The Art of Harmony — Jazzing Proust
by Maroje Mrduljaš

Serious architects traditionally write, because the act of building decently is inseparable from sensible conceptualisation of ideas about building. For Zumthor, the architectural essence consists of simultaneous concepts about material and spiritual form, gradually concocted into a building substance through strenuous contemplation. One’s personal, Proustian history, consisting of tectonic images and intimate impressions, is also involved in that purification process. Zumthor shows a poetic approach to that imagery, conveying his rich planning experience, which in his texts appears lyrically subtle and uncompromisingly determined at the same time, in a concise, but unrestrained discourse. It reveals his excitement about creation, which essentially includes a seemingly hidden, but still considerable ethic and aesthetic strain. Zumthor’s works and thoughts persist on the phenomenological concept of architecture, understood “as strict discipline” (Husserl). That form of strictness is far from copying literal ambience references, because it subtly researches basic sensibility forms devoted to the spirit of location, material and the programme task.

The spontaneity and clarity of the message in Zumthor’s essays are a reflection and a consequence of systematic thinking, a passionate, but obsessive approach to the archetypal task of taming the amorphous nature of building materials and the abstractness of space. The texture of his paragraphs is a faithful representative of the architecture he creates: its foundation is the work in living matter. Particular steps in shaping a text or a building show their autochthonous existentially founded identity. They follow their particular regularities, whose sedimentation forms a logical entity. It is an architectural and textual substance, understood as totality, imbuing formal (aesthetic) tools with sense and purpose.

Zumthor persists on the purity of the builder’s calling, so that the reflection of his didactic texture discovers a stress on the thoroughness of craft, but his essays certainly encompass contemporary, cultural topics not bound by time. His contemplation on architecture is a witty extension of carefully chosen influences: syncopated rhythms of cool jazz, Joseph Beuys’s conceptual art, Peter Handke’s writing… Those references are in no way random, because like impressionist imprints, and in their manner, they economically participate in the explanation of “beauty’s solid core”, which Zumthor’s buildings also radiate. In this sense, Zumthor’s work points to refined, meticulously balanced architectural threads, which are not just phantasms of personal preferences, but also objective intellectual spatial matrices, emerging from the understanding of the building substance’s existential totality.

Zumthor is, before anything else, a very considerate builder, deeply immersed into reality free of substitutes and insincerity. Zumthor stands on the first line of defence against dissolution of building substance in cheap banality and spectacle. He displays an ability always inherently present and highly valued in architectural theory and practice: the art of linking elaborate craftsmanship with intellectual insight, which avoids to literally replace tectonics by linguistics, the art of recognition of particular urban values. His every sentence and work shows this masterful harmony, translated from architecture into a text.