don't remember an exact quote but, because of your question, i just scanned the first chapter of 'thinking architecture' looking for something. the chapter is called 'a way of looking at things'.

even if zumthor never said anything directly like what you're seeking, it's pretty clear from this chapter that this would be where he'd be coming from...

"Elusive Zumthor Quote" sounds like spam jibberish... I love it.

SP: With architecture, you see something in a book or you see it in a magazine and then you see it in real life, and of course it is very rarely, or never, the same as it was in the image. Sometimes it is
better and sometimes it is worse. And so this brings up the question of representation of your works. I don’t remember where, but you commented somewhere about the Hélène Binet photographs in your
book, Peter Zumthor: Works, and how you didn’t see them as a representation because she is an artist. So how do you approach that? Obviously people are going to publish your works...


PZ: The best thing is if somebody else does their own work of art or a personal work of literature or criticism. You can feel this other person reacting to what he or she sees and then it doesn’t try to
represent, but is a thing in itself. So this is sort of like the concept of these autonomous pieces next to each other that are related to each other, which of course is sort of like you have with the main
characters in literature. And then I think there’s another kind of representation, like an explanation, that you could do. You
could maybe publish the concept of a building. This is what I was trying to do in the book, where you have a text of mine and you have the major plans and the site and the major ideas of the building itself. This is maybe more for architecture or people who are interested in concepts and how they are made. It’s a little bit didactical, of course, but I think to a certain point I do this. I say, ok, I will do this once and then that’s it. For that, to keep this clear, in my book, I didn’t have any other people commenting on this; this is just our work. Which is what I had decided; that this is how it would be. So it’s just my text and my buildings, and nothing else.

But what you also could do - it’s still not representation, it’s also explanation - is explaining the technical, constructive and so on: the parts of the relations of the building. This I have done so far only in one case, in the case of the Kunsthaus Bregenz, but I think we are actually trying to do a small little monograph for each building in which you get explanations about how it is constructed and the major issues of constructing the building, and how it works. And this is also a little bit of a practical kind of thing, but its technique and concept. It has no aim at all to explain the building as a whole or to represent it. So that is three things I can see: artistic comment upon a work, and the concept part, and the technique part.

As to the rest I try to be nice. The older I get, I get even more angry, more strict, and I say, "No no no no no". I cannot stand architecture becoming part of a marketing strategy and its being used as a label; this I really hate, I despise it. I don’t like it, it’s not good for architecture; at least for me, let’s say, for me, I don’t want to be part of a marketing concept. If I find out that people want something from me because of my name, if it doesn’t really matter what I do as long

wow holz, this is exactly what I was looking for, thank you so much

do you remember where this interview came from so that I find the original and cite it?

is a line that comes up pretty often around here. he's like an encyclopedia.

it's from a vatech interview.
interview pdf

there are some other tasty nuggets in there as well, about how he threatened to sue usm haller, and they gave him a crap load of furniture to buy him off.

a quondam banquet: when are you going to join facebook?

seems a shame, somehow...