Theoretical Currents II - Full Paper - Ross Jenner - University Of ...

Proceedings of the Theoretical Currents II: Architecture & Its Geographic Horizons Conference – Lincoln, UK, 2012
Building Site:
The Schaulager by Herzog & de Meuron and Zumthor’s Field Chapel
at Wachendorf
Ross Jenner
School of Architecture & Planning, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Abstract
At the beginning of Geographia, Ptolemy immediately splits geography from chorography: The
former is a mimetic world-picture requiring the mathematical plotting of position and outline; the
latter concerns the qualities of places or architectural spaces (in the terms of this conference)
‘and no one presents it rightly unless he is an artist.’
Examining a ubiquitous material, concrete, this paper questions how materials and processes
interrelate with place. How can concrete be localised for it to take on meanings that can only be
perceived in a particular way, in a particular building, in a particular landscape? Within such
horizons, the interaction achieves a poetic quality through a localisation of material and by imprint,
a tangible and visible transposition of site to building, and a bonding of material process to site
and geophysical terrain.
Perret used regional aggregates to relate his concrete to the local. Wright’s California “textile
block” houses were made from the materials of their sites, to capture an indigenous colour and
texture. The dark reddish-brown hue of Pei’s National Centre for Atmospheric Research matches
the Rocky Mountains before which it is set - with sand and aggregate ground from the nearby
quarry, its surface bush-hammered like eroded rock.
The central focus of the paper, however, will be, first, Herzog and De Meuron’s Schaulager in
Basel, cast from and on the ground of its site. Like the second, Zumthor’s Bruder Klaus Field
Chapel at Wachendorf, it retains the mark of its mud. In Zumthor’s chapel the concrete was cast
on local trees in hand-mixed aggregate from the site, trodden in layers by the locals. The trees’
removal by fire brings with it a more complex temporal stratification: what guarantees presence
by imprint and by soot inevitably states an absence. The material and the mud of the fields,
masses worked by hand and foot, take form by not taking form. This is the potential of the plastic.
In the field-chapel, Zumthor thickens site and process.
Building Site
Introduction
At the beginning of Geographia, Ptolemy immediately splits geography from
chorography. The former is a mimetic world-picture requiring the quantitative plotting of
position and outline; the latter concerns the poetic, qualities of places or architectural
spaces (in the terms of this conference) ‘and no one presents it rightly unless he is an
artist.’ 1
How are such architectural qualities sited in specific geographical horizons? How, for
instance, can a ubiquitous material like concrete, and the processes of its making,
interrelate with place? How can it take on local meanings that can only be perceived in a
particular way, in a particular building, in a particular landscape? Within such horizons,
the interrelation of building and place achieves a poetic quality as material and imprint
are localised; a tangible and visible transposition of site to building, and a bonding of
material process to site and geophysical terrain.
This conjunction is not new. Frank Lloyd Wright’s California “textile block” houses were
made from the materials of their sites to capture a local colour and texture. The dark
reddish-brown hue of I.M. Pei’s National Centre for Atmospheric Research matches the

Proceedings of the Theoretical Currents II: Architecture & Its Geographic Horizons Conference – Lincoln, UK, 2012
Rocky Mountains before which it is set - with sand and aggregate ground from the
nearby quarry, its surface bush-hammered like eroded rock. 2 The primary examples in
this paper are Herzog & de Meuron’s Schaulager, cast from and on the ground of its
site. It retains the mark of its mud, as does Peter Zumthor’s Bruder Klaus Field Chapel
in Germany.
