PETER ZUMTHOR
Interview by Francesco Garutti. Klat #05, spring 2011.
Here I am back in Haldenstein after a gap of almost two years. The studio is bursting with maquettes and models. There hardly seems to be any space left to walk and find your way among the things; a few empty spaces on the walls in which to put up drawings, sheets of paper and pictures. There is no letup in the work in Peter Zumthor’s house and studio. Outside the Swiss Alps are cloaked in silence, while the Rhine flows under the bridge that connects the village to the small city of Chur. Zumthor, who was born in Basel, decided to come here to live and work many years ago. Since then dozens of collaborators have been working at his side forming a team of designers. Young architects from all over the world come to him to take part in his work, to learn how to do just one thing: architecture. Perhaps there’s no need to add anything else. “Very high quality and precision, obtained through endurance and perseverance,” is how he puts it. Peter Zumthor checks every detail, adjusts proportions with extreme care, takes the project the closest as possible to reality: to test it, to imagine the space as a place that one day will be lived in, a place that will soon be crossed by air and light. In this brief conversation recorded in his studio, we talk about his work and his youth. Peter hangs up the phone after a long call to the United States. I don’t know when I’ll be coming back here to talk to him or interview him again.
I’d like to start by asking you to tell me about this place, Haldenstein, where we are now and where you live and work. At the beginning I lived in that old red building (he points out of the large window that faces onto the patio of the house, ed). My son lives there now. It was in 1971 that we bought a house here, with the engineer Jürg Buchli. Fully in keeping with the ideals of sixty-eight, we renovated that building ourselves. Many years have gone by and I’ve constructed two more buildings here to live and work in. All in a very natural way, without planning.
The first wooden studio-house was built in 1985. The idea of that building was to have a room on the upper floor for designing and working and to keep the room underneath, at the level of the garden, for the family, but in fact I’ve never used it like that, as a gartensaal, I mean. In the red house we had no space for a garden and I thought of designing the architecture in that way. Then seven or eight years ago my studio had grown and I
had the chance to buy the piece of land nearby. I waited for the bank to let me have the funds, and when they came this other building was born. With the passing of time I started to feel at home here. Perhaps not so much in the first ten years, but afterward yes. Now I think that this place has a really great quality. Because in this small and pleasant corner among the Alps, all the houses belong to us or to friends. And this gives us the possibility of maintaining the quality of the place. It’s a little bit of paradise here. But perhaps the crucial thing to be said about this place is that living and working coincide here, there’s no difference. The image in a way is that of the farmer with a large working family, children, grandchildren and so on. This has always been the way I work.
Here there is a strange sense of the passing of time. Everyone who spends even just a day at your studio notices it. The atmosphere here seems suspended, but very dense. And this kind of relationship with time is at bottom part of your practice. I believe I am capable of creating an atmosphere. Yes, the time here is dense, characterized by concentration and intensity in the work. At the moment there’s a very fine group of twenty, twentyfive people who are working with me and it’s fantastic. It’s not a family, but a genuine community for doing something with passion. And it’s as if by being together we grow stronger, as if everyone sprouted wings. Thomas Durisch who was one of my collaborators twenty years ago, once told me that for every architect in the studio doing things with me in a way gave strength to everyone. It was as if each of them thought while working together in the studio: “Yes, I could certainly do this too, indeed I could do it better.” Then when they went home some of them tried to do it by themselves, but realized that something didn’t work. It wasn’t the same thing. He said there’s a specific kind of atmosphere here, he called it fluidum. It’s like I’m curating thisfluidum and the people somehow work in it. And now this atmosphere is very strong. It’s also nice that Annalisa (Zumthor’s wife, ed) is now working here. We are investing a little bit more in organizing things like table tennis and parties, between the studio and the house. People like to stay here and so do we. And this is very good for working. But you know, I want to say there’s a kind of mutual respect. It’s not about becoming friends, it’s about being good colleagues and working together. I had the chance in the office to see you and your wife reviewing the projects together. It was interesting to see how you perfectly understood each other and how important it was for you to have feedback from a person close to you, but not an architect. Now that Annalisa is here, I often go around in the office reviewing the projects with her. It’s very important to look at things with people who are not trained as architects, but who have good intuition and feeling. I mean Annalisa has been living with an architect for thirty five years, so she can read and judge a project. This is very important. As we know, in the end architecture is for normal people, not for specialists. Sometimes you become blind during the process. Days ago we were talking about the project of this house I’m designing for Tobey Maguire in Los Angeles. We were discussing the construction of a floor. I was totally convinced that the floor was not to be done in wood, because everything else was already wood. I thought of something mineral, a kind of stone, but she said “wood.” We put wood in the model and it worked incredibly. That was the most interesting proposition for the project, just to conceive that everything would be done in wood. Sometimes a view from the outside can sort a problem out.
