The Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has built ‘a gliding swan’ of a house in Devon that strikes a perfect balance between inside and out, whichever way you look — The Guardian
Peter Zumthor recently completed a meticulously crafted concrete house in the gently sloping English countryside of Devon—the Swiss architect's first permanent building in the UK after designing the Serpentine Gallery's 2011 summer pavilion in London.
Titled Secular Retreat, the five-bedroom brutalist abode is part of the growing Living Architecture vacation home portfolio which also includes MVRDV's Balancing Barn and Jarmund/Vigsnæs Architects's Dune House (both in collaboration with Mole Architects) as well as a quirky cottage in Essex by FAT Architecture and Grayson Perry.
"Simply a miraculous piece of architecture" is The Observer critic Rowan Moore's impression after visiting the building for his latest review. "The sublimity of the architecture comes by way of a certain roughness," Moore writes. "Its character is set by pillars and walls of thick concrete mixed from local materials, shovelled and rammed by hand, the wobbly joints between one day’s work and the next left visible. It conveys the joy of mud, the primal pleasure of shaping stuff with your hands, albeit in rectangularised form."
2 Comments
is anything concrete brutalist? I don’t think so. That refers more to 1950s-70s civic modernism with heroic forms and mission. This seems more like Ando’s spiritual zen modernism ... and aligned with the critical regional phenomenologists. Can’t think of a better name for this group of design... neoclassic modernism? Materialists?
Zumthorism
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