A Feeling of History

A Feeling of History

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Peter Zumthor's surprising and revealing reflections on time and history

 

 

Title Information

Peter Zumthor and Mari Lending. With photographs by Hélène Binet

1st edition

, 2018

Paperback

84 pages, 14 duotone illustrations

11 x 19.5 cm

ISBN 978-3-85881-805-8

Content

While he was working to complete the Almannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum in southern Norway in 2016, Swiss architect Peter Zumthor asked Norwegian architectural historian Mari Lending to engage in a dialogue about the project. In meandering, impressionistic style, and drawing on their favorite writers, such as Johann Peter Hebel, Stendhal, Nabokov, or T. S. Eliot, their exchanges explore how history, time, and temporalities reverberates across Zumthor’s oeuvre. Looking back, he ponders on how a feeling of history has informed his attempts at emotional reconstruction by means of building, from architectural interventions in dramatic landscapes to his design for the redevelopment of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which conceived the building on a suitably grand urban scale.

This small, beautifully designed book records the conversation between Zumthor and Lending, accompanied by photographs taken by the renowned Swiss architectural photographer Hèlène Binet. The resulting book is a surprisingly revelatory view of one of the most interesting and restlessly creative architects of our era.

 

Deutsche Ausgabe

Edition française

Authors & Editors

Mari Lending

 is professor of architectural history and theory at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Her latest book is Plaster Monuments. Architecture and the Power of Reproduction (Princeton University Press, 2017).

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Peter Zumthor

, born 1943, works with his Atelier of around 30 people in the alpine setting of Haldenstein, Switzerland, producing architectural originals like Kunsthaus Bregenz, Therme Vals, Museum Kolumba Köln or the Steilneset Memorial in Vardø.