Yes, I understand what you mean. Going back to the issue of time for a moment, in your house-studio you keep all the models, even those in one to one scale, of structural details, samples and materials. You said you like to live amongst them. How do you reconcile the idea of time you have with the idea of time your client might have? Now this is not so difficult any more. It used to be difficult. Now clients like to get involved in a design process that can take years. People seem to understand... now that they know what I do. They understand that the time is needed. But you have to explain to them that this is not just technical work: arriving at good architectural concepts is artistic work in the end. If you have to write a symphony or a string quartet or... it’s like writing a book. It takes the time it needs, and that’s it. The architecture I do is not something you can order at the store. For me architecture is an authorial work. It’s not just rendering a service, it’s developing an idea with the client and becoming more intelligent together as the design process goes on.
You very often use samples on a one to one scale to check details, space and proportions. It’s something not so common in architectural practices in the world, because it takes a lot of time. Le Corbusier worked in this way. People told me his studio in Paris was full of one to one things, handles, doors and so on. It’s the same kind of curiosity and passion for things to be just right in scale, material and proportions to the touch.
You sometimes speak about memories and records as a part of the process of your inspiration. Can you tell me something more about it? This is not a big mystery. We are all part of life and we absorb life. If we never had consciousness of what we experience and what we see, what we feel, we would not be human beings. This is the basic thing that we have. We have an experience. From there I decide. I don’t take a decision through abstract concepts. If there’s an abstract concept, I try to translate it immediately in my mind into a physical form so that I can somehow feel it with my body, soul and emotions somehow. The architecture I’m looking for doesn’t stay on paper as a concept. Therefore in my mind I always imagine my projects being part of the physical world.
You know, I thought immediately of you when I read The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk. The Turkish novelist collected thousand of objects and records in a room in Istanbul before starting to work on a novel set in the seventies, the time of his youth. He used all these objects as tools to write a story. He needed the real objects as an inspiration for him to start writing. Now if you go to Istanbul you can visit that room. I like it. I’ll do a lecture now in Helsinki and afterward at the Swiss National Museum in Zurich with the title: Love at First Sight, and the subtitle will be About Spaces and Things. I’ll talk about specific objects and the space created for them. For instance my private collection of things that I keep on my shelves. Let’s say half the people have this passion for objects. Nice. Of course you can develop a passion for things and also for places. I have the feeling that this place here is full of passion. People may think this is a remote place, but actually it’s the center of my work. And geographically speaking I can reach the airport at Zurich in no time.
Working here I’ve never felt I was in a remote place. The architectural experience is unique of course, but it’s not just that. As you said it’s a mix of things: the place, but mostly the community of people. This makes the experience here stronger. It makes this place a sort of “right” place. And there’s another point.
