Lecture by Peter Zumthor

thank you good evening good evening ladies and gentlemen I will make my introduction naturally in English so that Peters inter can understand what I see about him and the beginning how is it possible to introduce a monument such as Peters in tow of course all of you are here because you know a lot about his work so can i what can I say about his work which I could add to what you know of course you know that Peter Zampa toe is the Pritzker Prize of 2009 and is one of the more the world most famous architect in the world since his first published work in 1985 Peters inter has played with shapes of such a powerful evidence that it was too so easy to categorize in in some kind of a minimalist family of architect bringing all the details and resolutions to such a precision that nothing seems to be in contradiction with these results that sort of a case acceptance is quite much dangerous because Peters interest projects have nothing to do with some kind of a monolithic attitude on the opposite his attitude is to throw himself into the confrontation even the contradiction of his practice and I remember a good friend of mine coming back from the terms of Val's and completely excited to describe me all the complexity in the use of materials material night in many different scales of uses and implementations so if Peter's Intel seems to have such a high discipline in the perfection of his practice it is always because he wants to get up to the point of what is to be said and understood on the place another strong memory of mine is one of his latest work the Columba when is a Museum of the Prezi the precision of his architecture is meant to let us concentrate on the measure graphy on the one hand and the relations of the internal world with the city around on the other Peters interests work are never simple they have always a high level of complexity and tonight he is planning to share with us one of the latest challenges that are set for our contemporary society which is what do we do with our own identity so please give a great welcome to this fantastic architect Peter hunter good to be here thank you tonight I'm going to talk about a work I started we start at seven or eight years ago I should go away from these guys huh okay and it could look that it takes another will take another seven year or another 14 years to finish it you will see it's not easy why am I doing this why I am why do I work on this male fabric project in Holland and Ivan there's one interest one it let me give you an example some I don't know 8 10 years ago with the students we went to the outskirts of Milano studying all these amazing factories which have in the periphery of Milano have been constructed in the last fifty seven hundred years why did we do this because I personally like a lot the structure of engineered buildings where you have the feeling there is no architect it's only a civil engineer who has made a very logical kind of structure and I always admired these buildings because I think they have a lot of strengths what I see there and what we studied with the students I call the anatomy like the bones of a body there is the skin and there are the beautiful eyes and everything but there's also Anatomy which comes from the inside and this is what I like about architecture not only industrial architecture that there is an idea of the structure inside the structure is not something superfluous which afterwards gets clad or covered okay this is one interest so when the telephone call come from yoculan there would be a small competition in this metal accomplice with a year maybe we could deal with this kind of anatomies industrial and Atmos let's go and have a look so I went there and going for the competition the architects were invited to look at the side and this was sort of a real disappointment because it was raining and they put put me in the Holiday Inn Hotel so I said I will never come back to these plaques in my whole life if somebody puts me the Holiday Inn hotel he has no idea who so please so sort of against my grain I went to look I went onto the tour to look at the building complex the next morning together with my colleagues and this I have to admit was more and more interested so interesting so my negative a key attitude sort of dissolved huh I became more interested than positive about what I saw we had they gave us a tour of about two hours going through all the buildings you will see in a moment I'm in the middle okay they gave us this tour we walked through all these seven eight nine different buildings of the production process and then something strange happened this this factory went out of business in the 80s and at the end of the tour in building called male market in germán I don't know how to pronounce this gotcha but you understand male magazine so at the end on the top floor where our tour ended my Spanish assistant said look over there in the rubble in the waste there is something like a calendar with a beautiful image on it so he went over and came back with this calendar and on this collet this was very impressive you could see that the workers had crossed out every day and all of a sudden it stopped the last day of work and afterwards the factory went out of business and then we looked at the image and the image was from Switzerland from the mountains and it said the village of files so from then on everybody knew I was going to win the competition so here you see what I'm going to talk about here we start with the history the city of Leyden around the city of light we have the screen this defense ring the fortification with the busted bastions and on the bastions this is great the windmills for me as if Swiss this is great that on the best end you have mid windmills so it's not only about the war and defense so we are talking now about is it this one yes we'll be talking about this one so we have the fortification about the city you know this in the bastion and there came the 19th century industrialization something positive as you can see all the smoke and so this was a positive