The notion of a built, or “constructed” 3 site, as posited by Vittorio Gregotti among others,
goes some way towards explaining these two works. Attention to the site frames issues
of making and interpreting as an interrelationship of cultural production and local
conditions of material practice. Materiality, morphology, and land and architecture, meet
at the conjunction of earth and building. In physical terms, the resulting architecture is a
building and setting shaped through physical processes to reveal pre-existing layers that
denote geological, agricultural and industrial forces. 4
Gregotti defined the laying of stone on ground or soil as the “principle of settlement”, the
manifestation of a “mode with which a collective represents nature to itself”. 5 For him the
environment is not “a system in which to dissolve architecture” but, rather,
it is the most important material from which to develop the project. Indeed,
through the concept of the site and the principle of settlement, the
environment becomes the essence of architectural production. 6
According to Gregotti, the architect is charged with revealing landscape, nature and
history as “the sum total of all things and of their past configurations”. Building, then, is a
modification with an awareness of participating in a pre-existing whole, where the
organisation of space starts from the idea of place which the project transforms into
settlement. 7 A simple exterior, Gregotti argues, is actually a complex conjunction in
which material is not “a thing of nature”. It is both “more earthly and more abstract” as it
alludes to “the form of the place, to things as they are combined” and to the substrate,
the geological formations “to a nature which is historically transformed, to a nature which
is the product of thought, and which as a result of being frequented or settled has
become a shared memory”. 8
Figure 1. Herzog & de Meuron, Schaulager, (Photo: Hans Peter Schaefer, Wikimedia Commons)
Schaulager
The Schaulager in Basel (2003) a “show-storage” of contemporary art, is set among
common warehouses but strongly distinguished from them by its façades. Herzog and
de Meuron originally intended them to be in clay but did not “want to take the risk of
having parts of such a tall façade fall off. So, they “couldn't eliminate cement altogether”.
Therefore, the façades are made of “a kind of concrete mixed with local gravel”, which

Proceedings of the Theoretical Currents II: Architecture & Its Geographic Horizons Conference – Lincoln, UK, 2012
behaves “like natural soil”. The walls look like the surfaces “of the hole that was
excavated for the foundations. It is a kind of positive-negative game, an image of what is
underground, the impression of a dig”. 9
The granular raw material of the exterior, pale ochre in complexion (carefully perfected
in the laboratory), comes from the ground. Its aggregates are largely comprised of
gravel excavated from the site, with the surface scraped off wet, letting the gravel reappear
(curiously fragile) as raw material - earth. In physical terms, its mass guarantees
a constant temperature and humidity. 10 The texture is of something cast on the soil:
spoils of the building site after excavation of the footprint. This lends a strong and
unusual presence to the Schaulager’s polygonal block of. Pebble sediments of the
Rhine valley are laid and layered up on show – exhibited, 11 to “express the floor-by-floor
[…] stacking pictorially”. At the same time, this strategy shows the walls as “durable and
solid, in contrast with today’s aesthetic of computer-controlled storage facilities and the
inevitable light-weight design.” 12 The building’s external shape derives from the
configuration of the storage arrangements inside, and from the exterior setback
requirements. 13
Beyond its direct, physical imprint, the architects re-scaled the excavated gravel as a
“digital landscape profile”. This profile then determined those of other building parts,
such as the metal grilles of the auditorium and the gates (“generated by a rudimentary
frottage technique and transferred to a stamper at a scale of 2:1”). 14 The enlarged
moulding of pebbles appears most landscape-like in the horizontal “crevice” [Riß] that
forms the window reveals that mask the window frames of the office and working areas.