It was here that I met Richard Serra, the kind of person you maybe meet once in your life. Or Maurizio Cattelan. And the director Wim Wenders was here. This place, now that you’re here, has a catalyzing power. It can make us think about the notion of “center” in our contemporary society, or the new idea of geography you were referring to before. What is your relationship with other world-famous architects? Respect from a distance. The opinion of architects who don’t belong to the team working here would somehow disturb the work. Their opinion would bring a wrong kind of energy. The construction of a specific concept and emotion for a project developed here together over hundreds, maybe thousands of hours cannot be shared easily. Even good or intelligent critics would seem like an intrusion. Here you’re not disturbed by anything and are completely into the work, only focused on that. Yes, all the time. And if there’s something that can disturb this I have to eliminate it. You know I can be pretty hard and say: “Ok that’s it, out please.” Because I need fire here and it has to be my fire.
In this connection, can I ask you something about the relations you have with the media? What do you think of the image of your work presented to the world? It’s difficult. I’m still reluctant, but I’m trying to put it in a more polite form compared to twenty years ago. I could say that I’m more polite now! But it’s more like I’m trying to protect my work here. I’m happy that people can appreciate my work, that people can see it and so on. I’m trying to show and explain my practice and myself to the outside world, and make myself understood. For this reason I have started to go out again, giving a lecture every once in a while. I go to the ETH in Zurich every three years or so to give a lecture and to talk so that the students can see how I work, my interests and passions, and my joy. This is all I want to convey to the outside. In the last years we have started working on making a homepage for this office on the web. Probably it’s going to be a one-page website, with no images, and with only a text explaining the office philosophy: what we do and what we don’t want to do. Information about shows and books and publications, of course. It’s the same thing again: I don’t want to be snobbish by not having a page. We’ll do something simple, not advertising ourselves.
Talking about distributing and disseminating thoughts about architecture, you’ve been a teacher. What kind of suggestion would you give to a student, to a young architect? If you start to become an architect you should somehow start to build up your personality. You
should ask yourself questions like: Who am I? What do I have inside me? What do I like? Why do I like this? When teaching you should encourage people to come up with this attitude. You really have to be careful not to suffocate them with many big theories. I think it could be very dangerous to start your education in architecture in an abstract way. You have to create a good atmosphere so that people can express themselves. Not impress anybody. And there are other important things to learn which really could be taught and in my opinion are not taught enough. This is a discipline too. It’s a mestiere, the craft of making. You should take it seriously. Light is light, shadow is shadow and there’s construction. Architects should learn everything about construction!
How did you learn things? It’s a good question. One could say I’m an autodidact, but I think I’m the opposite! I grew up in a family where everything was made by hand. “The craft of making” again. So in my house this was a sort of tradition. We were doing everything by ourselves. I learned in a really technical way, my father was a cabinetmaker. I had to work in my father’s shop, I didn’t want to do that, but he forced me to do it so that I could walk in his footsteps. That was a very powerful experience. I had to stay there eight hours a day, sometimes doing very repetitive and boring work. In this way I learnt how to aim at quality and precision in my work with endurance and persistence. Then I went to the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel, the Academy of Applied Arts, and there the school was organized on the lines of the Bauhaus: a one-year course, Vorkurs, of preparation teaching the basics of design, and the Fachklasse, teaching knowledge of a specific field. In my case this was furniture and interior design. I didn’t know it at the time, but looking back I saw that everything I learned there I learned in the first year, during the basic course. Not during the Fachklasse. In the Vorkurs I learnt about the principles of composition with lines, areas and volumes, the principles of writing and typography, the techniques for recognizing and mixing colors. Then drawing objects, animals, plants, human beings by hand, and this practice was mainly about looking precisely. All drawing is about looking... You start to draw cubes there for instance. Yes, drawing cubes. If I remember well it was twelve hours a week of drawing cubes. For the first half year, only drawing cubes.