sign of a new area to come and then they started to build the mill fabric the flour factory first building the grain as you can see was brought in on water and then lift the top to the grain elevator and then produced and this is I think something incredibly fascinating I studied over meals because these mills as you know they work with gravity so you bring the stuff up and in the production it goes down and at the end you have to flour and this is also why that in all the old mill buildings you have a lot if it's not storage if it's process you have a lot of floor wooden floors and in the wooden floors they are full of holes this is because they always change the pipes you know they sort of mixed I don't understand it but you can see they mix different grains and as they prover produced the flour was made from this and this and this this was always changed fascinating flour factories so it gets bigger on the whole belt or the factory start I think this is the beginning of ankor factory where they made this huge iron anchors for ships now this is a anchor Factory here this is the male fabric in the back beautiful now you see the grain elevators going up and so on now some architect went to Italy and then you came back studied a little bit of Renaissance architecture here this is a really good one but it's still the same thing this is the anchor Park and the anchor factory still getting bigger so it must have been a good business here it's interesting that the buildings come and buildings go after it I'll show you a sequence and you can see this must have been beautiful in these times you needed something and you built it you don't ask a committee and wait seven and a half years until they give you a permission you need something then you do it and if you have to do a new building you take out one away maybe if you don't use it anymore beautiful times but all the hotter hand I have to say it's too bad that only a little bit of this is left so for breakfast and over there this is a cotton factory cartoon Factory bon voyage spin that I in my language the maze of brick huge complex in the back almost as we have it now the anchor Factory monument monumental so I mean if you look at these now if you look at this now this is very beautiful but of course if you work there or live there as a worker maybe it was not so beautiful this we have to remember our I I'm remembering so this is the complex more or less as we have it now more or less this is multiplication this is cotton this is anchor and this you see is the workers so this is impresses the workers they lived right around the industrial complex see this is the workers of the factories and this is the metric and this is I think a very important moment anchor factory government also you can see the city starts to say we don't need industry anymore it's in the wrong place let's do all apart let's reestablish a green belt around the city and go away with these terrible factory things and then also they took away all the housing of the workers and this you see afterwards this is still a problem today because the new things they built there I think are of low quality there is no infrastructure there is not much here happening so this now has become maybe the most simple or the worst part of the city in a way because there's no public life and I think this has to do with this large destruction and an absence of I'm sorry to say intelligent planning at least that's how it looks to be okay so you see the cotton one is still there and the male fabric stays it may have a big still working but everything else already gone this image are when I look at this image I can hear the sound of the factory can you hear it oh it must have been an amazing sound of this huge huge volumes working metal brick their industrial heritage out of use so why did this not get distracted there was a Dutch guy who went to New York in the 80s and there he saw some lofts and he saw that the Americans were changing lofts into apartments then he went home to Holland said hey guys I'm going to buy this Mesa brick and I'm going to make lofts out of it so this is the 80s and he was the only one he had to fight for this because the city also wanted to take this down in the meantime I have to tell you this guy is my client he is sitting here somewhere and but he owns this now and this was hard for him to maintain it but now times have changed now this is industrial heritage and if we want to change a little bit we have to ask a lot of people whether we can do it or not you know but we agree it is it doesn't heritage but it's funny you know somebody is doing something against authorities and now authorities have come along so we're looking at this made for it now out of use impressive it's a monument to monumental but it is closed brick beautiful this for instance is these beautiful facades as you can see they are not the structural brickwork so you can see this is so that I think this is amazing this is sort of like a box with a very delicate membrane of glass and bricks hanging from the inside nice construction and this is the inside of the same building and there you can see it's hanging from the steel structure the hole so if you start to study these kind of anatomies of the buildings you can discover how they were made for their function sometimes delicate sometimes thick and heavy the silos underneath the silos with the funnels like cathedrals it's a little bit if you walk through the doors reminds me in the Cathedral of Cordoba and Spain if you ever have been there where you have different patterns into each other the Gothic one that the Moorish one this this is the building with which have to carry heavy loads email magazine you can tell with the mushroom columns and the slabs and this is this fantastic double helix where two things for the flower they use this over the grain yeah this is the building my client saw in New York and this is an often York so this is the source of inspiration so there was the council years later the competition asked for a concept of preservation and here is the concept