very different project built at a very different pace. For over three decades, Austrian architecture firm Feyferlik/Fritzer has been engaged in a gradual process of forensic upgrades to one building: Mariazell Basilica, one of the most visited locations in the Catholic world (pictured).

Starting with a modest commission for some wall-mounted lamps in a side room 30 years ago, the architects have slowly enhanced the 17th-century building with a raft of characterful adjustments. Their additions are neither grand gestures nor frigid restorations, but a sophisticated hybrid of deft interventions.

The most exciting challenge facing architecture is how to wean ourselves off chasing GDP growth

Precious collections are now on display for the first time. New and surprising spaces for art have been opened. Delicious details are scattered throughout the vast church, establishing an idiosyncratic but unostentatious architectural language.

Feyferlik/Fritzer's Basilica project, which won the Architecture Prize of the Province of Styria in 2019, is a powerful precedent to study. Its richness stems from its slowness; a long-term relationship between client, architect and place, and the steady hand of a team who are in no rush.

The result is an immensely dynamic building bursting with elements that will continue to evolve and delight for years to come. It is infinitely richer than anything spurted out of the nozzle of a 3D-printer.

The case for slow architecture is clear. As I argued in 2018, and as the Copenhagen biennale argues today, slowing down is not an option; it is inevitable. Without pre-emptive action, sooner or later industrial expansion will smash into planetary limits, forcing a contraction.

In Michau's words, "It's not 'when will it slow down', it's 'how will it slow down'?" By designing a calmer, fairer economy, or accelerating headlong into a crash? For me, the most exciting challenge facing architecture – and society at-large – is how to wean ourselves off our addiction to chasing GDP growth and pursue slower, more careful approaches to economics, architecture and culture instead.

Approaches that prioritise wellbeing and ecology above speed and shareholder profits. Approaches less easily conned into believing complex problems can be met with quick fixes. Approaches that don't "move fast and break things", as so many disruptor tech companies seek to, but take time and improve.

Phineas Harper is a design and architecture critic based in London. They were previously chief executive of Open City and curator of the 2019 Olso Architecture Triennale, as well as deputy director of the Architecture Foundation and deputy editor of the Architectural Review. In 2017 they co-founded New Architecture Writers, a programme for aspiring design critics from under-represented backgrounds.

The photo is by Max Creasy for Haus der Architektur in Graz.

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