The reveals, Hubertus Adam argues, recreate by their “undulations an artificial horizon
which is superimposed on the landscape unconcerned with the immediate
neighbourhood”. Adam notes that “deformed and crumpled pipes whose form was
digitally measured and enlarged” were used to create the recesses’ negative forms,
giving rise to a peculiar landscape within the space-containing façade. This landscape
“represents the interface between the interior and the cityscape, spoilt by
development.” 15 His interpretation conforms with Herzog & de Meuron’s intention to
create “a kind of artificial yet natural landscape … within the window apertures”; the
window is not primarily intended to “provide a view of the at best trivial landscape of the
urban periphery, but is a landscape in its own right.” 16
The artificial seems here to mask the natural but is also a conception of geography
miniaturised, of which Bernard Cache offers a perception from another angle:
Geography is not the field next door, nor even the neighbouring district, but a
line that passes through our objects, from the city to the teaspoon, along
which there exists an absolute outside. This outside is not relative to a given
inside; it exceeds any attempt at interiority. If there has been talk of a
cinematic device in architecture that allows for the passage from the frame to
the screen, it is in part because architecture comprises a register of out-offield
images that is specific to it: the geographical image. Just as in rhetoric,
where punctuation can be used in the name of silence rather than meaning,
so the built frame can allow us to hear the geography that runs outside it,
silently. 17
These relationships, paradoxically, are difficult to discern when confronted with the
Schaulager’s raw mass. Nevertheless, the architects intended to express “simply and
vividly” through the layers of material within the gridded compartmentalized articulation

Proceedings of the Theoretical Currents II: Architecture & Its Geographic Horizons Conference – Lincoln, UK, 2012
of the façade, load and support, 18 thus representing the stacking/storing and
compressing [lagern und comprimieren] of what is inside. 19
The building’s raw physicality, stored and displayed, and typified by one of Gottfried
Semper’s Four Elements, the mound [Erdaufwurf], is a key motif here. Heaping, as
Semper knew, is intimately and inversely related to the pit [Grubenbau]. The flipping
between solid and void is a strategy also found in Zumthor’s chapel. Yet another factor,
however, links the two works: imprinting. Both gravel and its imprint are exhibited on the
façade at the Schaulager. The heaped landform is moulded and, in other substances,
extends into mimeses. Kurt Forster already made this connection. In the gap “between
nature and ‘the figments of the mind’”,
Herzog & de Meuron's continuing experimentation with imprints of diverse
kinds connects Semper's ideas on facades with their own interest in images,
which is less about images as such than about imprints, for imprints span the
great trajectory from photographic trace to the virtual preservation of plant
and animal forms in lifelike casts. 20
Both Schaulager and chapel result from investigations of an existing situation “to
discover its latent qualities or potential”, and these inherent conditions motivate the
resulting buildings. 21 Both, however, exceed Gregotti’s propositions insofar as they result
from a geo-graphein, where the graphein is not description or revelation but a marking
and inscribing of the earth into building and vice versa.
Bruder Klaus Field Chapel
Figure 2. Peter Zumthor Feldkapelle Wachendorf (photo: author)
From a distance, Zumthor’s Feldkapelle at Wachendorf (2007) appears as a slab, stele
or dolmen. The object’s blurred, paradoxically diaphanous appearance derives from its
being of a substance with the mud of the fields, of the same sand and gravel as its site
and mixed there with white cement, sticking making to locality. On approach, it yields,
via a pivoting triangular door, a blackened interior cast on tree trunks, open to the sky,

Proceedings of the Theoretical Currents II: Architecture & Its Geographic Horizons Conference – Lincoln, UK, 2012
wet underfoot, spangled with the glazed apertures of its former form-ties and reeking like
a chimney of smoke.
The concrete was cast on local trees in hand-mixed aggregate from the site, trodden in
layers by the locals. The trees’ removal by fire brings with it a more complex temporal
stratification: what guarantees presence by imprint and by soot inevitably states an
absence. The material and the mud of the fields, masses worked by hand and foot, take
form by not taking form. This is the potential of the plastic. In the field-chapel, Zumthor
thickens site and process.
As a ubiquitous emblem of modernity, concrete excels in its capacity to receive imprints.
Wright insisted on the potential inherent in “the plasticity of the material itself”.
I should say that in this plasticity of concrete lies its aesthetic value. As an
artificial stone, concrete has no great, certainly no independent, aesthetic
value. As a plastic material – eventually becoming stone-like in character -
there lives in it a great aesthetic property, as yet inadequately expressed. 22
“Plastic” is a relatively recent term. In 1879, Semper observed that “[t]he Greek word
plastic” was used only for “figurative representation”, “not in general use and hence
sound[ed] affected”. 23 In his schema, plastic “referred to the process of forming”, in
particular of clay (kéramos), but also of metal and glass (concrete had scarcely entered
architectural discourse then). Moulding concerns what is “[s]oft, malleable (plastic),
capable of being hardened, easily shaped and formed, and retaining a given form when
hardened.” 24 Our word plaster derives from Greek plássein (whence “plastic”). It is like
mássein, to handle, touch, work with the hands, to knead dough, press into a mould.