this is when they built these fine steel structures this one so I were I have to tell you I worked in my canteen in Switzerland I worked for 10 years for the tank my play again for this the modern department for monuments and sites for the preservation so when I looked at this I have this eye in the competition I looked at this and said this is beautiful but if I have to redo this with our new laws of insulation and not make it making double and triple windows and so on and so on the beauty will be gone completely and I will not be able to reconstruct this I could only keep it but I cannot keep it so from there came the idea of the competition let's get rid of all the results because facades are too difficult to maintain or it's actually not possible let's get rid of all the facades but keep the structure so we said we proposed to the people in Holland in the competition that we would keep all the anatomies of all buildings entirely we would not take anything away but we would make new facades for every building so we built these models of the structures you see and then you could see if you take away the facades you can see it's a collection of industrial building types steel frame mushroom column of a slab this one please note how the columns get thinner to the top and imagine the tons of flour the building had to carry this is all in our model see this is not the reality this is our company our competition entry we made these models to photograph them to study them this is you can see the concrete frame building one of the younger ones or this here is the older one oldest one case cell house this is the only shell building conventional shell building with puncture windows and a vault all the other ones are skeletons and more modern type holidays and then if you look at the plants I think this is amazing I mean if you I would be proud you know if I would could have done a building with such a floor plan ever beautiful you can see an incredible power of composition of it that it doesn't come from competition as we know these are the batteries for the different grains of the silos here coming in different phases and so on this is the on ground floor where you get this forest of columns and this wood there's the water you'll see later so we are quite excited about these things here and you see the steel frame buildings very subtle sections this is a one of my big complaints in my office that my young collaborators they always do tabs and they never do sections and every second say day I say please do a section for me because I think sections are beautiful can you can see here and you know what if I look at things like this I have a feeling as an architect I don't have to do much maybe my task here is to be clever enough not to destroy and add just a few things to keep the strength of what we see you'll see later whether you succeed in this beautiful sections and this is how it looks so do you take away the facades and then you start to see this collection of building types here and then we start to add new facades and the new facades should highlight however they were are being made they should highlight of course the anatomies of the buildings so this is what we did you see we didn't do any facades we just worked with light until this was it's more like a promise the work is not yet done but the promise is let's do a new facades and then we also needed an idea for the silos because the silos happen to be completely closed of course so we said the silos they will get a perforation okay for some reason this was good enough so surprisingly we did win this competition and also the people from the monument department in Holland they liked the idea shared my idea that it could be worthwhile to maintain all the physicality inside and make news results urban analysis clear the easiest thing the male fabric is a monument like the church and other things the male fabric is a monument in the city in the townscape of Leiden easy to see it's great it always reminds reminds me of Palazzo in Italy so sometimes if you come to a Italian town outside you have the four steps away castelo this is how it looks all the important monuments in the city we are here let me go back home so if you go there now from the distance it's a monument if you come close you cannot get in it's fenced in it's completely locked up it's not part of the city it's there's a fence there some open fields there's parking so this whole thing is not at all of course integrated to the city so it's important to understand for us to understand what we could do it's important to see how it developed as I already told you one building two buildings three buildings so what you don't see that I already told you what you don't see that sometimes they took away former buildings protein new ones so I think we said we can learn from this or we keep with this we can take away we can keep and we can also add let's see 78 and this is the actual situation now so these this is a building not very interesting there's a fence going there this is a very cheap building also not very interesting and here very nice two buildings of the administration this is a bicycle shared and this is the administration trees which is not the industrial type of building you see them this is this this is this and there this is also a nondescript student house I think there are some shops there there's parking and these so quite nice this is the bicycle shed and here we have two a piece for the administration so this was a little bit a heavy one now we proposed for the monumental thora T's in Holland this is easy we said we have to cut connect the complex hid in these three directions to the city open it up this is the easy part maintaining if you see it now okay so this I mean we said this building has to go it's not the industrial type building yeah no problem this building same thing has to go but this was a bit hard to swallow for the people from the monument department because this is administration and the bicycle shop it's actually part of the complex but our argument said we want to keep