A Handle on Building

A Handle, on BuildingMeeka Walsh · Bordernotes · Issue 121 ·

February 2012

Winter is interior, a strangely longed-for time of

retreat and withdrawal. Shortened daylight and

intense cold drive us in, and inward. We

compress or distill our attention and inevitably

think back to our past. We are small and in the

close bed of memory. And we are inside, in the

spaces that house us. If we are well-housed, we

celebrate the architecture that frames us; if it is

inadequate, it also impresses itself on us.

Peter Zumthor is an accomplished Swiss

architect, and it’s his book, Thinking Architecture,

that I’ve just read (Birkhäuser GmbH, Basel,

2010, first published in 1998). Here he states his

basic principles of building. It is building that is

his focus, believing that the real core of

architectural work is in the act of constructing, a

sensibility and conviction that began with his

early training as a cabinet maker in his father’s

shop. Or more probably, beginning in childhood,

and subsequently, with memory. “There was a

time,” he wrote, “when I experienced

architecture without thinking about it.

Sometimes I can almost feel a particular door

Page 1 of 9A Handle, on Building – Border Crossings Magazine

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handle in my hand, a piece of metal shaped like

the back of a spoon. I used to take hold of it

when I went into my aunt’s garden.”

Seizing a door handle and crossing a threshold is

indeed the stuff and invitation of memory, and I

have taken it too, on countless occasions. Such a

rich and simple device a door handle is.

In the late ’60s my father decided to add a small

screened porch to the cottage he’d had built in

1950. The porch’s width came to be determined

almost arbitrarily, by a window in the kitchen

wall and the stone fireplace further along. The

opening to the screen porch would be between

these two elements. Even within these

constraints there was room to build the porch

wider, but that wasn’t the case. And to avoid

encroaching too far into the play area around

the cottage the addition would be built out only

so far. Longer, I suppose, it would have appeared

as merely a screened corridor. (As I think of it

that would have been fine–we would sit in a row

like guests on the front porch of a small seaside

hotel.) What my father arranged to have built

was a small rectangle with screened windows on

three sides. With privacy in mind, the openings

were placed at a height where, if you were

seated, the walls rose even with the top of your

head. So, while the cottage faced a fine lake,

what was framed in the screened windows was

our upward gaze. We looked out at the topmost

third of the trees around the property’s edges,

and at the sky beyond. Only the screen door,

which was entirely screen, top to bottom,

allowed a full view: deck, long grasses, small

birds dipping in and darting from various



hanging feeders, and a vertical swipe of lake. On

the door’s exterior–a cast metal handle, shaped

like a flattened bow and finished in black

enamel.

Everyone I love has slipped three fingers behind

that handle and placed their thumb on top–my

kids, my parents, friends, grandparents. In my

mind–like a sequence of film stills: different

heads, different heights, varying postures, one

after another they reached, paused, pulled and

entered this small, odd porch. Their hands have

rubbed the paint, exposing the grey metal

beneath, which is now satiny from use. When the

screen needed to be replaced and the door

repainted, the handle was removed, left

untouched and returned, its patina even more

particular against the fresh paint. When years of

pelting rain softened the wood to the point of rot

and a new door was required, my instructions

were to remove the handle, save the screws and

place all exactly as before, on the new door, a

request which was met with a quizzical shrug.

Like Proust’s madeleine on his tongue, that door

handle in my hand is both a prompt for memory

and a reassurance against time’s wash. Readily

available in hardware stores across western

Canada in the 1960s, the handle would have

been regarded for its utility alone. This was not

the cast brass door handle sculpture designed by

Ludwig Wittgenstein for his sister Margarethe

Stonborough’s mansion in Vienna in 1928 where,

Bernhard Leitner noted, “Formal simplicity in

Wittgenstein’s case means aesthetic

complexity.” (The Wittgenstein House, Princeton

Architectural Press, 2000). Mine was just a

handle.



The handle, in Peter Zumthor’s telling, opened

to his aunt’s garden, through a stone path and

into a darkened, wood-panelled interior, which

led finally to her kitchen–traditional and

unremarkable, as he remembers it, but which

has come to be kitchen for him. “Memories like

these contain the deepest architectural

experience that I know. They are the reservoirs

of architectural atmospheres and images that I

explore.” He is after the poetic in his work, he is

engaged with materials and seeks to use them

honestly, calling up American poet William

Carlos Williams’s conviction that there are “no

ideas but in things,” and he says his passionate

desire is “to design buildings that in time, grow

naturally into being a part of the form and

history of their place.” Solidity and sense of

place, the rootedness and certainty of a building

properly set in its geography, are Zumthor’s

response to a world where he sees signs and

symbols obscuring the real, which, he feels,

remains hidden. His use of materials is antidote,

like the artists whom he admires, who were

working in the ’60s and ’70s with plain stuff.

