A Handle, on Building Border Crossings Magazine

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A Handle, onBuilding
Meeka 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 its his book, Thinking Architecture,
that Ive just read (Birkhuser 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 fathers
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

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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 aunts 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 hed had built in
1950. The porchs 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 wasnt 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 finewe 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 propertys 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

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hanging feeders, and a vertical swipe of lake. On

the doors exteriora 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 topmy
kids, my parents, friends, grandparents. In my
mindlike 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 Prousts madeleine on his tongue, that door
handle in my hand is both a prompt for memory
and a reassurance against times 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
Stonboroughs mansion in Vienna in 1928 where,
Bernhard Leitner noted, Formal simplicity in
Wittgensteins case means aesthetic
complexity. (The Wittgenstein House, Princeton
Architectural Press, 2000). Mine was just a
handle.

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The handle, in Peter Zumthors telling, opened

to his aunts garden, through a stone path and
into a darkened, wood-panelled interior, which
led finally to her kitchentraditional 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 Williamss 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 Zumthors
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 assemblyoften loose, stacked
and joined, in a manner with which Zumthor
could readily identifywas 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

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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 Bachelards
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

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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 Bollnows including
ideas of habitation and stance, and he comes
back to William Carlos Williamss assertion that
an image in the writing generates the idea of the
things meaning. No idea but in things.
There is an idea that seems to recur in Peter
Zumthors bookan 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 Calvinos 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
Wittgensteins 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

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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 books 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 Bachelards 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. Its serious work,
constructing a home.

This article originally appeared in

Border Crossings #121, published
February 2012.

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