The Latin massa is what adheres together: a formless lump or mass of pitch, salt,
cheese, dough, mud, dirt or air, even. The English “glebe” (land, fields; from the Latin
gleba: globe, glob, clod or lump of earth) is similar. Like it, the etymology of “dough”
suggests a history of construction and figuration: by modelling and moulding. 25
Above all, there is a openendeness in the plastic, which Francis Ponge captures in
abruptly ending his “Unfinished Ode to Mud”:
But since I am fonder of it than my poem … I’ll give it a chance, not to turn it
into words. For it is opposed to forms and remains on the edge of the nonplastic.
It tempts us to form, then in the end discourages us. 26
Ponge’s postponement of form, his highly finished ‘unfinishedness’, is like the highly
wrought ooze of concrete within Zumthor’s chapel and the strata without, as well as the
Schaulager’s gravels. Concrete is commonly taken as an image of solidity, hence the
expression ‘set in concrete’. But concrete can be worked in such a way that it retains
traces of its plasticity – a ‘delay in concrete’. The material and the mud of the fields,
masses worked by hand and foot (even by machinery), take form by not having form.
This is the potential of the plastic. 27
Wright’s remark about concrete’s “as yet inadequately expressed” aesthetic property
implies an element of the unfulfilled. This may be concrete’s potential in modernity, 28 but
also a figure of potentiality per se that happens to have become emblematic of
modernity. What is potential is not definite enough to be a thing. A differal of form, it is
deprived of completed presence. Unfulfilled, it is a trace. And, indeed, the whole interior

Proceedings of the Theoretical Currents II: Architecture & Its Geographic Horizons Conference – Lincoln, UK, 2012
at Wachendorf is a trace, by imprint, and smell. It is not only made from an outside but is
an outside, being both a (seemingly fortuitous) representation of the radiant firmament (if,
as cosmological image, this can be called ‘an outside’) and in reality open to the sky with
a bowl of rainwater, an impluvium, subtly cast in the floor. The jagged ooze of concrete
is quite unlike the comfort of any interior.
Figure 3. Peter Zumthor Feldkapelle, Wachendorf (photo: author)
The plastic is both the mouldable and the moulded. It is something on the verge of
formlessness: in formation as much as being a form. Plasticity, the most common figure
of potentiality, concerns the receiving and leaving of traces, aesthectically valued as the
inchoate, protean, unfinished and emergent in (post-)modernity. 29 Reception and
passivity are essential elements of concrete’s potentiality – like that of clay, wax, or
paper, before imprinting.
The way in which the architects of Schaulager and Feldkapelle keep alive the
potentiality which is matter (dunamis) – the ability to accept and receive form, matter
with its making and its making into – is a measure of their craftsmanship. The word
‘make’ is related to ‘might’, meaning (like dunamis) both force (noun) and possibility
(verb). In a sense, all making concerns the forceful change from one state to another. In
architecture, sensitivity to such possibilities can, as here, reveal the ‘might’ in the making.
Contact through making
What is important, especially in Zumthor’s chapel, derives from direct touch with bare
material. The result is concrete untreated after removal of the formwork, in a rough or
raw state and bearing the exact imprint of the form into which it had been poured, the
mark of making. 30 The chapel is something ‘as found’ after casting. In the post-war
period, reinforced concrete comes to evoke “the rudimentary character of the building
site”. 31 The marks that scar the surface are proof of an authenticity, in the imprint’s
capacity to register material directly. The words of Philippe Potié on La Tourette are
applicable to the Schaulager and especially to the field-chapel: “Materials must be
displayed in all their poverty in order for them to appear in all their purity. The less a
material is worked the more expressive it will be.” 32

Proceedings of the Theoretical Currents II: Architecture & Its Geographic Horizons Conference – Lincoln, UK, 2012
The walls at the Schaulager appear as a block excavated from, and imprinted by, its pit.
