Peter Zumthor

"Teaching architecture,

Learning architecture"

All design work starts from the premise of this physical, objective sensuousness of architecture, of its materials. To experience architecture in a concrete way means to touch, see, hear, and smell it. To discover and consciously work with these qualities - these are the themes of our teaching.

All the design work in the studio is done with materials. It always aims directly at concrete things, objects, installations made of real material (clay, stone, copper, steel, felt, cloth, wood, plaster, brick...). There are no cardboard models. Actually, no "models" at all in the conventional sense, but concrete objects, three-dimensional works on a specific scale.

The drawing of scale plans also begins with the concrete object, thus reversing the order of "idea - plan - concrete object" which is standard practice in professional architecture. First the concrete objects are constructed; then they are drawn to scale.

We carry images of works of architecture by which we have been influenced around with us. We can re-invoke these images in our mind's eye and re-examine them. But this does not yet make a new design, new architecture. Every design needs new images. Our "old" images can only help us to find new ones.

Thinking in images when designing is always directed towards the whole. By its very nature, the image is always the whole of the imagined reality: wall and floor, ceiling and materials, the moods of light and color of a room, for example. And we also see all the details of the transitions from the floor to the wall and from the wall to the window, as if we were watching a film.

Often however, they are not simply there, these visual elements of the image, when we start on a design and try to form an image of the desired object. At the beginning of the design process, the image is usually incomplete. So we try repeatedly to re-articulate and clarify our theme, to add the missing parts to our imagined picture. Or, to put it another way: we design. The concrete, sensuous qualities of our inner image helps us here. It helps us not to get lost in arid, abstract theoretical assumptions; it helps us not to lose track of the concrete qualities of architecture. It helps us not to fall in love with the graphic quality of our drawings and to confuse it with real architectural quality.

Producing inner images is a natural process common to everyone. It is part of thinking. Associative, wild, free, ordered and systematic thinking in image, in architectural, spatial, colorful and sensuous pictures - this is my favorite definition of design.