Really? Yes. You have the cube on the stand in front of you, you have to draw it and then the teacher sits down and places his eyes where your eyes were and looks at your work, maybe saying: “Are you looking at this cube from a helicopter or what? I don’t see this cube like this. Start again.” Then the
same thing with writing. We had to learn handwriting, with a big pen, Carolingian script. My teacher studied it at the Bauhaus itself. Here everything was about negative and positive space. Everything done by hand. The first day of the Vorkurs I remember the professor came in saying: “Hey guys, this school is called Kunstgewerbeschule, but what you are doing from now for a year has nothing to do with Kunst (art, ed). Just so that you know.” And he was right in a way, it was mestiere. These were my two basic trainings, and then in 1967 came a sort of ethnological education in art history for me: ten years at the Department for the Preservation of Monuments in the Canton of Graubünden. Looking at farmhouses, looking at settlements. I wrote a couple of books on this topic. I was doing inventories, studying the structures of historical settlements and checking historical art forms inside buildings: for instance the decoration on the façade of farmhouses, like graffiti in the Engadine. It was a way to learn art history from the bottom up. I was studying vernacular architecture. It was a fantastic and formative experience. Before that I had also studied at the Pratt Institute in New York, and there I really learned nothing. I went to the industrial design class and the teacher looked at the material I had done before and told me: “I cannot teach you anything, none of my students can do what you have already done.” But one good thing was that I met there Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, László’s wife. She was teaching the History of Architecture at the Pratt and I wrote two papers for her course. She was an eyewitness to European architecture, I remember she often talked about all these people like Mies van der Rohe, who had been her friend.
How do you view your early projects now, looking back? How has the way you design changed over the years? The method has become much better. I teach the people working with me, and I think that now it’s functioning very well. We do things and then we talk about them. We do and we talk all the time. The process is very model-related, its core is image-related and I’m the director of it all. As you know, I gather everybody in the office in front of the project and I make up the questions. I put the questions in the right order and I wait for a reaction. When somebody wants to explain his answer I always say: “Please, no. Just say if you like this solution or that solution.” If you start to rationalize you cover up the immediate reaction, your immediate feeling. It’s more like keeping this fluidum of immediate reaction to things. I really don’t want to kill off this first reaction by talking about it too early. And most of all I think that every emotional reaction is true for the person feeling it. It cannot be argued by another person.. I think this procedure is pretty perfect for me. The most difficult thing for me is that I’m impatient. My wife is helping me to be patient with my architects, I think I’m getting a bit better now. In the last few years I’ve been trying to improve my understanding of individual people, of what a person is able to do and what not. Before I was probably a bit too schematic in thinking that everybody should be able to do everything, which is completely stupid.
Somehow a while ago I was taking myself as a measure, a reference for my collaborators, expecting them to become like me. Referring to your questions about my old projects now, I can say that two days ago there was a concert in the Protective Housing for Roman Archaeological Excavations in Chur, a project I completed in 1986, and there I could see that certain details of the architecture were disturbing me. Small things, but I was really smiling when I looked at them. “These elements are too small,” I thought, or “these others should not be flush, they should stick out.” So in a way I could see that I have developed. Thirty years of always looking, checking, looking and looking again at details and proportions. Maybe I’ve become a little better than thirty years ago. I remember one day we were talking in the office about a sample of zinc for a roof of the Almannajuvet Mine Museum project, in Norway. We were discussing the material and the roof structure, and suddenly you said something like: “It’s perfect for the floor!.” We looked each other in the office, surprised and not understanding what kind of floor you were referring to. You realized that instead of the poured lead, zinc would have been a perfect material for the floor of the Bruder Klaus Chapel, a project completed a couple of years before. I’d forgotten this!