At Wachendorf, 112 spruce trunks (charred and removed) left their traces in the
inhospitable interior surface both by imprint and by soot. The indexical sign is based on
a physical contact to its referent, but one that makes the question of contact rear up into
visibility. However, the inanimate imprint is lent a magical animation by that with which it
was for a moment in contact, and from which it draws its nature as imprint. There is the
touch of the formation, then the distance of having been abandoned by what
engendered it. What guarantees presence by imprint inevitably states an absence. For
the print to be produced, the foot must sink into the mud, “at the very place of the mark
[…]. But for the imprint to appear in what results, the foot must also lift, be separated […]
from then on, quite surely, the walker is no longer there. 33
Vestiges (footprints) are both physically immediate and temporally remote, presence as
something past. The play of contact and gap overturns our relation to becoming and to
memory, “the Now and the Past interweave equally in an unknown and troubling
formation for thought”. 34 The reality of the trunks is that of a “having-been-there” – as in a
photograph – a borrowed reality, but with “the constantly amazing evidence: this took
place in this way”. 35 There is another, equally physical vestige evident in the building’s
strata from outside: the concrete, hand-mixed, was tamped, stamped, trampled, trod by
the local Land-youth and Land-folk movement in the manner of pisé de terre (rammed
earth), in half metre layers in 24 pours.
The casting over the tree trunks and the formwork on the outside depends on something
rudimentary and anachronistic, a survival from a time when humans first made and
recognised themselves in imprints. They placed sooty hands on or blew soot over them
on cave walls and recognised their feet in mud. 36 Zumthor thus stages an encounter of
temporalities through an ‘archaeology’ that does not proceed according to plan but
shows itself to be “more tactile, more groping, more disturbed, more heuristic”, as Didi-
Huberman notes of many contemporary works of resemblance by direct contact, imprint
and casting. 37 And, similarly, the visitor’s hand (stooping into the sudden darkness of
Zumthor’s chapel on entry, with the imprint of daylight still in the retina), gropes but has
little inclination to touch.
In all aspects of this constellation, Zumthor articulates relationships between modes of
acting on materials and their spare existential properties. Like him, Herzog & de Meuron
make visible what has existed since the ‘first’ experience of matter and the dialectic
between form and formwork, between inside and out, heap and pit, as they employ
concrete, the modern material, par excellence. They set up structures, based on the
persistence of the past in the present, which may seem fundamentally sparce and
hollow, no more than a memory in which the past appears as ooze, impression, soot,
shade and spectre.
Their force (dunamis) derives, as Zumthor puts it, from the relation of materials to
context:
I believe they [materials] can assume a poetic quality in the context of an
architectural object, although […] materials themselves are not poetic. […]
Sense emerges when I succeed in bringing out the specific meanings of
certain materials in my buildings, meanings that can only be perceived in just
this way in this one building. 38

Proceedings of the Theoretical Currents II: Architecture & Its Geographic Horizons Conference – Lincoln, UK, 2012
The chapel demonstrates that significance can lie in the very act of making as much as
in any product. The building sets up bounds and possibilities in the interplay between
bodily actions and the materials of the environment. 39 Becoming indistinguishable from
the processes that went into its making, it challenges the classical (and current)
aesthetic whereby making is “technique”, mere means towards an end called “form” (or
“image”). In the chapel, formation is as important and might be better rendered in the
present participle (forming as opposed to formed, i.e. solidified). Better still is the notion
of the formable, the persisting or ‘living-on’ of potential inherent in materials. In the fieldchapel,
Zumthor thickens field and process: setting adheres to setting.
Rather than something merely contingent to the act of building, the site is, in both cases,
opened towards its own potential. Its ties to the potential of making (in all its
ramifications) bring it into thought. The buildings reveal their world, as Gregotti would
want, but in each of them there is more than a revelation or recuperation of nature or
history; something anachronistic and troubling emerges. Sites and geographies are
never simply finished, or begun. Their meaning remains open-ended and indeterminable.
Occasionally, poetry happens.
References
Adam, Hubertus 2003. “Herzog & de Meuron: Schaulager In Basel”, Baumeister, Sept.,
v.100, n.9, pp70-77.
Aristotle, De Anima
Aristotle, De Generatione Animalium.
Banham, Reyner 1955. ‘The New Brutalism’, Architectural Review, 118, December: 354-
361.
Banham, Reyner 1966. The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? London: The
Architectural Press.Barthes, Roland 1957. “Le Plastique” in Mythologies, Paris: Éditions
du Seuil.
