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[Zumthor uses the word: Schluchf ]. This is what I am interested in very much, that void. How do you create it, make it full of atmosphere, adequate to the need (this is important), where nothing is an obstruction, and there’s only that directness.
The German language has an adequate word for that: die Stimmung - the mood, ambiance; etwas stimmt - something hits the spot, matches the ambiance, but also:
Instrumente werden gestimmt - instruments are being tuned. All this is the base to me, the need. The fold theoreticians talk about the seed, programme, inner code;
perhaps I am more pragmatic, closer to physical realness. But perhaps this is almost the same... And then, this base is the starting point for long-term work - still on that fi rst, original theme. There always has to be an image. At fi rst, it is not clear.
I can see some things while others are in the mist. And this means that I have not yet worked long enough. During the design process, these things become clearer and clearer. It is also possible to live in this space that is being designed, to move around in it. I am in the spaces that I design when I take a shower, when I wake up;
I enter the room that is being designed to see what it’s like and if I like it. And only then do I go to the offi ce and check the models and plans if it really is like I see it in my imagination. Space meaning: void. What I’m interested in is work on the boundaries, the outskirts of this mystery of the void. It’s important how it radiates, how light spreads within it, what it does to it, what it is like on objects. Light is a mystery, too. Isn’t it? So, what are the walls of this void like; do you want to enter it;
does it give you warmth, tranquillity... ? All these words are a little traditional...
PZ I think that it’s natural to want to get to know the family you make a design for.
I quickly sense what they like and what they don’t. I’m very open. But I have a need to be trusted. After all, I am a specialist; maybe I just know better. I think that, if there is this openness between people, it is not diffi cult to understand this unique couple, marriage, family. Sometimes, the client is a friend. The lady pharmacist that I am designing a house for in Chur, the Haus Schwarz, which looks just like my new house, has a lot of confi dence in me. This is a very good client because she asks me what I like, how I would do it for myself. Her house will be different from mine in that inner space that we keep talking about, but with similar, identical details.
PZ Yes. But, in Bregenz, we were trusted by the inhabitants of the city.
BS With this strong, personal commitment and sensing of space, what is the process of designing the intimate space of a private house like? You’ve mentioned designing a house for a family with six children. A separate flight of stairs leads to each of the four bedrooms upstairs. This is peculiar rout-ing, with a strong impact on how space, privacy is sensed.
You call your new house, which is currently under construc-tion, a “house for walking” because it is designed as an elongated U, encompassing long, narrow spaces.
BS This confidence is also inspired by your successful built projects. Although, you’ve mentioned the great distrust shown by clients in Bregenz.
BS Since we’ve brought up the subject of the Kunsthaus in Bregenz, I’d like to ask about inventiveness. You’ve written that designing means to you an inventiveness which is not to consist in surrealistic inventing but rather in discovering.
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PZ Yes. There are houses which are built a bit like aeroplanes - there’s the original beautiful design, and then a whole series is made. I’m not interested in this. I like the process. All our projects are very different from one another as fi nal forms.
When you compare, say, the old folks’ home in Chur, St. Benedict’s Chapel, the baths in Vals, the Kunsthaus in Bregenz - each is different. I also like to look at projects in the process of being designed - after a month, a year... when I see that the emerging form talks about the work process. Work, specifi c work, and things fi nd their places, they enter into their own order. This is a process of looking after something, like after a plant - perhaps this simile is a bit exaggerated, but you know what I mean- you work on something that must develop by itself over time. I think that, in our case, forms come by themselves. And this is what I like. We don’t work on the form, we’re working on...
PZ Exactly, on everything else, but not on the form. The form creates itself because it has to - when you take materials and mark the boundaries of the void that we talked about. It emerges in the end as evidence of the design process.
PZ In architecture, there’s always some content to be grasped in form. I’m most successful with the form, I think, when you can’t sense it in my work, when the form speaks merely about the content. This is when I like the form, and it seems to me then that I experience the content in as simple a manner as never before.
PZ [laughter]... and if not, then we go back. We never change the form itself, but we go back to see again the conditions, the theme, and we fi nd the choice that was an error. Because I am convinced that correcting just the form without going back is artifi cial and will sound alien.
PZ Always, in the end, it is evidence of our work, authenticity - a building is created. It is an evaluation of the design process, it testifi es to all the work.
BS ... on everything else?
BS Could you then formulate your design methodology?
BS And if not?
BS The form emerges on its own, as it were, as a result of the work on other elements of the design and it cannot be changed.
BS Yes, but your inventiveness is not just the uniqueness, the exceptionality of each project, but also the inventing of new structures or connections between materials that have not existed before. Admirable is the inventiveness of the Kunsthaus in Bregenz: e.g. the way large glass panels are suspended without any holes being punched through them, or the structure of the curtain wall. You create new tensions between materials that are in common use today.
Do you feel that you are a bit of an inventor when you design? The discoverer of the potential hidden in the materials of a structure?
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