For Zumthor , who is 65, receiving the Pritzker prize, which is awarded annually to living architects and is equivalent to the Nobel Prize, was a kind of justification. “You can do your work, you do your thing, and it gets recognized”, he said in a telephone interview. He practices what could be called Slow Architecture, an antidote to the sugar-rush of “iconic” buildings, with intense attention to the making of the building, and to its stuff and detail.
Extending the building horizontally would have meant decreasing the size of the courtyard, the Schürhof. Instead the Vischer building of 1917 has been given a new roof. Consisting of irregular folds clad in blackish green ceramic tiles, the roof resonates with the medieval roofscape in which it is embedded while functioning at the same time as a clear sign of renewal in the heart of the neighborhood.
An attractive density and an urban centrality represent the main aims of this project, which have been investigated through the genesis of a system of architectures able to dialog between themselves contaminating the surrounding landscape. A network of connections similar to a transposition of historic paths into a denser texture, becomes a web of fluxes that generates a system of public shared spaces among the residences and the territory.
An interesting feature of Botta’s sketches is big similarity of the conceptual drawings with the accomplished works, which proves his great imaginative ability. Sketches are dominated by form of the design, but on the sketches is clearly discerned an extraordinary sense of texture that the objects will later get through the project.
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