Kenneth Frampton was longing for a richer context in modern architecture, when he introduced in 1983 the term ‘critical regionalism’ in his essay “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architectural Resistance. In an interview in Rassegna 2006 he asserts that this is still an important approach in design practice but warns of a misunderstanding as a stylistic term. In the history of ideas the question about the relationship between world and place has retained a certain consistency even though the meanings of terms are shifting. In 1965 Paul Ricoueur placed “Universal Civilization and National Cultures” in a controversial dialogue, in 1951 Martin Heidegger spoke in “Bauen, Wohnen, Denken” (Building, Living, Thinking) of space and place and in doing so referred to Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Kolonie und Heimat” (Colony and Homeland). The following essay circles around this pair of terms using as an example a house, a family and an architect from the Swiss canton of Grisons.

First image – the valley
“From that point onward the trip that had previously followed majestic direct lines, gets bogged down. There are stops and inconveniences. At Rorschach, on Swiss territory, one ventures onto the train once again but only gets as far as Landquart, a small Alpine station where one is forced to change trains. After standing around for a while in a windy and not particularly attractive area one boards this narrow-gauge train, and, in the moment when the small but apparently powerful machine starts to move, the truly adventurous part of the trip begins, a difficult and arduous ascent that seems as if it will never end. Landquart station lies at a moderate height but from this point onwards one proceeds along a wild and rocky route into the high mountains.”1
Thomas Mann leads Hans Castorp, the principal character of his novel “The Magic Mountain”, from Hamburg to Davos. In 1912 Mann made this journey himself when visiting his wife Katia who was stationed there as she suffered from a lung illness. Half way between Landquart and Davos he passed the little Grisons village of Jenaz where, around 90 years later, an agricultural economist and a handcrafts teacher were to built a house for themselves and their six children.

Second image – the house
The Luzi House stands on the edge of the old village core that is formed by a tight circle of solid farmhouses, some of them massive old wooden buildings built of timber logs, dark, burned almost black by the sun over a period of (in some cases) 300 years. The road in front of the house slopes downwards lifting the building onto a plinth of carefully laid natural stone. There is room for a garage in the plinth, which is connected to the basement. There are three full storeys above: a shared entrance with a self-contained flat, a living floor and a bedroom floor that is topped by an open attic space. The self-contained flat is rented out and is intended to be used by the couple in their old age. From the approach that faces towards the village centre and is fully glazed a corridor burrows into the closed wooden block and leads up a single flight staircase to the family dwelling. There, where it is light and open again, the entrance area is revealed as one of four spaces of equal importance, connected by passageways with the kitchen, the dining room and a music room. An open flowing space between five timber cubes. At the centre is the wet area, in the other ones are service spaces and four stairs leading to the sleeping level.
Peter Zumthor comments: “The idea was that you can go from the living area or from the dining room directly to your room, that everyone has a personal stairs leading to their room. This is a domestic feeling, a kind of intimacy that I learned about in the mountains. Perhaps what I wished to evoke here is one of those ‘Ofentreppe’ (stove stairs) that used to exist and you could directly reach the warm chamber above the stove.”

Third image – about the house
Peter Zumthor describes two important motivations: “Up there, not far from the new building, there is an old schoolhouse. This schoolhouse is a beautiful, impressive, simple and uncomplicated log cabin. And it was built by a man who at the time was the leading architect in the canton Grisons. He also built hotels in St. Moritz and Davos.2 I find it completely right that an architect should also be able make very simple things. And that is exactly what I wanted to do, to accept a commission and to complete something decent and simple, if possible anonymously. This is a personal drive. The other aspect has more to do with the construction, with the restrictions imposed by using the log cabin system. If you look at this method of building it is really archaic. When, as in the 17th century, there are small windows in larger areas of wall, the impression made is coherent and atmospheric, but the larger the windows become the more the log cabin loses its strength. And here in this house an answer has been found to this problem.”
Peter Zumthor solves this problem by contrasting the massive corner towers with the completely glazed central bays. The latter are six metres wide and have sliding or normal doors, opening onto deep terraces protected from the weather and so meet the clients’ wish for more light and space. Peter Zumthor: “All the rooms are like being in a cinema and all four views are marvellous. There is absolutely nothing that disturbs one. This is rare, it’s like cinemascope.”

Fourth image- archaic quality and alienation
It is hardly surprising that this house has been ambivalently received in the small Grisons village. Familiar basic archaic patterns and modernity seem to circle around it, so to speak. The double symmetrical form of the building is based on a grid of two by four wall panels and follows the logic of traditional building methods. However the creation of space by means of elements and the space between them refers to a modernist concept that can be most tangibly felt on the living room level. Through sophisticated variations with just a few openings the spatial impression on the other two levels is completely different. The strength of the clear spatial order and the visual density of views and surfaces remain unsullied by daily use. But a rustic quality is not created, for the rooms are 2.5 metres high to meet modern needs. And so the three normal floors reach a considerable height. Above an open roof space there sits a wide projecting, self-supporting box-girder construction with a roof slope based on the neighbouring buildings. This creates an overall order that is freed from any hint of obsessiveness by the introduction of small asymmetries. It stands proudly there, as Peter Zumthor states, and alongside the historic weight of the old village core develops a gravitation that is at the least its equal.

