While he was working to complete the Almannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum in southernNorway in 2016, Swiss architect Peter Zumthor asked Norwegian architecturalhistorian Mari Lending to engage in a dialogue about the project. In meandering, impressionisticstyle, and drawing on their favorite writers, such as Johann Peter Hebel,Stendhal, Nabokov, or T.S. Eliot, their exchanges explore how history, time, and temporalitiesreverberates across Zumthor’s oeuvre. Looking back, he ponders on howa feeling of history has informed his attempts at emotional reconstruction by meansof building, from architectural interventions in dramatic landscapes to his design forthe redevelopment of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which conceived thebuilding on a suitably grand urban scale.
This small, beautifully designed book records the conversation between Zumthor andLending, accompanied by photographs taken by the renowned Swiss architecturalphotographer Hèlène Binet. The resulting book is a surprisingly revelatory view of oneof the most interesting and restlessly creative architects of our era.