the industrial buildings we need some space to create a dialogue between old and you to make this connection to the city and to the people and also on the economic level you need some new buildings to make it feasible economically the whole complex this belongs to the task here too so yellow goes away sorry about that I mean you know this is all on paper they are still standing maybe after this lecture somebody will go into damage you keep distances not a good idea huh so okay what what is left here now is Einstein gravy Avenue sucks save and 7/7 old industrial buildings industrial topologies all different in this kind of shape and this now would become our area of intervention to create new urban energy and connect the whole place to the city bring new life to this Monument so as you know we do have a strategy for these skies and we know what we keep there but we need of course more so blue is heavy concrete buildings in the model this means lightweight steel buildings introduced public infrastructure now while I'm showing you this looks like we would have made a map of this in a couple of months too but this I have to tell you is the result of seven years of work because we have two new parks here they are designed anchor Park Katoon Park you know why they have these names they are called like this now but at the moment they are completely nondescript green areas and after a while now we got the city of Leiden enthusiastic about the idea to create new to new public parks here and they did give the Commission and for landscape architects from Zurich they made design with us for these two parks to make this kind of connection you know what was the biggest I don't know what maybe I should tell you that I think this is interesting we always went to talk to the city of so authoritative Leiden my client is project manager me and a couple of other people and for a long time the city authorities of Leiden they didn't really trust us you know because they thought there always only three or four people coming in a project like this usually there are 20 consultants on the table there must be something strange so it took quite at some time that they developed a trust because maybe they thought this is a person who says he wants to restore the old thing and thus assumed he has the permission he does all the new things and says now I'm out of business I'm not doing the old thing and now we are in a point where they believe my client and I guess they also believe me and that's why we can do now things like that that we can do these public parks together in a joint venture hopefully or let me see I'm sorry back back I'm not very good at this but okay the city has this kind of project see this is the city project the city says what we want to do we would like to have a continuous Park all around the city on a fortification I'm not too sure whether I like this project myself but I understand it because as you know nowadays people if you ask planners and people I think everybody wants always to connect sometimes I think it would be much better not to connect to keep single identities and so on but you can see there are large parts where you have the feeling they will never make it to connect it just will stay an idea but anyway here we have a long connection we need a new bridge there and we yeah you see the idea okay so it makes part of the city kind of the idea for Leiden and then the next thing we introduce this new canal and this canal this is already water here and this here we create a veil fabric Harbor and from here we want to go by boat to the city or from the city by boat to the metropic Harbor so this is new this is new and this is you so we say there's the railway station could be beautiful when you could go from the railway station by boat to the Basel break okay so my client put these ideas of this what we could do we could have a male fabric boat I think there was an interview in the newspaper and the taxi boat people they already are interested don't they called him right away that yeah we want to talk to you so it's a maybe a realistic idea to come up with the connection that you can visit our area by boat bridges I mean maybe you share this I like bridges I think bridges are great it doesn't actually really matter how they are designed it's good if they're nicely designed but much much more exciting is always the moment you have a bridge at all so bridge you reach you bridge so you see we're preparing our ground here for this connection cars cars come and go into there and there will be an underground garage here and another one here in two different phases so that the whole area here will be a pedestrian area and then you will see of course for some of the new buildings it's necessary to offer a direct access to the parking garage as you know there's two connections water connections motorized connections bridges introducing new buildings curating public spaces maybe this is the most difficult this is what we have so far we have the bridges we have the water you have this water we open this so we have this now we put the build the new buildings here ah if this since these industrial buildings have been designed to carry heavy loads flour they can carry a lot more so that's why on the and here and here this is just symbolized in the model we can add floors we call the crowns so we know on all the old types we have the possibility to add things not on the steel buildings they are limited but all the other ones also well they can carry much more so the crowds now the first thing which comes into existence is made for big square we put the building here and here for the first time we jump over and so do you know this is fortification line and this is City line so I have to confess that this is always discussed again in my office whether this is correct a new brilliant architect comes to my office again and says here they should all be like there why is this open and then it takes another two days of this rushon and then we think again now we have a more open kind of system which comes from there are open setting