We visited Peter Zumthor – one of the world’s leading architects – in his studio in Switzerland. In this extensive and rare biographical video interview he tells the captivating story of his childhood, his studies in NYC and his parents’ strong influence.
Zumthor – who works from the small town of Haldenstein in Switzerland – likes being outside the big centres of the world, as it frees him of having to consider the opinions of his fellow colleagues: “If you work like an artist, you need your own separate space.” He does, however, also work well in the “anonymous sound” of a city, where it is also possible to find calm in “a protective ocean of sound.” There are, Zumthor feels, different kinds of silence, and finding one’s mental silence – being able to concentrate – is what is most important in order to work well.
“There’s nothing I’m not interested in.” Zumthor loves literature and music, but prides himself in taking an overall interest in different things, as it fuels him: “It’s a nourishing ground.” His constant appetite for learning gives him the tools to be able to understand whatever place or landscape he needs to work in, and being able to “feel a space” and having an idea how to react as an architect, is essential. When he designs his innovative architecture, Zumthor furthermore puts great emphasis on connecting the old with the new, rather than breaking with history. Likewise, he feels that all architects have a great social responsibility when it comes to creating buildings, which are both well crafted and sustainable.
Anything can be considered art as long as it’s done with personal devotion to the making of it, Zumthor argues: “I never decided to become an architect.” Starting out as an industrial designer, it was not until 1968 that he made the decision of becoming an architect and began participating in competitions, thinking to himself: “I can do this better.” As for the first competition he entered, he was kicked out in the first round – a pivotal experience that made him aware of the need to always improve.
Peter Zumthor (b. 1943) is a Swiss architect. Among his best-known projects are the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, the thermal baths in Vals in Switzerland, the Swiss Pavilion for Expo 2000 in Hannover (an all-timber structure intended to be recycled after the event) and the Kolumba Diocesan Museum in Cologne. Zumthor is the winner of several prestigious awards such as the 1998 Carlsberg Architecture Prize, the Mies van der Rohe Award for European Architecture (1999), the Praemium Imperiale (2008), the 2009 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2013 RIBA Royal Gold Medal. He lives and works in Switzerland.
For more about Peter Zumthor see: zumthor.tumblr.com/
Peter Zumthor was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner at his studio in Haldenstein, Switzerland in May 2015.
Camera: Klaus Elmer
Edited by: Klaus Elmer
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2015
Supported by Nordea-fonden
1st prize winner of Henning Larsen Foundation’s international film competition on architecture and film.
Cole Phoenix Skaggs on his film: “This film attempts to capture one time cycle of the space as its transient occupants whirl through their lives. It silently holds firm a space of memories, atmospheres and emotions played out within its vessels. Time choreographs the space and Chopin’s Waltz No. 7 conducts the film. “Waltz” comes from the German word Waltzen, meaning to turn or revolve. A view from within offers only glimpses of what lies beyond as we move about and time passes firmly, leaving behind scenes of defeat, work and rest”.
by Cole Skaggs, Ithaca, New York
Location: Milstein Hall, Cornell Univsersity School of Architecture
Music: Chopin Waltz No. 7 In C Sharp Minor
A building is a stage for the life it encloses. To show it without life is like showing a stage empty of the drama, raising the curtain only during the interval.
Though architects cannot script people’s lives, they can imagine them enacted, in their full complexity, against the backdrop they have built for them. Instead of empty buildings, or—worse—buildings decorated with the pseudolife of static models, we wish to show architecture refracted through a stream of dramatic life.
In the first short film of our series—Black Ice—the life is dark, psychotically inventive, as is the architecture. The others will be different. But they will all seek to unify architecture and life, against the old conventions that keep them artificially apart.
We shall be screening Black Ice at our studio during the London Design Festival 2015, and offering guided tours of the space the film seeks to bring into created life.
What is it that makes us human? Is it that we love, that we fight ? That we laugh ? Cry ? Our curiosity ? The quest for discovery ?
Driven by these questions, filmmaker and artist Yann Arthus-Bertrand spent three years collecting real-life stories from 2,000 women and men in 60 countries. Working with a dedicated team of translators, journalists and cameramen, Yann captures deeply personal and emotional accounts of topics that unite us all; struggles with poverty, war, homophobia, and the future of our planet mixed with moments of love and happiness.
The VOL.1 deals with the themes of love, women, work and poverty.
The VOL.2 deals with the themes of war, forgiving, homosexuality, family and life after death.
The VOL.3 deals with the themes of happiness, education, disability, immigration, corruption and the meaning of life.
Based on the hypothesis of maximum density = maximum desires, the studio explores the potentials of negotiation and density. Through the development of multi-user real-time video games, the studio explores participatory design processes through gaming to model the competing desires and egos of each inhabitant in a housing block and designs their apartments accordingly in the fairest way possible.
