Abstract
The North American city is dominated by suburban sprawl, that vast formless, center-less, fragmented urban structure that the Sierra Club calls the ‘Dark Side of the American Dream.’ These places are like fast food. On the surface they appear easy, cheap, and cheerful. However, this marketing veneer masks a world of thoughtless design, careless construction, and waste that is bad for both us and the environment. In the same way that fast food disrupts the historically rich cultural context of cooking; these fast homes replace the experientially deep potential of urban dwelling with a shallow standardized product.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2011.029
Citation
Brown, J.(2011) Slow Food Slow Homes: Expanding the role of architecture in the North American housing industry., Nordes 2011 - Making Design Matter, 29 - 31 May, School of Art & Design, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland. https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2011.029
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Exploratory papers
Included in
Slow Food Slow Homes: Expanding the role of architecture in the North American housing industry
The North American city is dominated by suburban sprawl, that vast formless, center-less, fragmented urban structure that the Sierra Club calls the ‘Dark Side of the American Dream.’ These places are like fast food. On the surface they appear easy, cheap, and cheerful. However, this marketing veneer masks a world of thoughtless design, careless construction, and waste that is bad for both us and the environment. In the same way that fast food disrupts the historically rich cultural context of cooking; these fast homes replace the experientially deep potential of urban dwelling with a shallow standardized product.