Revisited: Thinking Architecture
An autumn beach read.
I spent the last weeks exploring Portugal’s west coast and its endless beaches with its tumultuous waves. Among other books in my suitcase, which I didn’t get to reading yet, I brought Peter Zumthor’s Thinking Architecture with me. After writing about how the Serpentine Pavilion got me into architecture in the first place I came to think about his thoughts and projects more often again. I read Thinking Architecture for the first time in 2017, one year into my architecture studies. Since then I re-read it once or twice, always inspired by Zumthor’s straightforward yet thoughtful takes on architecture. Therefore it comes at no surprise that Thinking Architecture, and the name of this publication, Writing Architecture, are quite similar.
This time around, when reading Zumthor’s book, I highlighted the paragraphs which struck a chord with me. It will be interesting to see if the same parts will speak to me when I come back to this book in a few years. In the meantime here are the quotes that resonated with me in the last days:
In the books first essay A way of looking at things, which Zumthor held as a lecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Santa Monica as a visiting professor in 1988, he speaks about what architecture is and what it should be. The quotes I highlighted in this essay, without an agenda in mind, touch on three topics: architectures connection to everyday life, to the zeitgeist of society, and to its concrete reality, also known as construction. In The hard core of beauty, the second essay featured in the book, truth within architectural design and construction and architecture’s attitude toward its recipients, were the subjects that appealed to me. Individual findings in the following essays spoke to me, touching on architectures connection to its surroundings and the concrete nature of architecture.
Reading each of the following quotes individually, letting them sink in and thinking about their meaning to your own life and practice has proven to be a rewarding experience for me.
Architecture has its own realm. It has a special physical relationship with life. I do not think of it primarily as either a message or a symbol, but as an envelope and background for life which goes on in and around it, a sensitive container for the rhythm of footsteps on the floor, for the concentration of work, for the silence of sleep.
Details, when they are successful, are not mere decoration. They do not distract or entertain. They lead to an understanding of the whole of which they are an inherent part.
I think that the hidden structures and constructions of a house should be organized in such a way that they endow the body of the building with a quality of inner tension and vibration. This is how violins are made. They remind us of the living bodies of nature.
To a large degree, designing is based on understanding and establishing systems of order. Yet I believe that the essential substance of the architecture we seek proceeds from feeling and insight. Precious moments of intuition result from patient work.
Not until later did I realize that there are basically only a very few architectural problems for which a valid solution has not already been found.
Our times of change and transition do not permit big gestures. There are only a few remaining common values left upon which we can build and which we all share. I thus appeal for a kind of architecture of common sense based on the fundamentals that we still know, understand, and feel. I carefully observe the concrete appearance of the world, and in my buildings I try to enhance what seems to be valuable, to correct what is disturbing and to create anew what we feel is missing.
[…] I am convinced that a good building must be capable of absorbing the traces of human life and thus of taking on a specific richness.
I believe that architecture today needs to reflect on the tasks and possibilities which are inherently its own. Architecture is not a vehicle or a symbol for things that do not belong to its essence. In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and meanings, and speak its own language.
The hard core of beauty
And: to remain close to the thing itself, close to the essence of the thing I have to shape, confident that if the building is conceived accurately enough for its place and its function, it will develop its own strength, with no need for artistic additions.
The architect responsible for the building is not present, but he talks to me unceasingly from every detail, he keeps on saying the same thing, and I quickly lose interest. Good architecture should receive the human visitor, should enable him to experience it and live in it, but it should not constantly talk at him.
[…] a building that is being itself, being a building, not representing anything, just being.
From passion for things to the things themselves
When an architectural design draws solely from tradition and only repeats the dictates of its site, I sense a lack of a genuine concern with the world and the emanations of contemporary life. If a work of architecture speaks only of contemporary trends and sophisticated visions without triggering vibrations in its place, this work is not anchored in its site, and I miss the specific gravity of the ground it stands on.
Teaching architecture, learning architecture
Architecture is always concrete matter. Architecture is not abstract, but concrete. A plan, a project drawn on paper is not architecture but merely a more or les inadequate representation of architecture, comparable to sheet music. Music needs to be performed. Architecture needs to be executed. Then its body can come into being. And this body is always sensuous.
Apart from sharing is beliefs and objectives Zumthor adds descriptions of buildings, interiors and scenes that resonated with him, throughout the book. These descriptions are well worth reading:
A glass partition divided up the length of the narrow corridor of the old hotel. The wing of a door below, a firmly fixed pane of glass above, no frame, the panes clamped and held at the corners by two metal clasps. Normally done, nothing special. Certainly not a design by an architect. But I liked the door.
Making a habit of journaling your own spatial experiences seems to provide a great tool kit to work with when designing. Yet, as Zumthor points out, the search for an answer to the question of what evokes resonance with specific spaces remains unfinished.