Scores and images. On the insufficiency of representation

Abstract

The general qualities of Peter Zumthor’s work, an extremely careful, sensitive, slow and respectful craft, make his nearly perfect architecture a very interesting object for analysis and research. All the more so in these times of vertiginous production and an almost blind exaltation of the new and the original, a time when the discipline of architecture, and consumer society in general, are moving more and more away from constructive traditions and from the wisdom of master builders. His work is a somewhat ‘resisting’ position, a fruitful and hopeful moving forward against the current, carried out on the basis of a very special reading of the place and its traditions, a very wise and precise selection of materials and a desire to approach technical and sensitive excellence in each and every aspect of the process and the built result.