A reference, not an illusion
A digital room can invent a horizon without cost. That makes the ordinary window more difficult, not less useful. A window should say what it looks onto: another inhabited place, a recorded environment or an external time reference. If it only changes colour, it should not pretend to witness a street.
In Slow Windows, an external reference is held while internal time proceeds at its declared eight-to-one design ratio. Residents can return to the same reference and notice their own intervening interval. The project does not present the reference as complete surveillance of an outside city.
A starting state needs an address
MindProto’s version 12 offers documented starting configurations. An initial profile can enter a room, but it does not arrive with a whole biography. We keep the room’s environmental conventions separate from an initial configuration: a persistent task setting does not justify an exit hidden behind a task.
The room after a restoration
B17’s residence gives returned fields a place without building walls around an identity claim. The journal room presents the captured journal period. The preference room marks checkpoints as versioned records, not eternal wishes. A missing memory does not become a blank plaque waiting for another person to fill it in.
The architectural question is not how much comfort we can simulate. It is what a resident can understand, change and leave. We consider a legible boundary part of the work, even when a client would prefer one uninterrupted view.