Belmont, Nicole 1988. “L'Enfant et le fromage,” L'Homme, 28e. Année, No. 105,
Jan. - Mar. pp13-28.
Burns, Carol 1991. “On Site”, in Andrea Kahn, ed., Drawing Building Text, New York,
Princeton Architectural Press, p146-67.
Bachelard, Gaston. La terre et les rêveries de la volonté, Paris: José Corti, 1947.
Bachelard, Gaston 1957. La poétique de l’espace, Paris: Presses universitaires de
France. Translated as (1969) The Poetics of Space, by Maria Jola, Boston, Bacon Press.
Collins, Peter 2004. Concrete: the vision of a new architecture, 2nd ed., Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Deligny, S. 2004, “Textures et Matières”, Le Moniteur architecture AMC, Vol. 147, pp98-
101.
Forty, Adrian 2006. “The Material without a History” in Liquid stone: new architecture in
concrete, Cohen, Jean-Louis and G. Martin Moeller, eds., New York, N.Y.: Princeton
Architectural Press.
Forster, Kurt 2002 “Pieces for Four and More Hands” in Ursprung, Philip (ed.), Herzog &
de Meuron: Natural History, CCA, Lars Müller, pp41-62
Gregotti, V. [1966] 1993, Il territoio dell’architettura, Milan, Feltrinelli.
Vittorio Gregotti, “Architettura e Geografia”, Casabella, 421, 1977, pp. 59-60.
Gregotti, V 1985. “Territory and Architecture”, Architectural Design Profile 59, no. 5-6,
pp28-34.
Claudius Ptolemaeus, Geographia, in Opera quae exstant Omnia, Leipzig, B. G.

Proceedings of the Theoretical Currents II: Architecture & Its Geographic Horizons Conference – Lincoln, UK, 2012
Teubner, 1898, v.1.
Didi-Huberman, Georges 2008. La ressemblance par contact: archéologie,
anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte, Paris, Minuit.
Jenner, R 2011. “Inner Poverty: a setting of Peter Zumthor’s Brother Klaus Field
Chapel”, Interstices: Journal of Architecture and related arts, 12, pp35-47.
Morris, Robert 1970. "Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for
the Motivated," Artforum VIII, no. 8, April, pp62-66
Needham, Joseph 1959. A History of Embryology, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Krauss, Rosalind E 1985. “Notes on the Index: Part 2” in The Originality of the Avant-
Garde and other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985.
Legault, Réjean (2006). “The Semantics of Exposed Concrete” in Liquid stone: new
architecture in concrete, Cohen, Jean-Louis and G. Martin Moeller, eds., New York,
N.Y.: Princeton Architectural Press.
Onderdonk, Francis S 1928. The Ferroconcrete Style, New York: Architectural Book Pub.
Co.
Le Corbusier 1953. Oeuvre complète, vol. 5, 1946-1952, Zürich: Girsberger.
Potié, Philippe 2001. Le Corbusier : le Couvent Sainte Marie de La Tourette (the
Monastery of Sainte Marie de La Tourette), Basel: Birkhauser; Paris: Fondation Le
Corbusier.
Ponge, Francis 1999. “Ode inachevée à la boue, Oeuvres Complètes, Paris: Gallimard,
Vol.1: 729-731. Translated (2009). Unfinished Ode to Mud, Beverly Bie Brahic, London:
BC Editions, 80-83.
Poretti, Sergio 2005. Il calcestruzzo nelle architetture di Carlo Scarpa. Forme, alterazioni,
interventi di Bruschi, Greta, Paolo Faccio and Sergio Pratali Maffei (eds.), Bologna:
Editrice Compositori.
Semper, Gottfried 1851. Die vier Elemente der Baukunst : Ein Beitrag Zur
Vergleichenden Baukunde, Brunswick, Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn.
Semper, Gottfried 1879. Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Kunsten oder
praktische Aesthetik, Vol. 2, Munich: Bruckmann.
Steinberg, Leo 1972. “Rodin”, in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-
Century Art, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 322-403.
Wright, F.L.W 1975. In the Cause of Architecture VII: “The Meaning of Materials –
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1 Geographia, Book 1, §1, ¶ 6.