EgoCity, instead of juxtaposing compromised individual “dreams”, proposes a new urban model whose primal matter is its citizens’ most crazy fantasies. It is a project that goes far beyond a theatre of formal architectural folies and aspires to construct, in urbanized and dense conditions, a participative dream, a living mosaic that contains an unlimited amount of desired situations. In order to achieve that, rather than focusing on an aesthetic result, a particular interest has been manifested in the development of an appropriate gaming process that would be capable of taking advantage of every player’s selfishness and then transform it into a spatial potential. We consider that this constant emergence of unexpected typologies can be proven a vehicle of crucial interest towards an authentically human-driven architecture.
Model
Author: Matteo Pavanello, Lucile Dugal, Francesco Barone, Prokop Matej, Tan Wen Jun, Hun Chun Hoi, Olina Terzi, Marek Nosek, Charles Ducerisier, Felix Borel, Iason Stathatos, Javier Lopez-Menchero, Loes Thijssen, Niels Baljet, Soo Woo, Zichen Liu, Tarryn Leeferink
Function : Dwelling
Site location: None
Year : 2015
Institution: TU Delft
Brief description of the project:
Egocity
Maximum desires / Maximum Density
(EgoCity is an effort to revolutionise the architectural process, in order to maximise individual desire simultaneously whilst maximising collective density)
What sort of city can you have when everyone chooses to live by himself in order to realise his dream?
The paradox of our current urban challenge is that, although the city remains the best solution to diminish our impact on the environment, we want to live a life that is not standardised – we want our own dream house.
Typologies schemes
How can we solve the seemingly unsolvable conflict between freedom and density?
EgoCity aimed to tackle firstly the dilemma of maximum desires / maximum density by accommodating truly the needs of users for a differentiated lifestyle, away from the repetitive and monotonous characteristics of the suburban periphery of our cities.
17 architecture students chose 17 possible clients and studied their personalities in order to design their dreamhouses. But how do 17 people occupy the same space with their dreams?
The aim was to devise methods that avoid compromise at all costs.
Architecture therefore was considered as the design of an ideal game that solves conflicts between neighbours’ fight for space. The nature of gaming is collaborative and therefore results in design with multi-user participation, thereby unlocking conversations which would otherwise be difficult, or impossible.
The concept of gaming as simplification and exaggeration of reality led to the idea that different patterns of the real world could be tackled by the development of more than one games. Four elements of real conflicts rendered four set of rules: firstly, the automaton game tested a framework of regulations formed by individual desire, expressed in space hierarchy, or ‘power’, which acted as the base of the production of the city; secondly, the trading game simulated a financial framework relating spatial desires to a fixed capital; the strategic game was an investigation of the idea of phasing in the urban fabric, thus relating spatial desires to real-time claiming of space; lastly, the blind game simulated the fair negotiation of boundaries between parties, causing restrictions to their evolution. The four games provide a broad spectrum approach to gaming as an urban design tool. By generating more than one approach, we were able to gain valuable insight into reactions of people to certain scenarios.
One possible outcome amongst several was deeply developed and shows how the standard idea of dwellings is outdated when architecture is really human-driven.
Síntesis & Contención es un video documental dirgido por Alejandro Cabrera y producido por Portavoz, sobre el trabajo de Cadaval & Solà-Morales en el que se muestran las obras construidas por el despacho Barcelonés a lo largo de la ultima década. El video incluye testimoniales de los usuarios de sus espacios así como de algunas personalidades del mundo de la arquitectura tales como: Iñaki Abalos, Director del departamento de Arquitectura de la Universidad de Harvard. James Corner, Creador del Highline de NY y director durante más de una década del departamento de arquitectura de paisaje y urbanismo de la Universidad de Pensilvania. Juan Herreros Arquitecto del Museo Munch en Oslo y profesor de la Universidad de Columbia en NY. Josep Lluís Mateo arquitecto Catalan y profesor del Politécnico de Zurich, Mauricio Rocha destacado arquitecto Mexicano y dos veces ganador de la Bienal de arquitectura de Mexico y Benedetta Tagliabue, Arquitecta Italiana radicada en Barcelona y Jurado del premio Pritzker.
Producción. portavoz.tv / @portavoztv
Dirección. Alejandro Cabrera
Fotografía. Alejandro Cabrera, Israel Solórzano, Juan Diego Bautista
Edición. Camila Ausente
Food and wellness club is for relaxing. Most relaxing thing is nature itself. Feeling the sun and air, sounds of the birds and water, whisper of the wind through the trees, fresh and organic nutrition. FWC is place that people can meet the nature, comfort and technology. It’s the new generation of wellness center which bring nature and technology together.
