The Childhood Remembrance –Or The Trace Of Proust– In Peter Zumthor

Abstract

By a double testimony, written and constructed, Peter Zumthor manifests explicitly the childhood footprint that underlies his creative impulse, as a presence, in his “thinking about architecture.” The correlation of both records, literary and architectural, allows us to outline the germ of an epistemology of architecture from childhood memory as well as a re-reading of Marcel Proust through the work of the architect. From this original territory of the experience, the analogy between the evocation of the text “In search of the lost architecture” (2010), and the atmosphere of his work at the Serpentine Gallery Pavillion, Hortus conclusus (2011), which invites us to understand the imprint of childhood as a powerful leitmotif of his creative impulse. From this childhood scene, we will conduct a reading of the pavilion as a journey through time, penetrating the memory space where architecture seeks to recover an awareness which we do not dare to understand while it dwells in our own body.