Zumthor the shaman - Peter Zumthor, winner of the 1998 Carlsberg Prize for Architecture

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1998 by Peter Davey

6 Ibid, pp11-12, same lecture.

7 Ibid, p36. lecture delivered to the Alvar Aalto Symposium, Jyvaskyla, Finland, 1994.

8 Idem.

9 The community is only about a thousand strong, but it can give itself planning permissions and when necessary raise large sums of money, in this case 250 million Swiss Franks.

10 Zumthor's brilliance in framing is at its most intense in two of the smaller rooms, where you lie on long curved chaises-longues, made of slats of the same mahogany like wood as the lockers. You look beyond your feet to a small square window which has a view of the hillside selected precisely for you.

11 Here there is none of the whooping and shouting that cacophonize most public baths; in fact, in the smaller rooms, water noises, intensified by small tall spaces and hard surfaces, often seem to dominate those of people. The pools are never more than about four feet deep, so there is no diving, and little of the stupefying dreariness of health freaks doing their self-allotted number of lengths. In the happy omission of athletic approaches to the public bath, and the return to a semblance of the Roman habit of social bathing, the building itself interacts with the users.

12 Zumthor, Thinking, op cit, p58. The lecture was to his students at the Accademia di Architettura, Mendrisio, Switzerland in 1996.

13 The lakeside seems never to have had much coherence, and at present includes the star on and a huge semi-permanent set for the town's annual drama festival built like a chunk of destroyed urban motorway in Bladerunner. The disparate scales and styles are related by a pretty waterfront park.

14 This is a favourite device used to great effect in, for instance, the old people's home at Chur where the public side can be opened to the sun and air of the hills by lange sections of storey-height glass movable by even frail old ladies.

15 Zumthor, Thinking, op cit, p58.

16 I have only just found this quotation but, you see, I was right about the chapel's cladding: he is clearly fascinated by feathers And you could think of the plan of the chapel as a streamlined longitudinal section through a fish, and the shingles as scales.

17 Zumthor, Peter in Kunsthaus Bregenz, Hatje, Stuttgart, 1997, p13.

18 A plenum is a volume full of something (in this case air and light). As opposed to a vacuum.

19 Achleitner, Friedrich 'The Kunsthaus Bregenz as an Architecture of Art'. Kunsthaus Bregenz, op cit, p35.

20 Zumthor, Thinking, op cit, p24.

21 Details of the Bregenz system are in AR December 1997, pp51-52 Zumthor's fascination with the potential of massive concrete as thermal flywheel can be seen as early as the little wooden farm extension at Versam (1990), where a wood-burning stove heats a massive internal concrete wall with hypocaust like ducts. At Vals, the walls radiate heat from inbuilt pipes. The temperature is controlled by using subterranean warmth with a sophisticated heat exchange system, so artificial heating is needed only rarely on the coldest days. (Places on which you sit are kept warmer than surrounding walls.)