Some were part of the Arte Povera movement.

Their method of assembly–often loose, stacked

and joined, in a manner with which Zumthor

could readily identify–was simple and direct.

The object was itself, its meaning evident,

offering the same quiet satisfaction you would

derive from noting well worn and carefully

folded quilts stacked on a shelf. Useful,

necessary, basic.

The constancy of materials in unadorned,

enclosing spaces creates quiet and room, a place

that can be home. Not necessarily a house, but



what O.F. Bollnow identifies, in Human Space as

the spatial centre from which we can

dialectically venture out and to which we can

always return (Hyphen Press, London, 2011, first

published in 1963 by W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart).

This dwelling, which Bollnow elaborates to mean

a place, like a house, is also the inhabitation of

space and time, of pausing, and residing, “a place

where one stays, or ‘stance.’” If we can stay and

rest in a dwelling, it is because we feel secure,

and in this pause and vacant space can dream,

daydream and remember. For Zumthor, memory

and daydreams are a source out of which his

work comes, but first there is sleep. Architecture

is an envelope and background for life, he says, a

container for living and working and “for the

silence of sleep.” This is his sense and conviction,

and he must also know well Gaston Bachelard’s

Poetics of Space (Orion Press, New York, 1964).

“And so beyond all positive values of protection,”

Bachelard wrote, “the house we were born in

becomes imbued with the dream values which

remain after the house is gone. Centers of

boredom, centers of solitude, centers of

daydream group together to constitute the

oneiric house which is more lasting than the

scattered memories of our birthplace.”

The habitable but unavailable, longed-for dream

space is the storehouse and reservoir that impels

us forward to seek it, or replicate it in fragments,

in virtually everything we do, either as paradigm

or dialectic, as model or warning.

We are looking for the idea of the real; the home

that resides in memory and imagination, which

provides sufficient quiet and safety and in which



we can daydream and be silent and generate the

thoughts from which to make something of

value, and real.

Zumthor reads the poets Wallace Stevens and

William Carlos Williams, he reads Italo Calvino

and he likes the directness of American painter

Edward Hopper. He reaffirms his sense that “it is

only between the reality of things and the

imagination that the spark of the work of art is

kindled.” He quotes Martin Heidegger on what

dwelling is, which parallels Bollnow’s including

ideas of habitation and stance, and he comes

back to William Carlos Williams’s assertion that

an image in the writing generates the idea of the

thing’s meaning. “No idea but in things.”

There is an idea that seems to recur in Peter

Zumthor’s book–an idea of a building being

silent, not speaking, of being so right in its siting

and materials that it appears part of the history

of the place in which it resides, or will come to,

in time. It is an odd engagement in, and reversal

of, superfluity. Zumthor refers to Calvino’s study

of the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, who found

particular beauty in literature, where it was

vague, open and indeterminate. This was

achieved, Calvino explained, through meticulous

thoroughness and rigorous attention to every

minute detail. The same effortful ease is also

evident in the design and construction of

Wittgenstein’s house for his sister. “Wittgenstein

shows the highest simplicity,” Leitner noted in

his book and gives the “impression of modesty, a

modesty that is barely affordable.” Similarly, the

Dandy, a figure Baudelaire studied and admired,

wears only his perfection and not the effort of his



achievement. In The Painter of Modern Life he

wrote “One and all stem from the same origin, all

share the same characteristic of opposition and

revolt; all are representatives of what is best in

human pride, of that need which is too rare in

the modern generation, to combat and destroy

triviality.” To illustrate further, he added, “It is

the pleasure of causing surprise in others, and

the proud satisfaction of never showing any

yourself.”

This achievement of simple perfection, of

apparent simplicity earned through honed focus

and unrelenting effort, produces finally, a quiet,

admirable lustre. What is necessary to pull it off

is through-going self-consciousness and the

ability to skillfully draw back from excess. The

impetus may be daydreams; the application is

full wakefulness.

Peter Zumthor writes about teaching

architecture, and learning, by which I think he

means knowing and experiencing. He says again,

as he did at the book’s opening, that we

experience architecture before we hear the word

and that the beginning of our understanding lies

in our childhood, in our biography. We are once

again in Bachelard’s oneiric home but also, more

concretely, in direct and traceable experience. Of

the frame around us we ask security, light, time,

and space for daydreaming. It’s serious work,

constructing a home.

This article originally appeared in

Border Crossings #121, published

February 2012.



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A Handle on Building