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Thursday, 30 June 2011

Eden at the Serpentine

Kieran Long has written a very interesting piece in the London Evening Standard about this year's Serpentine Gallery pavilion created by Peter Zumthor.

Zumthor has referred to his pavilion as a "hortus conclusus", an enclosed garden, and Long notes that  the reference inherent in this garden/cloister hybrid goes "to the very roots of Western culture, the mystical Christian tradition of the inviolate Eden that the Latin words call to mind":

"It is not simply a monastic kitchen garden; it has to do with how gardens connect us to the most universal of themes. In Zumthor's essay about the pavilion, he begins by writing: "We come from nature and return to nature; we are conceived and born; we live and die; we rot or burn and vanish into the earth." These are not the words of an artist merely engaged in the manipulation of sensory effects.

Perhaps death, life, religion and the mystical universals implied by walled gardens are taboo at the press conference of a fashionable art institution but it is undoubtedly in the background of Zumthor's thinking, even if he doesn't quite make it explicit. He has spent the past few years working on projects deeply connected with the Catholic Church. The first, a modest chapel in a field in Germany (Bruder Klaus Chapel, 2007) is made of the roughest concrete blackened by intentional charring, with a poured lead floor. The second is the beautiful Kolumba museum in Cologne, run by the catholic Diocese of Cologne (2008), which works with existing historic ruins to make an ambiguous civic monument. Neither of these projects is in any way dogmatic about Catholic faith, but both of them deal with how architecture can help us understand our place in the world."

Long applauds Zumthor's "serious-minded attention to the most universal themes in architecture."

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Ed Sheeran - Wayfaring Stranger.

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