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INa dialogue In Finland in 2018, Swiss architect Peter Zumthor and Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa discussed comfort and experience spaces in the home. While Pallasma spoke of the atmosphere of the space, Zumthor’s explanation was more explicit. “I like to sit in a space with a wall behind me and I want to look at the ocean… or the mountains, but I don’t… but what I have is a garden, which is pure luxury and it makes me quiet. I’m very interested in Don’t know anything about plants but I feel protected…as I sit there there are three steps to the kitchen on my left and to my right is the stube (living room)…what an extreme important For me it was the kitchen corner bench…the stub had to be wood and it needed a fireplace. ” In these few lines, Zumthor seems to be stating the “true way” of things.
As an architect who has been designing for more than four decades, it is not the formal or visual aspects that attract him, but the feel of the floor beneath his feet, the way the walls curve and respond to touch, how light carves out darkness from darkness. Space, or how a facade conceals and reveals the inner workings of a building.
The 80-year-old Pritzker Prize winner Zumthor attended the India Design ID event in Delhi, followed by speeches in Mumbai, Chandigarh and Bengaluru last month, organized by the Swiss embassy, which is also the Part of the India 75 initiative.
One can imagine that the central theme of Zumthor’s architecture is time. In 1998, an elderly farmer couple in Germany wrote to Zumthor and asked him to draw up a plan for a church they wanted to build in the fields of the village of Mechernich-Wachendorf. Zumthor agreed because Bruder Kraus was also his mother’s favorite saint and the patron saint of Switzerland. The Bruder Kraus Field Church took nine years to finally build, using traditional farmers and unconventional techniques to become a one-of-a-kind church that can accommodate approximately three to four people at a time. A deeply meditative space that expands and contracts as one moves from the church entrance to the center, it is shaped like a shed with a teardrop-shaped oculus at the top to allow light in. The interior walls are composed of 112 tree trunks, layered with 50 cm high tamped concrete strips, each layer taking 24 working days to compact. Once completed, the dry tone was fired for three weeks, giving the undulating concrete walls a charred effect. The church’s floors were covered in lead, which was then melted by hand on site. It can be said that Zumthor succeeded in defamiliarizing everyday life through his works, whether in churches, museums, apartments or pavilions.
“now architecture Considered fashionable. It’s all about form and structure. You never see the inside because it’s all steel and concrete. The walls and floors are prefabricated and everything is made in the factory. It’s perfect for a glossy magazine, but that’s not how you measure space. It’s a damn loss that such a smooth space bears no trace of human making. It would be nice if you could look at a wall or a window and say, “Ah, he made a mistake,” and if they allow those flaws, that’s us. These skills are still alive in India and should not disappear. ” said Zumthor when we spoke under the Bodhi tree at the National Museum of Crafts and Crafts in New Delhi.
The years spent as an apprentice to his father, a carpenter, gave him a sense of centrality and proportion that would become apparent when he studied industrial design and architecture at the School of Arts and Crafts in Basel and later at the Pratt Institute in New York. This feeling has been further strengthened. In the 1970s he moved to the Swiss canton of Graubünden to work for the Ministry of Monuments Conservation, where he honed his understanding of materials and his skills in observation and making. So when he began his practice in the remote forest village of Haldenstein, Switzerland, in 1979, it was his way of getting away from the distractions of city life and dedicating himself to working on quieter architectural planes.
“Architecture has to be functional, someone needs a space to live and work. That’s where I started. The core of my profession is creating space. First I had to understand the place, see what the people want and their background, and then look See what I can do. I try to imagine what I have to design, I have a good sense of space and maybe I have some talent,” he said. His project models are known for their ability to provide insight.
Vals Spa in Switzerland is one place that proves this. The village, famous for its thermal springs, experienced a renaissance in tourism, which led the Vaal municipality to invite Zumthor to design new bathrooms for a spa hotel in 1983. Zumthor used more than 60,000 slabs of quartzite to pay homage to the valley’s beauty, designing six pools with temperatures ranging from fire to ice that take users on a journey along cave trails, letting light and shadow play in the space. Skimming and floating. When it was inaugurated in 1996, it was praised for its modern interpretation of the Roman baths and for its “bold and aesthetic lessons”. The space has a Keatsian lilt, with unheard melodies and antiseptic darkness, Zumthor letting light in without chasing shadows.
In 2007, he resurrected the ruins of a Gothic church destroyed in World War II at the Kolumba Art Museum in Cologne, Germany, and “understood its multiple floors with complete aplomb” in a new wing of a Los Angeles hotel. history”. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), he eliminated columns and gave the museum an amphibious shape, with a 60-foot cantilever and adjacent exhibition space nearly as long as three football fields. It replaces four older buildings, and “the old must go and the new must come,” Zumthor said.
He has said in the past, “You can’t order Zumthor architecture.”His “picky” attention to details and innate attitude Knowledge The use of materials and respect for experience over reason made him an architect who did not follow the established rule book. When young architects came to him for advice, he said: “Do it the way your mother would have liked it.”
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