It is somehow appropriate that I began writing this review on a plane. In an attempt to squeeze in a few extra productive hours between a busy conference and a hectic end of the semester, I resort to technology: not just the jet engine that propels me across the continent at the speed of over four hundred mph, but also the netbook computer and the available on-board internet, which allow me to instantly access my notes stored on a distant hard drive. It is an exhilarating experience, but it is also exhausting, as I cannot but long for the days when taking a trip guaranteed you a few quiet hours to spend reading, daydreaming, or, simply, sleeping. As trivial as it may be, this story illustrates how constant acceleration profoundly transforms the qualities of everyday life, affecting not only our material conditions but also our mental states and our deepest sense of self.

The exhibition Speed Limits pondered modernity’s fascination with speed and its flipside, the simultaneously developing “distinct forms of slowness.” Curated by Jeffrey T. Schnapp, the Pierotti Chair in Italian Literature at Stanford University, the show was a collaboration of the Wolfsonian—FIU and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal. The tone of the exhibition was set by the contents of the two partner institutions’ collections: North American and European design and art of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century from the Wolfsonian, and CCA’s architectural artifacts, including drawings, publications, films, etc. The basic theme, however, is considerably expanded in the eponymous book that accompanies the show, a handsome and well-illustrated volume edited by Schnapp, with contributions from a range of well-known scholars.

The point of departure for the project was the centenary of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s manifesto “Le Futurisme,” first published in the French daily Le Figaro on February 20, 1909. As a result, the running threads through the show and the book are the poet’s famous proclamation that “a roaring car . . . is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace,” and the equally famous incident that inspired that statement, in which the reckless young Marinetti drove his Fiat into a ditch while racing through the streets of Milan. Speed Limits, however, did not commemorate Italian Futurism. Instead, it focused on one of its central themes—speed—and explored its multifaceted legacies as they developed during the past century. As Schnapp points out, the project’s intention was “critical,” in the sense that it broadly questions the notion of speed in modern life and uncovers its various manifestations, far beyond the exhilaration caused by riding a “roaring car.” From such a perspective, the central motif of speed spawned a variety of corollaries that, in turn, become some of the project’s sub-themes, such as clock-time, efficiency, traffic and circulation, the impact on the built environment, and the physical and mental states of the modern subject.

The centerpiece of the show was, expectedly, Marinetti’s manifesto, shown in large print in the museum’s central double-height room. It was accompanied by projections of art videos contrasting the various speeds of life: from a busy Indian street to the creep of a couple of snails. The exhibition’s five sections branched off from this central display, each focusing on one of the mentioned sub-themes. The visitor first encountered “Measuring and Representing,” which juxtaposed the various instruments for measuring time and speed—from the 1930’s ”streamlined” clocks to a 1980s police “speed gun”—with pieces of speed-invoking graphic design, such as advertisements for spark-plugs and radios. An excerpt from Andy Warhol’s 1964 film Empire, the excruciating eight-hour, slow-motion footage of the Empire State Building, provided a counterpoint to the frenzied representations around. “Efficiency” explored the scientific rationalization of production, inspired by Taylorism and Fordism, in two fields outside the industrial assembly line: the modern kitchen and modern office. “Construction” focused on architecture—traditionally the slowest among the arts—and the ever-increasing speeds of production enabled by industrialization and prefabrication. Slideshows and films documented the fast construction of buildings, from the Eiffel Tower to OMA’s China Central Television in Beijing, but also a fascinating variety of methods of rapid demolition. “Circulation and Transit” compared the various representations of hectic urban life in the 1920s and 1930s with contemporaneous visions of the future. Video captures of the car-racing computer game Project Gotham Racing 4, displayed on nine iPads, provide an ironic contrast to the idyllic projections of urban life shown in Norman Bel Geddes’s 1940 film To New Horizons, which romanticized the premises of modernist urbanism centered on automobility. Finally, “Mind and Body” examined the acceleration of the “human machine” itself. It combined images of athletic record breakers and Rubik-cube-solving champions, videos of speed talkers, and an array of performance-enhancement drugs to invoke Marinetti’s notion of the “multiplied man” and the continuous expansion of human physical and mental abilities.

