Peter Zumthor y la Percepción Melancólica

Melancholy perceptions
Ettore Scola's film 'Le Bal' recounts fifty years of European history with no dialogue and a complete unity of place. It consists solely of music and the motion of people moving and dancing. We remain in the same room with the same people throughout, while time goes by and the dancers grow older.
The focus of the film is on its main characters. But it is the ball-room with its tiled floor and its paneling, the stairs in the background and the lion's paw at the side which creates the film's dense, powerful atmosphere. Or is it the other way round? Is it the people who endow the room with its particular mood?
I ask this question because I am convinced that a good building must be capable of absorbing the traces of human life and thus of taking on a specific richness.
Naturally, in this context I think of the patina of age on materials, of innumerable small scratches on surfaces, of varnish that has grown dull and brittle, and of edges polished by use. But when I close my eyes and try to forget both these physical traces and my own first associations, what remains is a different impression, a deeper feeling - a consciousness of time passing and an awareness of the human lives that have been acted out in these places and rooms and charged them with a special aura. At these moments, architecture's aesthetic and practical values, stylistic and historical significance are of secondary importance. What matters now is only this feeling of deep melancholy. Architecture is exposed to life. If its body is sensitive enough, it can assume a quality that bears witness to the reality of past life.
Peter Zumthor. Thinking Architecture. Basilea, 1999 Birkhauser
Capítulo: A way of looking at things, 1988. Pag 24
La autoría de las fotografías es de izquierda a derecha: evan chakroff y darwinism(2)
Editado por el arq. Martín Lisnovsky