Fifth image – leaving a house enough time. The building.
The beginning was the decision to build a house of solid timber. Spruce for the structure, oiled larch for the window frames and the floors. Trees were selected and were felled in winter, they were taken from the hights and the wood was therefore hard and homogeneous. It was only then that the clients began to look for a planner. Actually originally it was supposed to be someone from the village but through mutual acquaintances they came across Peter Zumthor from nearby Haldenstein. The clear ideas held by both clients and architect appealed to each other. “They both came to me,” says Peter Zumthor, “because they wanted something that had to do with the tradition of this place and its old building methods but that was formulated in a contemporary way. They did not have any formal ideas but they had values,” he continues. “When one sees what it means when people live in a culture, know their way around in this culture and then ask an architect to provide something new, something new that respects this culture, well, what more can one ask for?”
Unusual for Peter Zumthor’s work but characteristic of this project was the client’s wish to do some of the work himself, but a modus operandi was found and work could commence. Despite tight restrictions the building permit was granted by the local authorities who showed an understanding for contemporary ideas but this brought with it the first discussions with neighbours and the inhabitants of the village. Not everybody found that the house ‘suited’ the village and the family had to answer for their conviction about building a house the way it really is and not just following certain images. But by now it is the house itself and the calm beauty of its interior that convinces sceptics – or at least most of them. The taking down of an eighty year-old existing building was followed in the second year by the construction of the basement. The construction of the timber building and the fitting out of the interior took a further two years. Staircases and bathrooms were all fixed to the walls to avoid the usual settlement problems. Prefabricated floor-wall elements of black coloured polished concrete house all the water pipework and thus obviate the need for tiling. Their perfection is most impressive, even more so the information that the family cast and polished them themselves and that the stones used come from an nearby place where different geological systems meet. The stones were collected by clearing a stream and their size was checked for suitability for use in making concrete.

Sixth image – auf der Walz
One day on the way to work Valentin Luzi gave a lift to a hitch-hiker, a travelling journeyman from Heidelberg. This young man, a trained staircase builder, was looking for a new job and asked whether Mr Luzi might know of work for him. He then stayed three months in the Luzis’ house – which is as long as the rules of his guild allowed – built the staircases and floors and made himself useful in many other ways. Six months later he came back to continue his work and brought with him an apprentice shipbuilder, also a journeyman, from Lausitz who made two bathtubs from a well-matured oak trunk.
At present there are about 1000 journeypersons in Europe who are ‘auf der Walz’ (on the road), they continue a mediaeval tradition according to which, after completing their apprenticeship, they travel from job to job wearing their black ‘guild’ clothing to increase their knowledge and skills in foreign lands. Most of them travel through Germany, France, Denmark and Switzerland, but the shipbuilder had also worked as a carpenter in Argentina and Siberia. They are not allowed to stay more than three months in one place which should never be closer than 50 kilometres to their home. They travel with a minimum of luggage, no mobile phone and are committed to a code of honour. In an era of total telecommunication and collective consumption this system may seem like an anachronism and indeed in the 1980s was threatened to die out, is recently experiencing a revival.

Seventh image – about the place
In Peter Zumthor’s studio in Haldenstein: “What I have just done for the Luzi family is actually what I have always wanted to do: to take a commission seriously, to take a place seriously and to place a building there that is a source of delight and that represents a small enrichment. At this level it doesn’t matter whether it is the world or a village. The yardstick is not any kind of theoretical criteria but rather life itself.”
“On the one hand I explore the place, follow its traces and at the same time I look outwards into the world of my other places. Or to put it another way: that which is foreign to the place helps me to see the essential characteristics of the place in a new way.”3
“If I perceive people and myself correctly, then I note that people need a place where they feel well. Otherwise they begin to instigate wars. It is an enormous help for a person to have such a place. And at the same time it is good when people see and know as much of the world as possible. This is a piece of traditional wisdom. Looking at the world, for compassion and then realising that one has one’s own place in order to understand that other people must or ought to have their own place too. From this point the range of the two buzzwords regionalism and globlisation is insufficient. Each is blind to the other. In principle this is a dialectical story. The tension of being in the world is built up of this micro and macro, the small, the comprehensible and the large.”

