Slow Home: Thoughtful Residential Design as Antidote to Suburban Sprawl

As a response to current trends in real estate development – cheap, fast and homogenous – that have become hallmarks of unmitigated suburban sprawl, Canadian architect John Brown created the Slow Home movement in 2006. Borrowing its underlying philosophy from Slow Food, that of quality, appreciation and holistic practices, the initiative seeks to synthesize principles of good residential design with real world applications in a way that is accessible to a general audience.

Taking that connection a step further, Brown recently launched the Slow Home website, an effort that combines the brand of informative, how-to videos commonly offered by cooking shows with design studio expertise to help us make better choices about how and where we live. The site offers daily exercises that cover room-by-room design problems and case studies along with practical real estate advice.

And though Slow Home acknowledges the challenges presented by the slowed economy, making radical changes to our homes and lifestyles difficult for some, it encourages us educate and prepare ourselves for the near future when these solutions will become even more important.

As the website notes:

For the first time in several generations we don’t have to accept the status quo as the only alternative for where and how we live. Imagine how great our world could be if it could be different. That is both the challenge and the promise we face.

[via Neu Black]