In a way it’s interesting to think of the possibility of making amendments to designs during the life of a building. Can I ask you now to talk a bit about some of your current projects? I’m referring for instance to the Memorial to the Witches Burned in the Finnmark, at Vardø in Norway. It’s a project you carried out with the artist Louise Bourgeois during the last period of her life. How was it working together? We were invited to do a memorial building, she as an artist and me as an architect. I asked her to start, but she wanted me to start. So I designed my building, my interpretation of the task, and she took my design and reacted to it with her installation. So the memorial now consists of two buildings, a glass pavilion with a fire burning in it reflected by huge mirrors and my corridor building almost a hundred and twenty meters long. It’s a textile space with windows and bulbs lighting a biographical text on each of the ninety-one victims. The long textile space hangs in a wooden scaffolding. It’s a dark narrow passage. Two ramps as accesses on each side. Both buildings, the corridor and the pavilion, are situated exactly on the spots on the seashore where the women were burnt.
Can you tell me about some of your projects that you couldn’t build? Projects are never in vain. Sometimes ideas never built come up again. It happens many times. I worked for three or four years to make something for a project called Poetic Landscape in the North of Germany. But it didn’t work and only later did I find out that the Bruder Klaus Chapel was the product of all the work I had done on the Poetic Landscape. Thomas Durisch is preparing a new monograph on my work and I’m sure it will be possible to see how ideas and projects that may have never been built or published reappear in other proposals.
It will be possible to find analogies between projects really distant in time. Looking back at the whole opus of an artist or an architect it’s nice to have the chance to see how all the ideas and themes explored can go together and can be summed up in a few strong and crucial concepts. But maybe it’s something that happens only with great artists and architects. In my experience some things and concepts are basic. They always reoccur.
AJ exclusive: James Pallister spoke with Swiss starchitect Peter Zumthor on the eve of his RIBA Gold Medal lecture This week Peter Zumthor was awarded the RIBA’s highest honour – the Royal Gold Medal, adding to the 69-year-old’s haul of plaudits, which includes the Pritzker Prize, The Praemium Imperiale and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture.
Many details that make your work so rich seem to come from very close observation of daily life. Do you think architects’ work would be better if they learnt to relax and play a little more? I know exactly what you mean but it gives the wrong impression of how I work. I try to create emotional spaces that feel right for the purpose and the place. So I try to go into the use of the building very deeply and see what could be beautiful and comfortable. Sometimes it’s hard to get there. If I can tell something is missing, or I’m not quite there yet, I must be honest with myself. I must tell the client: ‘Please be patient for another month or two, or a year. You will have the rewards for that if you are patient now’. This is not easy sometimes. In judging what I am doing I have to be playful and serene and open and emotional because that – as we know – is how architecture is perceived, and not in abstract. I want to please people with my buildings unconsciously, emotionally. That’s all. I don’t want to lecture them. But it’s hard labour to get there.
Developing the sensibility for minutiae your work shows – how thin a rail should be, how it should feel – seems to be at odds with spending all hours working in a practice, as many architects must in the UK. Is it? I customised my practice in the way I wanted to work. I think everybody can do that. You can always say ‘this is how I want to live, this is how I want to work’ and go from there. You’ve alluded to a ‘slow architecture’. That goes against a lot of the demands of contemporar y life and business: of doing more for less. How do you convince clients that it’s wor th taking the extra time to develop something good? By quality. One client once said, at a time when things were difficult: ‘ Your best argument is the finished building.’ So I have to persevere to get there. Now I have more finished buildings it becomes easier for clients to trust. It was much more of a challenge for my clients to trust me 20 years ago. If you were to talk to my clients, they would say: ‘We could see he was always sincere.’ They could see I was trying to do the best.