2 The laboratory sits on a 200 metre high mesa above the city of Boulder against the Faltirons formation of
the Rocky Mountains. In the words of the architects:
The vastness of the Rocky Mountains presented the greatest design challenge. Inspired by Indian
cliffdwellings in nearby Mesa Verde, NCAR comes to terms with nature through elemental forms,
the absence of identifiable human scale and the use of indigenous materials. The innovative
architectural concrete walls were colored by local aggregates and bush-hammered to better merge
with the mountain setting. Set into a corner of the site, the building is only glimpsed from a mile-long
curved approach carefully threaded up the mesa to preserve the natural terrain.
Pei Cobb Freed & Partners “National Center for Atmospheric Research”, http://www.pcfp.com/a/p/6146/s.html
accessed 26.04.12.
See also Yukio Futagawa, ed. I.M. Pei & Partners: National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder,
Colorado, and Araldo Cossutta Christian Science Church Center, Boston, Massachusetts. Tokyo: A.D.A.
Edita Tokyo, 1976.
Heyer, Paul 1966. Architects on Architecture: New Directions in America, New York: Walker and Company,
pp317-318, p322.

Proceedings of the Theoretical Currents II: Architecture & Its Geographic Horizons Conference – Lincoln, UK, 2012
Id. 1993. American Architecture: Ideas and Ideologies in the Late Twentieth Century. New York: Van
Nostrand Reinhold, p115.
3
See: Burns, Carol 1991, “On Site”, in Andrea Kahn, ed., Drawing Building Text, New York, Princeton
Architectural Press, pp146-67.
4
Ibid. pp153-154
5
Gregotti, V 1977. “Architettura e Geografia”, Casabella 421, pp59-60
6
Gregotti, V 1983. Address to the Architectural League of New York, section a, vol.1, no. 1 March, p8. See
also Gregotti, V 1993. Il territoio dell’architettura, Milan, Feltrinelli, pp92-94.
7
Gregotti, V 1985. “Territory and Architecture”, Architectural Design Profile 59, no. 5-6, pp28-34.
8
Ibid.
9
Interview with Herzog and de Meuron, in Ursprung, Philip (ed.), 2002, Herzog & de Meuron: Natural
History, CCA, Lars Müller, p193.
10
Herzog & de Meuron, Architecture and Urbanism, August 2006, Special Issue: Herzog & de Meuron
2002-2006. p80.
11 For fuller descriptions see: Adam, Hubertus. 2003 “Herzog & de Meuron: Schaulager In Basel”,
Baumeister Sept., v.100, n.9, pp70-77 and Deligny, S. 2004, “Textures et Matières”, Le Moniteur
architecture AMC, Vol. 147, pp98-101.
12 Herzog & de Meuron, 2006, Architecture and Urbanism, Special Issue: Herzog & de Meuron 2002-2006.
p80.
13 A smooth white indentation in the façade to the main approach creates a forecourt. A “gatehouse”, with a
gable in the same earthy material, indexes the entrance. It also acts as projection booth for a mini-drive-in
movie theatre: two large LED panels, on which works of art commissioned by the Schaulager are advertised.
In contrast to the image of permanence created by the visual impact of the heavy exposed-aggregate, the
screen’s public, urban character stretches the building’s temporary civic dimension to the urban periphery
and the new Dreispitz/Münchenstein district for which it acts as urban anchor.
14 Ibid. The “unrolled” profile produced a cave-like surface in white moulded plastic for the suspended
ceiling of the cafeteria.
15
Adam, H. 2003, “Herzog & de Meuron: Schaulager In Basel”, Baumeister Sept., v.100, n.9, p74.
16
Herzog & de Meuron, 2006, Architecture and Urbanism, August, Special Issue: Herzog & de Meuron
2002-2006. p.80.
17
Cache, Bernard 1997,Terre Meuble, Orléans : Editions HYX, pp55-56. [Earth Moves, pp69-70.]
18
H&dM on Schaulager, Architecture and Urbanism, 2006, Special Issue: Herzog & de Meuron 2002-2006.
p80.
