A Feeling of History

While completing the Almannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum in southern Norway in 2016, celebrated Swiss architect Peter Zumthor asked Norwegian scholar Mari Lending to engage in a dialogue about the project. Departing from the ways in which Zumthor’s pavilions frame the barely visible traces of the industrial exploitation of zinc in the 1890s, the conversation took unexpected turns.

In meandering, impressionistic style and drawing on Zumthor’s favourite writers, such as Johann Peter Hebel, Stendhal, Vladimir Nabokov, and T.S. Eliot, their exchanges explore how history, time and temporalities reverberate across the famous architect’s oeuvre. Looking back, Zumthor ponders on how a feeling of history has informed his continuous attempts of emotional reconstruction by means of building, from architectural interventions in dramatic landscapes to his design for the redevelopment of Los Angeles’ LACMA on a grand urban scale.

This small, beautifully designed new book records the conversation between Zumthor and Lending, illustrated with photographs by the renowned Swiss architectural photographer Hélène Binet.