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 Helene Binet.