"A writer’s work must take account of many rhythms: Vulcan’s and Mercury’s, a message of urgency obtained by dint of patient and meticulous adjustments and an intuition so instantaneous that, when formulated, it acquires the finality of something that could never have been otherwise. But is also the rhythm of time that passes with no other aim than to let feelings and thoughts settle down, mature, and shed all impatience or ephemeral contingency."

Italo Calvino, “Quickness,” Six Memos for the Next Millennium 

In 2020, we started a project on contemporary architecture by identifying three patterns dominating pedagogy and practice.  We come to “Quickness” as the final chapter in this extended investigation, completing a cycle that opened with “Exactitude” and its counterparts and continued with “Multiplicity,” expanding into further networks and matrices.  Our initial premise is that, in the wake of current climatic and environmental crises, architecture needs to integrate reconfiguration, adaptation, even degrowth into the realm of the built environment. Secondly, we posit that new methods of construction, as well as increasingly complex and diverse materials, each with a different impact on the environment, continue to change our field of action.  Finally, we explore how digital platforms have radically shifted our collective horizon of thinking and making.  

The third essay in Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, “Quickness,” concludes with an homage to Mercury, the god of travelers, messages, prophecies and commerce, “with his winged feet, light and airborne.” In the Western classical tradition, Hermes/Mercury embodies communication and mediation—the power to overcome time and distance through speed.  Calvino praises literary forms that combine complexity with conciseness, such as poems and short stories, activating a mental energy which allows for multiple ideas and images to coexist: rapidity encourages “agility in reasoning, economy of thought.” On the other hand, Calvino warns his readers against the dangers of quickness in the age of instant communication. Although the Memos were published in 1988, before the proliferation of digital technologies, Calvino seems inspired by Mercury’s powers of divination when he anticipates that the vertiginous speed of modern exchanges may “flatten all communication into a single, homogeneous surface” instead of sparking the imagination. Calvino then calls on another Olympian divinity, Hephaistos/Vulcan, maker of shields, jewels, and weapons, to offer a counterpoint to quickness. If Mercury represents participation in the world around us, exchanges, and communication, Vulcan’s power lies in his focus and concentration. A writer’s work, according to Calvino, should combine these two rhythms – Mercury’s swiftness and mobility intertwined with Vulcan’s patient hammering of materials into meaningful forms.   

Shifting from literature to architecture, we wish to explore the value of quickness in contemporary design theory and practice. Today’s architecture relies on technological tools that accelerate the conception, production, and completion of projects at a rate that would have been unthinkable decades ago. Agility is prized as it embodies efficiency, innovation, and collaboration. The perpetual pursuit of quickness has caused architects and thinkers alike to advocate for slowness and to make space for deliberate and alternative forms of thinking and making. In the spirit of Calvino’s essay, we ask what configurations may be imagined to combine Mercury and Vulcan’s attributes within the parameters of contemporary architecture. We look for modes of thought and action that weave together the agility and mobility essential to architectural creation with the “meticulous adjustments,” concentration, and craftsmanship needed to produce a work that is “concise, concentrated, and memorable.” We propose to study quickness and its opposites following four paths:  

Quickness in Mind: From Simultaneity to Diachronicity  

Whether ideas form in the architect’s mind, as suggested by Alberti, or emerge from digital platforms, architecture continues to unfold along two arcs of time. One, which is close to what Calvino calls “mental speed,” has to do with the formation of ideas and images in the mind and in digital space. These images and ideas appear simultaneously and quickly. Yet architecture also requires what Filarete described as a long gestation period, involving architects as well as a network of collaborators, clients, inhabitants, and communities.  This section invites reflection on the oppositions, slippages, and transformations that emerge in the life of a project and in the arc of an architect’s practice.

Quickness in Method: Abstraction versus Realization   

In architecture, every project is a constellation of ideas and constraints. Ideas pertain to the realm of imagination while constraints negotiate physical considerations and the ethical obligations of the architect and their constituents (clients, users, makers…).  If quickness is the activation of a “constructive concentration” focused on ideas and images, how do work methods create, corroborate, or even resist the gap between the abstraction and realization?  In the architectural process, a wide range of intermediary artifacts inhabit the space between abstraction and realization: drawings, ranging from preliminary sketches to presentation drawings, detail drawings, models, specifications, contracts, and sometimes litigations. How does the architect, mindful of what Calvino names “ephemeral contingencies,” activate these gaps and move the project forward? This section discusses the polarities between the desire to slow things down and the pressure to speed them up. 

 Quickness in Making: Embracing the Material and Physical World   

Architecture has historically had an implicit slowness about it. From the construction of cathedrals, which often spanned centuries, to the completion of a house, there is a certain timeframe embedded in the process of making physical and material artifacts.  Within this process, an architectural project changes, ages, becomes weathered, is re-imagined, transformed, and re-inhabited. Houses often shelter more than one family and one history. The traces of these cycles of life and afterlife, left on the body of architecture, and manifested in the materiality of buildings and places, create an imperative to think of architecture as both belonging to a time and transcending it. In this section, we are interested in exploring how the different cycles of making (some a continuation of local, historic, and embedded practices, and others fully transformed by recent technologies, materials, and processes) create a landscape of making that is always in conversation with time.

Quickness in Body: Stasis, Floating and Agility  

Borrowing Calvino’s idea of “participating in the world,” our embodied experience of architecture situates us within space and time. As we move around, architecture holds us in place. Yet, architecture also moves in small and incremental ways. What may be considered stasis from one angle, from another reveals architecture’s slow change through the different phases of a project or as buildings breathe, weather, or are altered over time. By contrasting agility with floating and stasis, we seek the formulations and experiences of architecture that put different visions of embodiment at the center of the architectural project.

With “Quickness,” we are in search of moments and cycles, fields and objects, thoughts and images, artifacts, and ideas, all coming together in a “sentence in which every word is unalterable.”  Having left “Quickness” as the final project of our tripartite scheme, this symposium is an invitation to “hurry slowly,” and to hold consequential discussions focused on the intersection of the natural and the built environments, invisible ideas and formed images, sounds, colors, and textures of spaces that surround us, our bodies, and their constant motions in the world.