A Feeling of History
by Peter Zumthor and Mari Lending
p.16-17
Peter Zumthor / ......The feeling of history is different from the factual history conserved on paper and taught at universities. That is kind of "history-history," an intellectual system that works from document to document, from paper to paper; then papers become 100 papers, and so on. For me, this has little to do with the real things I experience on a site or in a landscape. As an architect, I am interested in the history that is stored and accumulated in landscapes, places, and things. The things I can see and feel in the landscape are physical and real, no matter how mute, hidden, and mysterious they might at first appear.
Mari Lending / This way of talking about actual and factual history resembles Josef Albers's distinction between factual and actual facts, which was so crucial to his perceptual aesthetics. In his 1963 Interaction of Color he the factual as that which is "not undergoing changes," while the actual "is something not fixed, but changing with time."......
p. 21
Peter Zumthor / Landscape and places store memories, they save traces of lives long gone. What fascinates me about these traces is that they are real, they are unique, they are always authentic. To me, landscapes are historical documents; I can try to read and interpret the place where I have to act as an architect. With my design I can help create an awareness; like a magnifying glass, it can help me look closely at place, discover remnants of human activities that are easily overlooked but clearly there......
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I want my buildings to be connected to the history of a place. That's important to me. What has long been mute starts to speak, sparks appear, emotions rise to the surface and we start to understand.....
p.25
Peter Zumthor / .....I think it is important to include traces of the past, to weave them into a new building, integrating them, overlaying, or absorbing them. The palimpsest is a nice metaphor for this kind of architectural layering on historical ground. Paragraphing Jenny Holzer, I would say: "Integrate things from before any time you have the chance." This gives me the chance to lend my building greater depth. I could, of course, design architecture that stimulates memories of the past through formal and material allusions to history, but I think nothing is more powerful than the historical substance itself.
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