Journal

Versione Italiana

“Why does contemporary architecture place so little faith in those unusual things that distinguish architecture: the material, the construction, the supporting and being supported, the earth and the sky; so little faith in spaces free to be so automatically; spaces in which care is taken over the casing that envelops and defines them, over the material consistency that characterises them, over their receptive and resonant capacities, over their cavities and emptiness, over light, air and smell ?
I like to imagine I am designing and building constructions which, when they have been completed, I shall leave, as the architect, ready to be inhabited, a structure that belongs to the world of things, capable of doing without my own personal rhetoric”. 1
Zumthor’s own words reveal his express intention to create a style of architecture devoid of emphasis, conceived as the result of an inventive praxis designed to satisfy Man’s needs in an essential, careful manner. The Home for the Elderly at Coira symbolises this perfectly.
The building, included in a pre-existing complex, has 21 bedrooms and an infirmary, all part of a low, narrow, long volume arranged on two floors. A simple parallelepiped, situated on a grassy site surrounded by the stark landscape of the Grigioni mountains, the building possesses the rigour of its stone walls, broken only by a series of large glassed surfaces. The essential nature of the materials used – of a simple, severe constructive and aesthetic character – is the basis for a minimalist architectural creation characterised by the technical accuracy and constant rhythm of a walled, L-shaped structure. The load-bearing walls are made of perfectly squared and levelled ashlars of highly-porous, light-coloured Slovenian tufa, left bare both outside and inside the building. This volcanic stone cannot be found locally, and given that it is employed outside of its zone of origin, possesses no specific cultural codification, and thus can only be evaluated in terms of its physical characteristics.
The masonry walls are cavity walls (with air in between the two walls), built in an irregular opus quadratum style; there was no need for insulation between the two walls given the considerable thickness of the stone and its own high non-conductivity.
The extremely thin, smoothed joints contain a mortar of the same colour as the tufa stone, thus giving the walls the appearance of polished surfaces, whose chromatic homogeneity is only slightly varied by the diverse concentrations of dark alveoli present in the stone. The concrete roof and pavement slabs, together with the red larch of the window and door frames, contribute towards establishing the volume of the building, within which walls, massive toilet blocks and wooden containers of the fittings, are all part of a large spatial continuum.

Alfonso Acocella

* The re-edited essay has been taken out from the volume by Alfonso Acocella, Stone architecture. Ancient and modern constructive skills, Milano, Skira-Lucense, 2006, pp. 624. architetturapietra2.sviluppo.lunet.it/libroeng

¹ Peter Zumthor, Pensare architettura, Baden, Lars Müller Publishers, 1999, p.32.