Slowness has been quietly unfolding since the creation in 2016 of La Granja Ibiza. The transformation of a dormant agricultural plot into a working farmstead devoted to discourse around food set the stage for a new kind of hospitality concept. We began to assemble a community of designers, farmers, writers, music scholars, artists, artisans and architects whose work engages with slowness toward a resetting of values in hospitality and beyond.
This intention has reached its apogee with Flussbad, the purpose-built Slowness campus along the Spree in Berlin. At Flussbad, drawing on the insights of the slow movement, adaptive reuse, and regenerative agriculture, we have taken a conscientious approach to every element in creating integrated aesthetic environments that enrich wellbeing and model a more sustainable future. Our acclaimed Reethaus—mixing the inheritance of both brutalism and ecclesiastical architecture, hand-thatched with ancient reed, and equipped with spatial sound technology—provides a prototype of this kind of intentional space-making and a new mecca for experimental sonic arts. With contemporary rituals conceived for every time of day and each part of the campus, we are bringing together a progressive community of creators and travelers to cultivate arts, crops and inner gardens.
Slowness also invests its imagination in a global collective, a highly curated circuit of places in which to make contact with the deeper life. Selecting projects led by people who have risked themselves to create oases of intention, we help build and nourish locally rooted places that offer a more conscious, ecologically embedded form of hospitality—not a “pit stop” away from the hectic pace of daily life but a continuous journey of reconnection, of learning to live in harmony with nature, our community and ourselves.
We draw inspiration from idealistic collectives of the past, like the 1920s experimental Catskills retreat Yama Farms or the legendary avant-garde incubator Black Mountain College, which looked to traditional cultures and crafts as they dreamed up wildly innovative new forms of habitation. To be slow is not merely to decrease the pace of life. It’s about taking the time to reconsider our actions and think more deeply and responsibly about how we live. Slowness, in the words of the Netherlands-based Slow Research Lab, signifies “an expanded terrain of individual and collective potential that brings balance to the pace at which we encounter the world.”
We yearn for an older, slower way of moving through the world. Yet we look toward the future, to new sustainable technologies and design methods, to novel ideas and audacious dreams. We want to be outdoors, and to bring the outdoors inside; to nourish ourselves on what Thoreau called “the tonic of wildness,” and to live evermore in the moment so that we can inhabit an existence that is “more elastic, more starry, more immortal.”