Slow architecture that tastes good - Times Online

after a year in which environmental and societal issues have been hauled up the political agenda across the world, even within architecture - supposedly the form of culture most connected to social and political topics, yet so often one ruled simply by money and ego - the AR awards, with their tendency towards good honest, well made, but still ambitious projects, seem not perverse, but stunningly prescient. China, Dubai, Moscow or Kazakhstan apart, there’s a shift among many young architects away from flash, if lucrative, bling buildings and towards, what? The uniconic? The spiritual leader of this not-quite-movement, Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, calls it slow architecture. Like slow food, this is about local produce that tastes good. It’s about that hard-to-define idea, integrity. Architecturally, it means back to basics building: providing beautiful shelter, addressing human needs with architecture which has longevity and presence, undeniably modern but also showing the mark of human hand. Its response to the bombast, fakery and crash-bang-wallop of globalisation is radical in its reactionariness.

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