Switzerland today represents one of the most important centers of modern architectural thought and practice, and Peter Zumthor has been among the major architects representing the country since the 1980s. Zumthor presents in his work not only beautiful form and masterly construction but the sensitive control of material and space achieved only by gaining intimate knowledge of all these factors.
Trained as a cabinetmaker, Zumthor studied design instead of architecture at Basel’s school of arts and crafts. He has concentrated on adapting the rural form and materials of his headquarters, the Swiss canton of Graubuden, and he has built a small but captivating oeuvre almost exclusively in his adopted home since his arrival there in 1967. Zumthor has said that he “creates spaces with soul” that become part of the everyday and stand in opposition to the “general artificiality of the world” (Peter Zumthor, Works, 1998). He argues his case to great effect in all of his projects, including the Sogn Benedegt Chapel, a shingled, leaf-shaped church perched high in the misty Surselva Mountains. A weathered, earthy, and private place, the form is derived from the lemniscate, an algebraic figure-8-shaped curve that when proportionately shortened also determines the section. A delicate band of windows ringing the top of the building ensures steady natural light. The chapel is an artful combination of rationality and poetry existing in an almost dreamlike setting. The architect’s atelier in Haldenstein draws on the contrast between softly finished local wood and brushed steel details to highlight the beauty in each. The humble building, though sited in the middle of town, lends no notion to its purpose. The modern addition to a traditional farmhouse in Versam, Switzerland, is an example of Zumthor’s seamless straddling of old and new, tradition and modernization, and his dedication to rooting buildings to the landscape. The architect was able to match almost perfectly the wood of the original building and made a modern addition for a family without interrupting the spirit of the old house.
The much publicized and much photographed thermal baths in Vals revisit the importance and sheer pleasure of bathing known in ancient Roman baths. The entire structure looks almost prehistoric, as if it emerged from the ground, and is con structed entirely of whole slabs of locally quarried, gray gneiss laid one on top of another, to a great monolithic effect. The beauty of the spa is awe-inspiring, as is its perfection in plan and construction. The sensuality of the color, the water, the sounds echoed in the chamber of the bath seem all but mathematically engineered by the architect—a stunning feat matched by few, if any, other of his projects.
If the spa at Vals is all subterranean mystery, then Zumthor’s first non-Swiss site, the Kunsthaus in Bregenz, Austria, is all light and transparency. Nestled beside a lake, the glass box of a modern art museum goes from white to blue to glowing yellow during the course of day to night. The light skin of the building allows but a peek into the frame and at the silhouettes of the staircases between galleries. The glass panels of the museum’s skin are not perforated and hang on a system of metal brackets held in place by large, modified clamps. Lighting is controlled by the amount of natural light entering the building at any given time through the massive glass skin of the structure. The interior floors and walls of the gallery levels are concrete and uniquely climate controlled by the circulation of water to the gallery floors and walls from an underground stream.
Zumthor’s plan for the Swiss Pavilion at the Hannover Expo 2000 was meant to echo a lumberyard in its use of piles of timber in parallel walls and the notion that the lumber will be sold after the close of the exposition. The multidimensional use of the space speaks to all the senses: lines of poetry are projected on the walls, and small troupes of dancers and musicians perform in the space, making it a living, beating organism.
The architect has succeeded by trying the “obvious but difficult solutions” first. Those solutions make architecture the medium it is: construction, materials, earth and sky, structure. He handles each with respect to create structures true to their surroundings, reflective of their culture, and representative of an architect craftsman who blends invention and sensitivity, intuition and intelligence.
EUGENIA BELL |
