The hotel I stay in when I'm in Kyoto has a 14-step path between the front gate and the front door. I have walked it perhaps a hundred times. Every single time, by the time I reach the second step, I have started to slow down.
The path is not made for navigation. It is made for arriving. There are stones placed so that you have to look down to keep your footing — not many, but enough that you cannot also look at your phone. There is a fragment of moss at step seven that has been growing for forty years. At step eleven the path widens, almost imperceptibly, and the building begins to be visible through a frame of bamboo.
What we lost when we got fast
The whole point of the path is to make sure you are not the same person at the door as you were at the gate. The walking does that work for you. Architecture used to do this almost everywhere. Cathedrals had narthexes. Houses had vestibules. Bookshops had aisles where you'd find a paragraph that derailed you on the way to the book you came for.
The point of the path is to make sure you are not the same person at the door as you were at the gate.
Now most things — buildings, books, websites — assume you'd rather skip the part where you arrive. Hotels have lobbies that empty straight into elevators. Articles open with summaries. Websites optimise for time-to-interactive instead of time-to-be-affected.
It is possible to design something so efficient that it cannot, finally, matter.
A defence of vestibules
What I would like to argue for is not slowness in the abstract, which has been romanticised by every essay like this one. What I would like to argue for is the deliberate insertion of empty time. A path, a porch, a paragraph of throat-clearing. The thing that lets you put down what you were carrying so you can pick up what's actually here.
When I look at the buildings, the books, and the websites I keep returning to, they share this feature. They give you time to change your mind about what you came for.