A Feeling of History

While he was working to complete the Almannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum in southern Norway in 2016, Swiss architect Peter Zumthor asked Norwegian architectural historian Mari Lending to engage in a dialogue about the project. In meandering, impressionistic style, and drawing on their favorite writers, such as Johann Peter Hebel, Stendhal, Nabokov, or T. S. Eliot, their exchanges explore how history, time, and temporalities reverberates across Zumthor’s oeuvre. Looking back, he ponders on how a feeling of history has informed his attempts at emotional reconstruction by means 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 Hèlène Binet. The resulting book is a surprisingly revelatory view of one of the most interesting and restlessly creative architects of our era.