Peter Zumthor: Thinking Architecture

Capilla de San Benito / Peter Zumthor.

Memories contain the deepest architectural experience that I know.

The roots of architectural understanding lie in our architectural experience: our room, our house, our street, our village, our town, our

landscape – we experience them all early on [...]

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011 / Peter Zumthor.

Materials in architecture can be made to shine and vibrate.

Man’s use of materials; materials in themselves are not poetic.

Joseph Beuys, Schlitten (Sled), 1969.

Therme Vals spa, Peter Zumthor.

Real core of all architectural work lies in the act of contruction.

The details establish the formal rhytm, the building’s finely fractioned scale.

Bruder Klaus Chapel, Peter Zumthor.

The new buildings should embrace the qualities which can enter into a meaningful dialogue with the existing situation.

To me, the presence of certain buildings has something secret about it. They seem simply to be there. We do not pay any special attention to

them. And yet it is virtually impossible to imagine the place where they are without them.

Zinc Mine Museum, Peter Zumthor.

Even when I concentrate exclusively on the architecture and try to understand what I have seen, my perception of it resonates in what I have experienced and thus colors what I have observed. Memories of similar experiences thrust their way in, too, and thus images of related

architectural situations overlap.

Bruder Klaus Chapel, Peter Zumthor.

We must construct a radical system of approach that enables us to see the work of architecture as a focal point from different angles simultaneously: historically, aesthetically, functionally, personally,

passionately.

To me, buildings can have a beautiful silence that I associate with attributes such as composure, self-evidence, durability, presence and integrity, and with warmth and sensuousness as well: a building that is

being itself, being a building, not presenting anything, just being.

Bruder Klaus Chapel, Peter Zumthor.

Zinc Mine Museum, Peter Zumthor.