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Peter Zumthor "Teaching architecture, Learning architecture" |
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The following is an excerpt from "Thinking Architecture", published by Lars Müller Publishers in 1998:
Young people go to university with the aim of becoming architects, of finding out if they have got what it takes. What is the first thing we should teach them?
First of all, we must explain that the person standing in front of them is not someone who asks questions whose answers he already knows. Practicing architecture is asking oneself questions, finding one's own answers with the help of the teacher, whittling down, finding solutions. Over and over again.
The strength of a good design lies in ourselves and in our ability to perceive the world with both emotion and reason. A good architectural design is sensuous. A good architectural design is intelligent.
We all experience architecture before we have even heard the word. 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, unconsciously, and we subsequently compare them with the countryside, towns and houses that we experience later on. The roots of our understanding of architecture lie in our childhood, in our youth; they lie in our biography. Students have to learn to work consciously with their personal biographical experiences of architecture. Their allotted tasks are devised to set this process in motion.
We may wonder what it was that we liked about this house, this town, what it was that impressed and touched us - and why. What was the room like, the square, what did it really look like, what smell was in the air, what did my footsteps sound like in it, and my voice, how did the floor feel under my feet, the door handle in my hand, how did the light strike the facades, what was the shine on the walls like? Was there a feeling of narrowness or width, of intimacy or vastness?
Wooden floors like light membranes, heavy stone masses, soft textiles, polished granite, pliable leather, raw steel, polished mahogany, crystalline glass, soft asphalt warmed by the sun... the architect's materials, our materials. We know them all. And yet we do not know them. In order to design, to invent architecture, we must learn to handle them with awareness. This is research; this is the work of remembering.
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 less 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.
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