Peter Zumthor

Mari Lending

While he was working to complete the Allmannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum in southern Norway in 2016, Swiss architect Peter Zumthor asked Norwegian architectural historian Mari Lending to engage in a dialogue about the project. In meandering, impressionistic style, and drawing on their favorite writers, such as Johann Peter Hebel, Stendhal, Nabokov, and T. S. Eliot, their exchanges explore how history, time, and temporalities reverberate across Zumthor's oeuvre. Looking back, Zumthor ponders on how a feeling of history has informed his attempts at emotional reconstruction by means of building, from architectural interventions in dramatic landscapes to his design for the redevelopment of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which conceived the building on a suitably grand urban scale. This small, beautifully designed book records the conversation between Zumthor and Lending, accompanied by photographs taken by the renowned Swiss architectural photographer H�l�ne Binet. The resulting book is a surprisingly revelatory view of one of the most interesting and restlessly creative architects of our era.

A Feeling of History

Erik Langdalen

A gem of midcentury architecture examined with previously unpublished archival material Sverre Fehn's Nordic Pavilion in Venice is a masterpiece of postwar architecture. The young Norwegian architect won the competition in 1958; the building was inaugurated in 1962. In minute detail, this book presents the history of the origins and making of the Nordic pavilion, covering everything from the geopolitical context in an increasingly tense cold-war atmosphere to the aggregates in the concrete of the audacious roof construction. Sverre Fehn, Nordic Pavilion, Venice also documents the vast cast involved in the making of the Nordic Pavilion, from kings, prime ministers, bureaucrats, ambassadors, museum directors, architects and a myriad of artists' associations to Venetian dignitaries, engineers, gardeners, lawyers and plumbers. Richly illustrated with previously unpublished images, the archival evidence also sheds new light on one of the great Nordic architects of the recent past.

Voices from the Archives

Sverre Fehn, Nordic Pavilion Venice

Thordis Arrhenius

Wallis Miller

Jérémie McGowan

Seemingly immobile and durable, architecture remains a challenge in the modern world of collecting and exhibiting. From the late eighteenth century onward, divergent conventions of display have been conflated with urgent discussions of how material culture is handed down, distributed, appropriated, and evaluated. Place and Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture investigates historical and con temporary practices of displaying architecture, whether in full scale or as fragments, models, or two-dimensional representations. Exploring questions of circulation and temporality, issues of institution and canon, and the discourse and politics of architectural spaces on exhibit, the book's essays discuss the ambiguous status of architecture as an object of display. Contributions from leading scholars in the new research field of architectural exhibitions reveal the centrality of the exhibition in defining and redefining the notion of architecture and its history.

Mari Lending

Books

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