and not a classic istic kind of 19th century city block so here we jump over the water and I create here we create this and we create this we call this now the male fabric passage going through these buildings going down and going over to the park so let me see okay here you see this in the model so to me I think this is a great potential I would like to do a building on the water across from these other two buildings also on the word adds on you see so this is the next with these two buildings we make the transition over to the residential area because we don't want to be monumental all the way to there but we would like to be friendly at nice with these people and these people around but still it should be part of the whole composition here so this we call Aspen Square because I like the name the way it sounds so we looked at the trees the aspen trees and they don't look so nice so we have a nice name of the tipper puppy is not yet so nice but maybe we find good species of Aspen's in German city puppy SP or SP okay okay made for big square aspen square completely different kind of situation so this should be more industrial and this should be a bit more domestic you see this in a moment so the idea behind this would be that I can create a series of interlocking distinct urban spaces let's see so what we have now use this is like social engineering we have to see what do we want to do we say the male fabric is basically a residential area there's no big dominance of offices basically it's a residential so it's living it started living we want to have students young professional singles families and elderly couples and then we want to have our today studios and offices secondarily for creative professionals we want to have communal building for some public venues we can use for our hotel and for the guests and so on and then we think we should have a series of magnets buildings which are more which are of a bigger interest in local so this is urban elements attracting visitors from the outside creating urban interest and an urban sense of place in our case we think you'll see this right away this should be a hotel it should be a very special fitness and spa my client is running one of these things very successful in another place we would like to do I made four big house of design and then we would like to anchor Park as you know Katoon Park and the mayor of big Harbor in cafe so these things here they come out of social engineering and so on process of talking of several years that we now more or less think this is the direction we want to go we know a lot but for me as a planner and architect and for everyone everybody else it's very important to be to stay flexible because this can always change we should be so what we did what I'm not going to show you I'm telling you in words we know the potential of or every old building by now because many of these functions we make projects and build student projects for this house and for the other house we try to do where should we do the hotel and so we know the potential of the structures and that leads us this this kind of mix we want to do this is the upper floors of the buildings I think you can read it so this is more about living and residential working meanings ateliers and studios it goes here we have apartments where we think you can have if the son of 18 or 20 wants to move out of the apartment it can be in the bay it can be the first on the ground floor or you can take of your older parents that you take care of your parents down there so this is a part which is not so much architectural but for me this is incredibly important that from the inside out I would know with each building how this would work so these are the main dedications you see the yellow ones or these things are the buildings we think are of a city interest and this is more living at all now maybe even more important to create public space this is ground floor so in these buildings we just saw before the ground floor is even more important because on the ground floor we need an even distribution of good functions and entrances and so on do you really have this I would call is this mixture of many things which make a place livable so you can see what we have here and I'll show you okay very important the arrows every arrow is an entrance now you can imagine how life takes place you can see yellow here yellow cafes and restaurants the harbor cafe there is Caffe Trieste you know Caffe Trieste oh okay you will it's it's good that you don't know you will know soon because this is our idea this to make a cafeterias the delicatessen there Harbor cafe and the student Kaveri Bakery in the student power there then we have very important these blue things they create addresses because these are the lobbies to the buildings the entrances where you put your bicycle or maybe in this one could be that there will be James James here would be in the lobby and you can ask him for air airport transfers he would water your plants he would walk your dog at all this would be you can imagine what kind of people could live in the greenhouse apartments there up there so they need to change the entrance of course in the student power something else the entrance there's no jail is there so lobby lobby red is retail so retail this the shops this is not a big shopping thing cos its retail for everyday you need somebody you need a barber a hairdresser you Anton you can match it what we what we need for newspapers and all this there with the workshop building we have the bookstore in many of these things here we have already people who want to do this not in not in all of them but the main thing there is an interest and this takes years to collect these interests and so on this is the exit from the underground parking garage which is there in this covered area with the forest of columns you please go on okay so first we look at the redeveloped buildings I mean I'm sorry maybe I'm boring you completely with these kinds of things but that's life okay first ideas about the silo give all that we may have a big hotel here