Between bodies and buildings: Representation as embodied thinking in the pedagogy of Peter Zumthor​

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Isabel Potworowski

University of Cincinnati, USA

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What is the boundary between flesh and space, between body and building? Marco Frascari wrote in his 1987 text “The body and architecture in the drawings of Carlo Scarpa” of the “alienation of human corporality” from building. Modern projects, he writes, tend to move away from being constructed by and interpreted through the human form, toward a “Cartesian rationality,” contributing to buildings that “lack human reality.” Frascari shows how Scarpa uses representations of the human figure in his drawings as a “modern usage of anthropomorphic practice.” 

 

In this paper, I will examine this connection between representation practices and the body. How do architectural drawings and models negotiate the boundary of flesh and space? How can they contribute to in-corporating the human body in the design and construction of buildings?  

 

I will address this question by examining the work of contemporary Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. Atelier Zumthor’s  drawings and models evoke the embodied experience of the future building, especially by the materials that he uses: drawings with watercolours and pastels, and models of stone, wax, plasticine, clay, lead, bronze, wood, charcoal, sand, pigmented concrete, among other materials. 

 

While much has been written about Zumthor’s projects, little has been published about his teaching at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, where he taught from 1996 until 2007, and for which he followed a phenomenological approach. A primary focus of his teaching was how representation practices evoke the embodied and material experience of architecture. 

 

In this paper, I will analyze three dimensions of the relation between body and sited building, and how drawings and models mediate this relation in the design process. I will focus on Zumthor’s teaching, while also making connections with projects that were ongoing in his Atelier during his teaching period (primarily the Bruder Klaus chapel and the Kolumba museum). 

 

1. The landscape as a body. Zumthor writes of the landscape as a living body, and as architectural interventions as acupuncture. He also describes landscapes in relation to our own bodies: the traces of use in a landscape, and understanding ourselves as being part of the history that landscapes and sites contain. 

2. The building as a body. Zumthor writes of technical drawings as anatomical, of a building as having joints and skin. In his teaching, students made what he called “anatomical models” that show the essence of the material or bodily qualities of a building. 

3. The building as a container of bodies. In Zumthor’s practice, large models are made as “theatres of life,” showing people and objects. In his teaching, students make models an photograph them to depict the life that would unfold there.

 

The primary source for this research will be the archives at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, which I have already consulted. I will also examine the relation of body and building as expressed in Zumthor’s writings and interviews, as well as my own interviews with Zumthor and his collaborators that I have carried out as part of my ongoing research. 

 

By examining Zumthor’s teaching, including previously unpublished coursework and student projects, this paper will contribute to scholarship on pedagogical approaches that bring awareness to the connections between our bodies and the sited buildings that we design and inhabit.