Even if you annoyed them? Exactly! In the UK there is a caricature of architects that they are all egomaniacs, waste money and have no idea of what ‘real people’ like. Do you recognise this or do you think it’s an irrelevance? For our society it’s very relevant. I think that’s what this prize is about. There are still some people left who believe in architecture not as a money-making machine but in architecture as an art. And yes, there are certain architects who are making fancy forms, but – big deal, so what! But architects who don’t know what people want, that’s a serious problem. It would hurt me if someone said ‘you did a thermal bath or an art museum which looks beautiful but cannot be used’. So architectural education should try to always focus on the ‘use’ – in the broadest sense of the word. Not function, use. I always think that there is something very noble to this. It is a noble thing to think how a building is used, because it has to do with how people’s lives are staged and how they are loved. Do you revisit buildings to see how they work? I don’t have to do this. I get this right away. I get the reactions straight away. In the UK we have a housing shor tage: Do you have any advice for architects doing housing projects? I would like to do housing but I have never had a chance. I am trying to convince some people in Switzerland – a major insurance company – [I should] work for them. I told them if they had the opportunity I would be really interested in doing something for them – not high end. For normal people. Affordable housing. I will also do something in Holland, in Leiden. Do people enjoy working for you? When people work with me they are normally happy. I asked this young girl from Holland how she liked working as an intern in the practice and she said ‘It’s great! Now I believe in architecture again. I can see it still exists.’ In contrast to architecture school? I have had the experience before that, when people go and study architecture at architecture school and they learn all these theories and the assistants are more clever than the professor and there’s all these talking heads, there is a gap between that and the real thing, which is the building. If architecture education does not focus on constructing, it becomes irrelevant for the building industry. What would your advice be to a young architect star ting now? Select your school carefully. Select your professors carefully. Try and go to a place where architecture is taught as a whole thing – not only as a theory, but also as a way of living. Don’t let any kind of gap come up between your architectural concept and living architecture. What do you mean by ‘a gap’? In architecture schools there is too much emphasis on the abstract: on the correct theory, idea or concept. Sometimes that stays very abstract and has nothing to do with real life. I remember when I taught a semester in Harvard we assigned the students a house
without a form. They could select a place they knew well and the research task was to represent a house with everything but drawings. This worked wonderfully. Renzo Piano, who was teaching nearby, by chance walked in and said ‘Oh! You are working on beauty’. In a sense he was right. We were working on emotional spaces connected to the biography of each of these 12 students. I told them: ‘Don’t give me any abstract “because of this and because of that”. As soon as you start to talk about your feelings you are competent.’ And that’s a beautiful competence!
“Presence in Architecture – Seven Personal Observations”
1: Spring 1951 “[It] was a beautiful day. There was no school. It must have been early spring – I could smell it [...] I remember myself running as a boy, and I had this lightness and elegance which I don’t have anymore.” Zumthor, born the son of a cabinet-maker in 1943, began by recounting a seminal experience from his childhood: “I didn’t know it then, but as an old man now, looking back, I realize this was my first experience of presence.” As he defines it: “Presence is like a gap in the flow of history, where all of [a] sudden it is not past and not future.” How can presence be translated or achieved in architecture? This question is a key motive in Zumthor’s atelier in the Swiss region of Graubünden. Founded in 1979, his home-based studio is located in the valley of the Rhein, where many of his seminal works – ranging from small-scale projects, such as home renovations and village chapels, to large-scale, monumental museums – have been built. Zumthor purposefully maintains his Atelier in this humble, remote location in order to ensure his experience of “presence”: “Every once in a while, I get this feeling of presence. Sometimes in me, but definitely in the mountains. If I look at these rocks, those stones, I get a feeling of presence, of space, of material.”
2: Like a Tree “I look at a tree and the tree doesn’t tell me anything.” A tree, according to Zumthor, is an object worthy of his fascination and admiration, due to its lack of presumption: “The tree does not have a message; The tree does not want to sell me something. The tree won’t say to me – ‘look at me, I am so beautiful, I am more beautiful than the other trees.’ It’s just a tree – and it’s beautiful.” To him, a tree is a pure being of obsolete presence; in his simple terms: “Nothing special – incredibly powerful.”
3. Constructing presence in architecture: First attempt – Pure Construction Zumthor recalls a 1993 competition to design a museum and documentation center of the Holocaust, The Topography of Terror Museum, located in the former Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. He describes the difficulties of creating architecture in such a historically charged site: “All that had happened there came into my mind. [It was] a center for destruction [… ] I can not do anything here. [...] How can you find the form?”