we go reception so what you're looking at here are images of our models so we do know computer renderings we build big models as big as possible put them in the daylight or in the artificial light and then make photos of this and there's a rural not more than 20 percent Photoshop a-- otherwise the things start to look that so this Edward Hopper composition this is actually the this is how it looks there and this is the lobby of the hotel also this and can you see somehow it seems to be so easy to do this everything is already there most of the things we are looking at is historic and of course it's much more beautiful than our model huh so in the male bucket time there is the this bit thing here you know what I mean not too bad of locate the city and this is on top for the fitness inspire we need we need some huge spaces with a big span and the whole factory doesn't offer any big spans because always these columns very tight columns so this is one of our crowns on top where we add all the water and all these things on top because this times we can do it it's still not as heavy as flour this is on top of fitness and spa this is the fitness in spoil from the outside with the Caffe Trieste of the first for the first of ground floor up there there will be tango dancing every night this is clear so this is this steel frame building also very beautiful all different floors this is a top floor these are all existing things we try to keep of course many old things there now I can see the boring part this over and you like to look at these images so okay this is also old stuff I wouldn't even know what they use this for this is huge trumpets of tin from the outside same building out of design our virtual building which is the communal building top floor you can show movies all today this is the old structure lobby entrance or except one or two windows new everything existing lawyer dentist architect graphic designer oh okay for the architect it's not messy enough think if you you just put in people and a little bit of furniture and then you have this if we if we got this is all for free at the moment this is a model as architects we know to go to get at this point that all of these things are exposed there and they and the ceilings are not covered with all kind of fire protection panels and all an installation panels that we can really keep this so basic as I show it this is the other seven years of work here that's it's clear but at this is where we want to go so this is our Dahle under fruit market and the passage looking over to the aspen square I can redo these images to give some hope to possible buyers or renters and also to give some hope to us that we think this could be beautiful to do house of design see that night from the outside ok the last images this will be the most beautiful thing if the project would be able to generate addresses and distinct spaces so this is from anchor Park back closer one of our new bridges there this is the passage you see it's at the moment we don't show you the facades it's because we haven't done them yet we only started to do them we want to do for each building we want to do a specific facade not commercial facades of course over the whole complex with real a specific high-class results for each building appropriate to its use so this needless to say is made for big Harbor this is Aspen Square and you bridge there the other bridge Oh air this is my f of X square man magazine this is the where you saw these people swimming that's up there this here this way fabric hotel where you see there but you can see how yeah that's another discussion they didn't put the images of the hotel rooms here too bad okay tell them to do that coffee Trieste again this is from Katoon Park site approaching the metal brick complex now I think these these are the images I really like the this is for sometime the first time we really managed to make a model where I start to really feel the sense of place so this is a new building in Aspen Square to decide to do other buildings and these are these utterly spaces on the ground floor and here I think this is only a model but I think this gives me a lot of hope for this building we know that we might be able to you know mechanize others on this side let me see what else we have here yeah same thing so images you saw before many of them I think you were not in the space and now you're in the space this is so difficult to make so I was so happy to see that last week when they came up with this that now we're there we're learning to really do something which starts to be that you feel you're there this is the other building on aspen square the long run these are family buildings both of them this is an existing bridge here and this model here is a sketch model you know this is another fight I had in my office the young people they are so good at the computers so they always sit in these computers and they also maybe you do this too they also sketch with a computer so the design with the computer and this is and then as I please let's sketch with models and this is now sketching with models we have an idea of these apartments and Aspen's we're on this side creating this long passage here and I like this very much because it's really getting why these are the who helped me to put this together huh Anna from London this arnica from dusseldorf this time a real dutch guy and this Kyle from Paris Dutch guy again hair done Giacomo Italian Giovanni Cecilia Kevin Massachusetts Nikolai is from southern Germany Philip say sky oh she she left me she is not in the office anymore but this is Sarah from Berlin algae also my tennis partner Suzy from London she was crying a little and she went home a couple of weeks ago thank you you

Channel: A+ Architecture In Belgium

Views: 97,745

Rating: 4.9563241 out of 5

Keywords: Peter Zumthor (Architect), Bozar Architecture, A+, Architecture, Lecture (Type Of Public Presentation), Brussels (City/Town/Village), Belgium (Country)

Id: N4QsGTZJwuA

Length: 68min 7sec (4087 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 20 2015