It consists of different size of blocks that has its own characteristics which depends on its function. These blocks constitute the general form of the building. All blocks look inside courtyard where the aqua zone exists. Dynamically placed blocks create unique and interesting spaces that never repeat. It also creates visual connection between old bologna castles and also natural form of rocks with its green areas and waterfall as well.
The FWC can work year around. In winters the main open air pool closes and the other inside zones operates.
Buss services from Bologna and FICO operates all day.
This project 3D-reconstruction of one of the legendary buildings of the Soviet avant-garde architecture – Narkomfin on Novinsky Boulevard in Moscow. This house is an architectural monument of constructivism, but not only because of the time of construction (1930) and forms. The architect Moses Ginsburg designed the new way of life – the life of a labor commune – where more time was devoted to work, and less – household routine.
It was a very ambitious project that was ahead of its time for 100 years. At that time people were not ready for this level of collectivism, now – you can call it a multi-functional complex of two-level apartments.
Initially, this project included two stages of construction, but only the first one was built. I modeled the whole complex of buildings in 3D – reconstructed the existing part as it was designed by architect, showed unrealized second turn, added a modern landscape design and paving.
Now it is a residential and office building, even my friends rented an apartment there, there is a yoga center and a rooftop cafe. Owners wanted to reconstruct the house, but the project does not move for many years. I wanted to show how this whole monument of architecture in the modern world might look like, if it was built.
Music by Discount Fireworks (discountfireworksband.co.uk/) edit by DJ Andy Mau
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Vertical farm and resident
As we know, the vertical farm is the potential solution of food problems that we may face tomorrow. We have all the technologies required to make vertical farm a reality today.
With respect to architectural planning, the vertical farm design depends on more universal factors such as technology and natural resources like sun and wind. There is another aspect that is important: residents, who depend on local factors such as social, cultural, and lifestyle factors. The purpose of this project is to tackle both of these aspects.
New York
Even though it is one of the youngest cities in the world, New York, one of the largest cities in the world, has experienced many changes and challenges.
Originally, it was established as a settlement when the Dutch arrived to Manna-Hata island inhabited by the Algonquin tribe to establish New Amsterdam. After a war between the Dutch and the English, its name was changed to New York. It was an important strategic base during the American War of Independence. Between 1783 and 1790, New York was the capital city of the US and during this time, it grew into the largest city in the US.
1811 Commissioner’s plan was the basis of the city planning of modern-day New York. The railway and metro system established afterwards was another important development that pushed the city to a new level.
It is important to note that it was the setting for most innovations and experiments related to urban development. As a result, New York has the potential to be the setting of the first vertical farm. Continue reading →
Young Architects Competitions (YAC) is launching an openarchitectural competition to design a Food & Wellness Club for the upcoming F.I.CO.® (Fabbrica Italiana Contadina) theme park in Bologna. In 2016, F.I.CO. will become the world’s biggest theme park dedicated to food farming and food culture, with nine million tourists expected to visit this structure each year. Such a project will trigger a redevelopment of the surrounding area in order to provide visitors with services. The Food & Wellness Club aims to offer a wellness area for those visitors willing to discover both nutrition and body care, offering comfort and care in a multi-sensory and exclusive space. The question of the competition becomes: how to create an architectural space that combines the elements of food, relaxation, wellness and seasonality?
PROGRAM
The Food & Wellness Club will not be a simple spinoff of F.I.CO.®, aiming instead to rely on a specific identity. The owner wants to blend wellness and advanced technologies. The architecture should blend food farming with architecture and health. Destinations and areas are provided in the guidelines.
CTRL+SPACE has launched its Istanbul Community Market Ideas Competition. Seeking designs from students and professionals (developed individually or in teams of four or less), the competition challenges participants to create a site-specific, multi-functional market with a strong public element. Submissions are welcomed now until June 27 and winners will be announced on July 17, 2015. Three winning designs will receive monetary prizes from 500€ to 3500€, and five merit award recipients will also be selected. For more details or to register, visit ctrl-space.net.
Directed by Ai Weiwei (China, 2012). Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam 2012.
Ordos 100 is a construction project curated by Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei. One hundred architects from 27 countries were chosen to participate and each design a 1000-square-meter villa to be built in a new community in Inner Mongolia. The 100 villas would be designed to fit a master plan designed by Ai Weiwei.
On January 25, 2008, the 100 architects gathered in Ordos for a first visit to the site. The film Ordos 100 documents a total of three site visits, during which time the master plan and design of each villa was completed. As of this date, the Ordos 100 project remains unrealized (Ai Weiwei Studio).
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