Peter Zumthor Quotes
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There is still a real need for good quality architecture, not paper architecture, but the real stuff.
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Architecture is exposed to life. If its body is sensitive enough, it can assume a quality that bears witness to past life.
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Designing is a matter of concentration. You go deep into what you want to do. It's about intensive research, really. The concentration is warm and intimate and like the fire inside the earth - intense but not distorted. You can go to a place, really feel it in your heart. It's actually a beautiful feeling.
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The first 10 years of my professional life had only to do with running away from my father. He was a wonderful cabinet-maker, and me being the eldest son, I had to take over his shop, his profession and so on and so on. I tried to escape by going to art school and then going on to industrial design and then interior design.
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My buildings should have an emotional core - a space which, in itself, has an emotional nice feeling.
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I am convinced that a good building must be capable of absorbing the traces of human life and taking on a specific richness... I think of the patina of age on materials, of innumerable small scratches on surfaces, of varnish that has grown dull and brittle, and of edges polished by use.
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I've built two wooden houses near Vals. I built them for my wife. Those were private projects.
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Every time I imagine a garden in an architectural setting, it turns into a magical place. I think of gardens I have seen, that I believe I have seen, that I long to see, surrounded by simple walls, columns, arcades or the facades of buildings - sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.
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I work anywhere between three and 10 years on a project, depending on the size. My lifetime is finite. Therefore, I have to look carefully at how many projects I want to put into my lifetime.
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My first buildings, when I was about 30, were rejected for aesthetic reasons.
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I grew up in a craftsman's home, where things were done with our own hands. I did cabinetmaking for four years and I hated it.
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My relationship to plants becomes closer and closer. They make me quiet; I like to be in their company.
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Architecture has its place in the concrete world. This is where it exists. This is where it makes its statement.
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I can't be bought with money. If someone calls me and asks me to work for them for three or four years, and they'll pay me well to build their vacation home, I ask myself why I should work three or four years on something like that.
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I work a little bit like a sculptor. When I start, my first idea for a building is with the material. I believe architecture is about that. It's not about paper, it's not about forms. It's about space and material.
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In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and meanings and speak its own language.
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When I concentrate on a specific site or place for which I am going to design a building, I try to plumb its depths, its form, its history and its sensuous qualities.
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The bottom line may be that my inventing buildings is, indeed, a very private kind of activity. But it's done to be shared. It is comforting and consoling. From the reactions I get I can see I'm not doing something strange.
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What I try to do is the art of building, and the art of building is the art of construction; it is not only about forms and shapes and images.
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If you look at the Earth without architecture, it's sometimes a little bit unpleasant. So there is this basic human need to do shelter in the broadest sense of the word, whether it's a movie theater or a simple log cabin in the mountains. This is the core of architecture: To provide a space for human beings.
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If, early on, you know how things are put together, then you can build. The architect is in charge of making - he is not an artist.
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Small museums are great. Big museums are a drag.
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I think space, architectural space, is my thing. It's not about facade, elevation, making image, making money. My passion is creating space.
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If you're lucky, and a building succeeds, the real product has many more dimensions than you can ever imagine. You have the sun, the light, the rain, the birds, the feel.