Zumthor in Mexico

August 16, 2019

Zumthor in Mexico

Zumthor in Mexico: Swiss Architects in Mexico
Arquine, July 2019

In 2017, as part of the MEXTRÓPOLI Festival, Pritzker Prize–winning architect Peter Zumthor (born 1943) was invited to Mexico City to participate in a series of public discussions about architecture and the city. Zumthor in Mexico, the first publication in Arquine’s new Swiss Architects in Mexico series, collects the architect’s Mexico City conversations in a handsome volume, featuring edited transcriptions of Zumthor’s talks with journalist Nicolás Alvarado, artist Pedro Reyes and architects Tatiana Bilbao, Gloria Cabral and Rozana Montiel, among others.

In these lively interviews, Zumthor explains his personal approach to architecture as it applies to a wide range of subjects, such as: where design ideas come from, how ideas move from conceptualization to materialization, the importance of the landscape and the natural environment to design and his sense of the responsibility of the architect in the present.

dDAB Commentary:

Just about any book with Peter Zumthor's name on the cover is a desirable title. Peter Zumthor Works and Thinking Architecture, both published in the late 1990s, were expensive, hard-to-find books whose values have respectively diminished slightly (Works goes for $450 and up) and dramatically (a first edition of Thinking can be had for just $40 since two subsequent editions have been published) over time. Numerous books on Zumthor's buildings and words have been released in the two decades since those early titles, each of them tending to focus on a particular building (e.g., Therme Vals and Serpentine Pavilion) or on the architect's own thoughts either directly (Atmospheres) or through interviews (A Feeling of History). Zumthor in Mexico falls into the last camp, coming out of a visit the Swiss architect made to Mexico City in 2017 during MEXTRÓPOLI, the annual festival of architecture and urbanism that started in 2014. The interviews in the book took place at a few venues, including the House of Switzerland designed by Dellkamp Arquitectos.

Zumthor in Mexico is short, at just over 100 pages, but it's even shorter considering the bilingual nature of the book: the interviews in Spanish fit on 46 pages, with the English interviews that follow taking up the same number of pages. Given this, and the thrift of photographs (all duotones), I'd say the book is primarily for Zumthor super fans or people who were lucky enough to attend one of the talks during MEXTRÓPOLI 2017. The interviews exhibit Zumthor's honesty and ingrained approach to architecture, but they tend to be too brief, especially the conversations at House of Switzerland, which are summarized through just a handful of quotes. A standout among the four interviews is the longest, "The Source of the Ideas" (# 2 in the table of contents below), particularly the back-and-forths between Zumthor and his four on-stage companions. We learn as much about Zumthor's take on things (not just his buildings) as we do about the artists and academics he asks questions of. It reads like it must have been a great event in-person — here it's a strong argument for attending MEXTRÓPOLI and for seeing what will follow in the Swiss Architects in Mexico series.