Description
While he used to be working to finish the Allmannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum in southern Norway in 2016, Swiss architect Peter Zumthor asked Norwegian architectural historian Mari Lending to have interaction in a dialogue concerning the project. In meandering, impressionistic taste, and drawing on their favorite writers, such as Johann Peter Hebel, Stendhal, Nabokov, and T. S. Eliot, their exchanges explore how history, time, and temporalities reverberate across Zumthor’s oeuvre. Taking a look back, Zumthor ponders on how a sense of history has informed his attempts at emotional reconstruction by way 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 Hélène Binet. The resulting book is a shockingly revelatory view of one of the vital interesting and restlessly creative architects of our era.