DZNR

pace as we experience it is a phenomenon of time (Paul Klee?). Our perception of space is transitory. We see space only in constant flux as affected by time, by life passing by. Space is what happens from moment to moment.

I have always been deeply intrigued by the fact that as an architect I am potentially able to create space as a sensitive body which - still in itself - has the capacity to frame the movement of life and more, to echo and even influence life taking place. Life takes its place. Creating some of the places life takes - that is architecture to me. It makes me think of an art form which seems to concentrate on the particlar relationship between life and things: still life.

THE HOUSE WITHOUT A FORM And within the house, a sequence of seven spaces. We design it, which means we search for it in our memory, intuitively, imagining it to be a real thing of architectural flesh and blood. We look for and concentrate on the things we know about it; the variations of its use, its possible users, and its place, in order to find out what we don't know about it yet.

We think of this house in terms of
scents and smells and light perfumes
of sounds, reverberations, noise
in terms of dimness, shadow, light
enclosure and exposure
openness and containment
intimacy and spaciousness
density and looseness
looking out, being inside
a charged composition of
materials ordered in rooms
oak, brass, wax
a sequence of atmospheres of
colors, shines and hues
thresholds
seams and joints from
one material piece to another
tactile qualities.
We don't think of this house in terms of form.

We close out eyes and look for this plausible sequence of atmospheres perfectly apt for their place and use and for the freedom of their users. Form is not yet an issue. We think only about sensation, about materials and sounds and smells and shadows and light and about what our hands touch and what our feet walk on and about what the rooms and their sequence allow us to experience and feel and about the way these qualities might fit together and suit their place and enhance the different ways of use.

REAL SENSATIONS
The final presentation of each project might be a big, collage-like installation in 1:1 scale demonstrating the concrete, physical qualities of the seven rooms and their sequential composition. It should allow us to experience the sensual and essential qualities which generate the atmosphere, while avoiding the formal, metaphorical and anecdotal and symbolic. The presentation might be accompanied by stricly descriptive words (no comments, no meaning, no philosophy, no interpretation, just concretely specified qualities). It shows the real materials that dreams are made of. The final result of the exercise could also be a short movie with stills of the sequence of rooms, traces of activities taking place and much more.

The exercise is well executed if the presentation conveys rich and precise, straightforward, and subtle images of the concrete qualities of the designed sequence, making it a pleasure to imagine dwelling and inhabitation, giving us the impression that the family would feel at home in the proposed environment.

THE FAMILY
The house in question is to be designed for a middle-class family: parents, two children, and grandmother living in the same house. Such a house may have upwards of ten rooms. The students select seven rooms which will determine the quality of the house, and the qualities of living in it. The location of the house is to be decided.

THE FORMS TO COME
Designing the body of architecture. Looking for the guts, the anatomy, the soul of a building, discovering the material and sensual content of this beautiful physiognomy which will eventually find its proper form. This design exercise stops at the delicate line just before form begins to emerge out of the process of sensual compostiion. If the composition works, it will be easy to imagine the resulting architectural forms - in fact they will almost be there already.

IMAGES AND MEMORIES
Designing to me is probably more re-discovering than inventing; it means to reconfigure, to recognize, to re-assemble impressions and emotions which I have experienced and now consciously try to recall. The images stored in my memory are personal co-incidents of form and meaning, that is: from image to image they hold traces of form and related meaning.

The images remembered are not fragments frozen in a definite form and stored in the architects of my mind. The process of remembering is dynamic and creative. It might be called an imaginative re-construction which always produces new aspects and qualities of the remembered depending on the actual way I look at it. Every time my mind touches my memories, they change a little.

As an architect, looking for the body of this new building, for these not yet existing spaces, these meaningful, sensitive, sensual rooms, and materializations, I start to wander around in the landscape of my images to track down qualities that refer to the object of my search and ignite my imagination. Thus, I look for the not yet unknown architecture in my memory as if it had always been there.

Peter Zumthor, January 1999