Thinking Architecture

Peter Zumthor

The Hard core of beauty, 1991 (link)

SUMMARY

In this writing, Peter Zumthor takes several creative visions and puts them into the perspective of architecture giving architecture its “hard care”. He approaches these ideas by first eliminating emotions and preliminary images and looking at the building as a thing itself that would “allow emotions to emerge”.

Zumthor’s idea of the Thermal Bath project has a basis in a concept of prioritization of questions that need to be answered step by steps such as location, purpose, and building materials. By answering the core questions the structure will arise.

idea that beauty has a hard core in architecture.

No ideas except in the things themselves. Not to wish to stir up emotions with buildings, but to allow emotions to emerge, to be. If the building is conceived accurately enough for its place and its function, it will develop its own strength, with no need for artistic addition.

Works or objects of art that move us are multi-faced: endless layers of meaning, change as we change our angle of observation.

Attaining the desired vagueness.

John Cage works out concepts and structures and then has them performed to find out how they sound.

Project Thermal Bath in the mountains. Not to form preliminary image, but by answering basic questions arising from the location, purpose and the building materials, which at first had no visual content as existing architecture.

When answering questions of location, purpose and materials, structure emerged.

Arguing with a statement of architects Herzon and de Meuron Zumthor stating that even though it becomes difficult to create wholeness in today’s myriad of signs and images, it is still essential. He is frustrated by the awareness of the inseparable artificial from the original and notices that attempts of achieving wholeness often roots in the natural environment. Zumthor questions the lack of confidence in the basic elements of architecture bringing the term of beautiful silence in a sense of the building being real, not representing anything but itself.

From the work of Wallace Stevens and Calvino Zumthor comes to the conclusion that the spark of the work is created between reality and imagination, where reality is the essence of place and purpose of the building.

Analyzing the writing of Martin Heidegger Zumthor implements the term of dwelling, “sense of living and thinking in places and spaces” to describe his architectural process where concrete building in relation to the state of dwelling creates a basis for the imagination.

PERSONAL COMMENT

I find Zumthor’s analyses a transition to a practical understanding of architecture where, similar to art, emerging from extremes it was given the foundation of being itself, settling its site, function, and materials first, which serves as a hardcore used for a beautiful imagination.