As broad as the exhibition was, the accompanying catalogue expands its scope of themes even further. Following in the vein of Schanpp’s previous editorial endeavor Crowds (co-edited with Matthew Tiews, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), an expansive multidisciplinary cross-section through a single general theme, the book Speed Limits is a genre-defying hybrid that relies on text as much as on images to make its point. The content is divided into three broad sections: a collection of commissioned essays titled “Speed Writings,” the “visual essay” “Rush City,” and a broad anthology on speed and slowness titled “Speed Readings.” The first section contains ten short essays by a roster of distinguished scholars in the various fields of history and cultural studies. The authors compress their obvious erudition into illuminating vignettes that span a range of fields—from architecture and painting, to economy and car racing—all variations on the theme of speed: acceleration and deceleration, frenzy and meditation, limits and breaks. Some essays offer broad, macrohistoric accounts. Anthony Vidler presents an amusing, yet erudite, take on architectural history by comparing the various concepts of historical development to drivable vehicles, each with its own destination, driving manual, speed limit, and penalty for traffic violations. Antonino Mastruzzo focuses on handwriting and points out that since the invention of cursive in the late Middle Ages the speed of handwriting remained remarkably steady for centuries, only to finally increase again with the recent proliferation of electronic writing. Edward Dimendberg’s topic is the variable speed of moving pictures and their increasing decoupling from material media. Other essays focus on specific case studies. Maria Gough discusses how visual arts aspired to represent the 1920s campaign to increase industrial productivity in the Soviet Union. Timothy Alborn summarizes the implementation of speed limits on capital and credit in Victorian Britain and the United States. Yves-Alain Bois focuses on Poussin to point out that some artworks can only be understood slowly, through meditation in subdued light. Finally, in a nod to the project’s Futurist subtext, Pierre Niox offers a highly personal account of the sublime experience of driving a race car, which is based on the years he spent as a racing champion.

The remaining two parts of the book present a selection of historic visual and textual material related to the theme of speed. Schnapp’s “Rush City”—an homage to Richar Neutra’s “Rush City Reformed”—opens views onto an imaginary modern metropolis through paintings, photographs, and graphic design. Its themes largely repeat those of the exhibition, ranging from clock time, control panels, architecture, traffic, and accidents, to hyperproductivity, the fast distribution of information, and the multiplied mind. The book’s third part, an anthology of “Speed Readings,” is a unique source that collects texts on speed written over the last two centuries in a variety of disciplines. It presents authors as diverse as Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Simmel, Marcel Proust, Marinetti, Kazimir Malevich, Le Corbusier, and Marshall McLuhan. Aside from the many celebrations of speed, frenzy, and efficiency, the selection includes several paeans to slowness and laziness, such as Folco Portinari’s 1989 “Slow Food Manifesto.” Both “Rush City” and “Speed Readings” focus heavily on the first half of the twentieth century, especially the 1920s and 1930s, the avant-garde decades that sought to outpace their time and take a “flight into the future.” This is particularly true of the visual material, as only a fraction of it ventures into the nineteenth or the second half of the twentieth century.

Since it is so broad in concept, Speed Limits is a difficult project to critique. Obvious omissions are far too many to enumerate, and, as Schnapp points out in his introduction to the book, he had no intention of providing a comprehensive overview of the theme, but rather focused on “tracing a selective pathway” through it (29). At moments, however, it remains unclear how that pathway was selected. This criticism particularly concerns the essays in the book, since the show was derived from the collections of the two organizing institutions. One has to wonder how certain themes were selected over others. For example, why focus on handwriting and ignore Gutenberg’s revolution, if it was the latter that far more profoundly affected the fast dissemination of information? Or, why focus almost exclusively on the developed West, without considering how the varying speeds of economic and cultural development cause frictions with other parts of the world? What about modern physics and its epoch-defining discovery of the speed of light as the ultimate “speed limit?” Or space travel, the ultimate in fast transportation? Or, to take a more sinister and distinctly Futurist angle, what about modern warfare and the instantaneous modes of annihilation associated with it? The list goes on.

The simple answer, of course, is that tackling all these themes would take a whole other volume. But, more importantly, it seems that a certain arbitrariness in the selection of themes serves as an economical way to pose further questions and to stimulate reflection, because every discussed topic opens a direct or roundabout way to a range of others. After all, the intent of the project was not to provide any particularly new or in-depth information, since much of the material is not only well-known but also presented as a sketch. Instead, the primary value of Speed Limits lies in its collage of a vast array of diverse information, interpretations, and insights, which explore the limits of the very notion of speed in modern civilization. There are no real experts on speed understood in such broad terms; we are all, more or less deeply, immersed in its various manifestations. It is therefore up to each individual visitor/reader, regardless of her or his expertise, to judge if the project delivers. I think it does. I visited the show with a group of sophomore students from my architectural theory class, members of a generation that, depending on the view, either handles the “speed limits” of contemporary life far more deftly than everyone else or suffers from an endemic attention deficit disorder. The visit proved to be a stimulating experience that resonated through our discussions until the end of the semester. With its great variety of perspectives and material, the book will be a similarly useful source that opens access to a broad range of themes related to modernity and speed’s impact on culture.