To us, originating from a culture where everything moves and changes so quickly, where they’ll say “change everything except your family”, where virtually every house is equipped with high-speed internet connection only to be replaced with an even faster service overnight, and where a twenty-year-old building would be regarded as a relic, things are just too slow here. Decisions here take time to be made; people walk so slow that we have to say “excuse me” all the time; paperwork will take an eternity. On a physical, urban-environmental level, the general slowness seems to manifest itself in the age-old aspect of the buildings in the city center. Of course, it must be a different kind of slowness; a more consciously orchestrated one, to keep this town as it has been for centuries. One day we saw an old building being renovated by carving out the internal material, in an attempt not to touch anything on the external surface – as if making a stuffed specimen of an animal. In fact, many buildings in Maastricht look like stuffed animals: dead but beautifully preserved.

Looking on a brighter and more positive side of slowness, we do see the sense of patience, the willingness to take the time to make things perfect, to wait for things to mature. It’s a quality that is hard to find in Korea nowadays, and here we don’t have to worry that a bridge might collapse because of the hasty construction – as it did happen in Seoul, with a disastrous result. For designers, it must be a blessing. In Seoul, deadlines come often as early as the following day – and the materials are still on their way. We like it here when they say “sorry about the tight schedule – it should be done in three months’ time”.