A special lecture by Peter Zumthor

This Thursday I had a special lecture by Peter Zumthor at Tokyo University. In this lecture he told me a lot of important things. However, I think the lecture style itself expressed his architectural character.

In many architect's lectures, they talk about a topic they are interested in or their latest works with graphics. But Zumthor's lecture does not. First, he simply introduced himself and told us about his office and his life style. After, he spent all the remaining time having a discussion with us and he didn't use any graphics.

During the discussion, he told us about the site. He told that, " Every site has it's own attractive point. Once you find the attractive point of the site, all you have to do is to utilize the advantages of that." I think an Architect's work is not make an eccentric building, but design architecture that has good harmony with it's surroundings.

Zumthor's architectural character that carefully consider about the site and surroundings has some relationship with his lecture style. I feel he tried to utilize his surroundings through discussion with us

At the end of lecture, he gave us a massage. He said " Just be yourself".
That is also just like him to say that.

Japanese Architecture History

Before talking about Japanses architecture, I'would like to point out features of Japanese Architectural history. Compaer to the European architectural history, the turing point of Japanese architecture history is not claer.

In European architecture history, every period has it's own character and form. And we can easyly distinguish them. Of cource, Japanese history has s claer turning point. But about architecture, turning point is ambiguous.

I think geography is the most biggest reason. Architecture is dicided by the sites and pleople. Diffirent sites and different people make different architecture. In Eourepe, each Architectural period was developed in different site and diffirent ehic group. But japanese arhitecture has been debeloped in small area and Architect has been always same ehnic group. (The distance from Tokyo to Kyoto is about 500km. It's shroter than the distance form Mirano to Roma. It's only a half of the distance form Rome to Paris.)

However, there are so many great archticture in Japan. Mitokusan Nageire-dou is the architecture which has gave me a very big impact. Because the site is crazy. It in the middle of cliff. Today I can't know the reason why peolpe build their temple like this site. But we can still feel the storng intention that make archetecture.

For me, Japanese archtectual history is imaged not a stream of period which has different calacter, but a some kind of mass formed by individual archtecture like Nageire-dou.