Rather than making a bold, controversial statement, as many of his fellow architects would do, Zumthor instead decides to translate his inability to react to the site by withholding architectural metaphors and symbolism. He decides to design a building with “no meaning, no comment” by inventing a building of pure construction. Although Zumthor’s design was chosen as the winner of the competition, construction was halted in 1994 and the building’s bare, concrete core stood vacant for a decade. When funding was regained, political shifts called for a new architectural competition, which led to the destruction of Zumthor’s unfinished museum. Though the building was demolished, the idea for a construction-inspired memorial site was not. “Ideas are never lost. In a way, once you have found something, as an architect, you have worked on something, you can always think about it again.” The concept was revisited by Zumthor while designing the the Steilneset Memorial in Norway, a memorial for the seventeenth-century Finnmark Witchcraft trials. The Memorial, “a building with no meaning which made no comment,” was a scaffolding-inspired structure composed of prefabricated wooden frames, constructed as a binary system of “voids and sticks” that encompass a narrow interior walkway.
4. “Constructing presence in architecture: second attempt – the epitome of a kitchen Or: Make it typical, then it will become special” “‘It looks beautiful, but it’s hard to use’ – that is a typical architect.” He tells of a studio he once taught, where the mission was to be un-special: “Let’s set out to be typical,” He told his students, and added: “It proved the fact that when you make something really typical, it become special.”
5. Constructing presence in architecture: Third attempt – Form follows anything Or: The body of architecture “For me, architecture is not primarily about form, not at all.” “Form Follows Anything” was a title of a symposium Zumthor attended some twenty years ago. “I think that’s a great title […] architecture can be used to do anything. […] The form is open.”
As Zumthor presents the next slide, the audience gasps – it is an interior shot of what is perhaps his most celebrated and praised project to date, the Therme Vals.
“We actually never talk about form in the office. we talk about construction, we can talk about science, and we talk about feelings [...] From the beginning the materials are there, right next to the desk […] when we put materials together, a reaction starts [...] this is about materials, this is about creating an atmosphere, and this is about creating architecture.” In the case of the Vals, the materials used were a mixed of locally quarried stones along with Italian stones: “trust your materials.” Following the prolonged seven years design process of the Vals, he could gladly say: “I found out that stone and water have a love relationship.”
6. Constructing presence in architecture: Fourth attempt – The house without a form While teaching at Harvard, Zumthor tasked his students with designing “The house without a form,” for someone whom they share a close, emotional relationship with. They were to present the site with no plans, sections or models. The objective was to inspire a new sort of space, described by sounds, smells and verbal description: “When I look at this kind of house without a form, what interests me the most is
emotional space. If a space doesn’t get to me, then I am not interested [...] I want to create emotional spaces which get to you.”
7. Constructing presence in architecture: Fifth attempt – Kim Kashkashian plays the Sonata number 2 in E flat major for Viola and piano by Johannes Brahms “I remember when listening to this piece. [...] after a fragment of a second, I was in it. Music has this capacity to go directly to your heart, much more than architecture. To me music can change the chemistry within you.” Zumthor ends his lecture with the importance of the “wordless impression” of different encounters with music, art, architecture and people: “In a fragment of a second you can understand: Things you know, things you don’t know, things you don’t know that you don’t know, conscious, unconscious, things which in a fragrant of a second you can react to: we can all imagine why this capacity was given to us as human beings – I guess to survive. Architecture to me has the same kind of capacity. It takes longer to capture, but the essence to me is the same. I call this atmosphere. When you experience a building and it gets to you. It sticks in your memory and your feelings. I guess thats what I am trying to do.” He pauses: “There is something bigger in the world than you are.” Merin, Gili. "Peter Zumthor: Seven Personal Observations on Presence In Architecture" 03 Dec 2013.