Word: zumthor
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...same, Zumthor is no recluse. In the 1960s he studied at the Pratt Institute in New York and he has taught in Los Angeles, Munich and at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. But for more than 40 years he has lived in Haldenstein, a small Alpine village in central Switzerland, where he maintains a studio with 15 designers and other "collaborators...
...Zumthor spent the first 10 years of his career restoring historic buildings and preserving them from the threat of new development.("The Germans were destroyed by war," he once said, "but we [the Swiss] were destroyed by building".) Those years appear to have taught him how to incorporate history into his own work without imitating historical styles. One result is the Art Museum Kolumba, a museum that houses the collections of religious art of the archbishopric of Cologne, Germany. It's a building that combines multiple levels of history - the ruins of the Gothic church of St. Kolumba, destroyed during...
...Twice Zumthor has designed small outdoor chapels, each of them a compact little hermitage for prayer and meditation - a kind of spiritual sentry box. The most recent of the two is the St. Nikolaus von der Flue Chapel, which stands in an open field near Cologne. Completed in 2007, it's a narrow, five-sided windowless space, nearly 40 ft. high, with an opening at the top to admit light and a single triangular door...
...that chapel was constructed says something about Zumthor's particular intensity. It was built by the farmer who commissioned it, working with neighbors. First they erected a vertical formwork of spruce branches and trunks. Concrete was then poured in layers, one per day for 24 days to produce a smooth exterior but a ribbed surface inside. Then the wood formwork was set afire, which scorched and roughened the interior concrete. The result is a building that's also a metaphor for the fierce yearnings of the soul...
...record, St. Nikolaus, also known as Brother Klaus, is the patron saint of Switzerland. He was a 15th-century hermit and ascetic. If he had lived to see Zumthor's work, just like Le Corbusier, he would have approved...