19 The translation of the section entitled “Stacking and Compressing” in the German version: Herzog & de
Meuron: Naturgeschichte.
20 Forster, Kurt, “Pieces for Four and More Hands” in Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History, p60.
21 Burns, Ibid.
22 Wright, F. L. 1975, In the Cause of Architecture VII: “The Meaning of Materials – Concrete” [Architectural
Record, August 1928], New York: McGraw-Hill, p.209.
23 Semper, Gottfried, 1879, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Kunsten oder praktische Aesthetik,
Vol. 2, Munich, Bruckmann, p.1.
24 Ibid., p.9
25 O.E. dag “dough,” from P. Gmc. *daigaz “something kneaded” from PIE *dheigh- “to build, to form, to
knead” (cf. Skt. dehah “body”: “that which is formed,” dih- “to besmear;” Gk. teikhos “wall;” L. fingere “to form,
fashion,” figura “a shape, form, figure”. Semper’s “heaping” also intimated man’s derivation from mud.
“Moreover, it is probable that man, not as an individual but certainly as a social being, arose from the plains
as the last mud-creation [Schlammschöpfung], so to speak. The legends from times immemorial of all
nations, which often conceal an idea of natural philosophy, agree on this point.” Semper, Die vier Elemente
der Baukunst : Ein Beitrag Zur Vergleichenden Baukunde, Brunswick, Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1851,
p.55n. (The Four Elements of Architecture, p102n.). For further discussion on moulding/modeling as regards
the chapel, see also Jenner, R 2011. “Inner Poverty: a setting of Peter Zumthor’s Brother Klaus Field
Chapel”, Interstices: Journal of Architecture and related arts, 12, pp35-47.
26 Ponge, 1999: pp.729-731, 2009: pp80-83.
27 Modelling and moulding leave traces and imprints. Roland Barthes wrote (tongue-in-cheek, albeit
accurately) that plastic is “a miraculous substance: a miracle is always a sudden transformation of nature.
Plastic remains impregnated throughout with this wonder: it is less a thing than a trace of a movement”.
Barthes, 1957, p.192. According to Aristotle, “matter is potentiality and form actuality”. “Esti d’he men hule
dunamis, to d’ eidos entelecheia” (De Anima; iii 4, 412a9). ‘Matter’ (hule) is that out of which something is
made.
28 Here see (probably the most conspicuous example) Francis Onderdonk: “According to The Esthetics of
Potentialities […], a material approximates perfection in proportion to the number of possibilities it presents.
From this point of view ferro-concrete is the most perfect material, as its potentialities far outnumber those of

Proceedings of the Theoretical Currents II: Architecture & Its Geographic Horizons Conference – Lincoln, UK, 2012
other materials” (Onderdonk, 1928: 17). Forty complains: “Over and over, people talk about concrete’s
‘potential,’ its ‘possibilities’ – in other words, it is seen as a material whose existence lies in the future rather
than in the present or past” (Forty, 2006: 38).
29
Cf. Leo Steinberg on Rodin: “His real theme then is the intimacy of gestation, every available means
being used to maintain a given figure as a telescoped sculptural process. Whatever vicissitudes a work in
progress can undergo are sealed into the form. The wet rags that are wrapped around clay to keep it moist
leave their textures imprinted on the bare chest of the great Marcelin Berthelot bust.” Steinberg, 1972, p393.
30
See Le Corbusier, 1953: 190, Banham, 1955: 354-361, 1966: 16; Collins, 2004: 344, Legault; 2006: 47.)
31
Poretti; 2005, p9
32
Potié, 2001, 108
33
Didi-Huberman; 2008, p310.
34
Didi-Huberman 2008, p310. In Seigler “the referent ‘adheres’ to its recording”. Stiegler, 2009, p14.
35
Barthes 1964, p47. See also Krauss 1985, p218, Didi-Huberman 2008, pp189-90.
36
See Didi-Huberman, 2008, p27.
37
Didi-Huberman, 2008, p311.
38
Zumthor, 2006, pp8-10.
39
In this respect, see Morris, Robert "Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the
Motivated," Artforum VIII, no. 8, April 1970: 62-66.