The Slowmo House offers a critique of the modern concept of time as an incremental and quantifiable flow, devoid of any qualitative and spatial sense. This concept of time is not advantageous to architecture, since by removing time from space it has transformed our spatial sensibility into one more governed by a generic and unilateral assessment of anticipated future use (program) rather than by its ability to promote and amplify the lived experience of the present moment. The Slowmo House is therefore designed to reintegrate space and time, allowing the present to become re-spatialized as the arena of heterogeneous qualities and idiosyncratic daily life. Rather than enduring stoically through time, the Slowmo House continually manipulates it.

The house slows down the flow of time in order that it can be appreciated in all of its phenomenal diversity, transforming the idiosyncratic moments of daily life—waking up, making coffee, the rustling of leaves, or even a video chat with a friend—into unique spatial, atmospheric, and ultimately architectural experiences. In order to accomplish this, the house remains in a constant state of motion.

It features a number of transformable space-making elements that continually and automatically re-define the spatial and atmospheric qualities of the house in response to changing conditions. These responsive elements are indexed not only to external stimuli such as changing weather and diurnal cycles, but also to the daily routines and habits of its occupants. Anticipating the means by which recent developments in data mining, machine learning, and ambient intelligence can be thoughtfully applied to architecture, the Slowmo House sympathetically monitors the behavior of its occupants both in real space (through physical sensors distributed throughout the house), as well as online, in order to continually produce relevant—and sometimes even unpredictable—spatial and atmospheric experiences. This shifts the basis of architecture from one of eternal and programmatically-resolved sameness to one of temporality and heterogeneity. Accordingly, the supposedly perfect alignment between anticipated use or function (program) and actual activity (real life) that has always been the basis of architectural design is set aside in favor of the possibility of imperfect conditions that give rise to different spaces and atmospheres.