*Synopsis – economy of attention *
Each of the preceding sketches describes a relationship between the place and the world, and the attention that is given to both. Thomas Mann uses Prätigau and Davos as a picturesque backdrop, as an allegorical stage design for a metropolitan counter-world. 250 years after the invention of tourism in Switzerland the Luzi House itself stands in a tradition that is anything but isolated. In an idiosyncratic balance of regional ties and a broader view the clients draw their resources from an intensive exchange with the place and the potential of the surroundings. And so the outcome is not confined to technical solutions, social processes are also started. Everything, that signifies culture beyond its products. Accordingly such a building also becomes a reflection of the surroundings: the stones from the nearby mountains, the manner in which the old houses in the village are built, the abilities of the local carpenter or of a Portuguese mason who has been working in the region for years. And, not least importantly, they met Peter Zumthor for whom the primary concern was not a complex definition of region but the place here and now, as the focus of sustainable attention and the sum of relationships.
In the fourth image we finally encounter an old European tradition of learning and exchange, that combines curiosity, the foreign and patience with the place. To spend 90 days working on a manual task, to get to know a place in the process contributing one’s own rich experiences is more than just the exchange of products, or of information. Globalisation became possible only through the dissolution of places into competing worlds of goods, images and signs and does not mean a territorial war but the competition for attention, as a resource that is in short supply. Whoever devotes his attention to foreign images, whoever is seduced by transnational consumer worlds gets lost for his own place.
The Luzi House demonstrates how place and world stand in a symbiosis, while also showing how much strength a centre of one’s own actually requires. This culture and the resistance it produces are valuable resources that are often confused with their products. At the same time they are exemplary and consequently represent a concept.

Kenneth Frampton was longing for a richer context in modern architecture, when he introduced in 1983 the term ‘critical regionalism’ in his essay “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architectural Resistance. In an interview in Rassegna 2006 he asserts that this is still an important approach in design practice but warns of a misunderstanding as a stylistic term. In the history of ideas the question about the relationship between world and place has retained a certain consistency even though the meanings of terms are shifting. In 1965 Paul Ricoueur placed “Universal Civilization and National Cultures” in a controversial dialogue, in 1951 Martin Heidegger spoke in “Bauen, Wohnen, Denken” (Building, Living, Thinking) of space and place and in doing so referred to Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Kolonie und Heimat” (Colony and Homeland). The following essay circles around this pair of terms using as an example a house, a family and an architect from the Swiss canton of Grisons.

First image – the valley
“From that point onward the trip that had previously followed majestic direct lines, gets bogged down. There are stops and inconveniences. At Rorschach, on Swiss territory, one ventures onto the train once again but only gets as far as Landquart, a small Alpine station where one is forced to change trains. After standing around for a while in a windy and not particularly attractive area one boards this narrow-gauge train, and, in the moment when the small but apparently powerful machine starts to move, the truly adventurous part of the trip begins, a difficult and arduous ascent that seems as if it will never end. Landquart station lies at a moderate height but from this point onwards one proceeds along a wild and rocky route into the high mountains.”1
Thomas Mann leads Hans Castorp, the principal character of his novel “The Magic Mountain”, from Hamburg to Davos. In 1912 Mann made this journey himself when visiting his wife Katia who was stationed there as she suffered from a lung illness. Half way between Landquart and Davos he passed the little Grisons village of Jenaz where, around 90 years later, an agricultural economist and a handcrafts teacher were to built a house for themselves and their six children.

Second image – the house
The Luzi House stands on the edge of the old village core that is formed by a tight circle of solid farmhouses, some of them massive old wooden buildings built of timber logs, dark, burned almost black by the sun over a period of (in some cases) 300 years. The road in front of the house slopes downwards lifting the building onto a plinth of carefully laid natural stone. There is room for a garage in the plinth, which is connected to the basement. There are three full storeys above: a shared entrance with a self-contained flat, a living floor and a bedroom floor that is topped by an open attic space. The self-contained flat is rented out and is intended to be used by the couple in their old age. From the approach that faces towards the village centre and is fully glazed a corridor burrows into the closed wooden block and leads up a single flight staircase to the family dwelling. There, where it is light and open again, the entrance area is revealed as one of four spaces of equal importance, connected by passageways with the kitchen, the dining room and a music room. An open flowing space between five timber cubes. At the centre is the wet area, in the other ones are service spaces and four stairs leading to the sleeping level.
Peter Zumthor comments: “The idea was that you can go from the living area or from the dining room directly to your room, that everyone has a personal stairs leading to their room. This is a domestic feeling, a kind of intimacy that I learned about in the mountains. Perhaps what I wished to evoke here is one of those ‘Ofentreppe’ (stove stairs) that used to exist and you could directly reach the warm chamber above the stove.”

Third image – about the house
Peter Zumthor describes two important motivations: “Up there, not far from the new building, there is an old schoolhouse. This schoolhouse is a beautiful, impressive, simple and uncomplicated log cabin. And it was built by a man who at the time was the leading architect in the canton Grisons. He also built hotels in St. Moritz and Davos.2 I find it completely right that an architect should also be able make very simple things. And that is exactly what I wanted to do, to accept a commission and to complete something decent and simple, if possible anonymously. This is a personal drive. The other aspect has more to do with the construction, with the restrictions imposed by using the log cabin system. If you look at this method of building it is really archaic. When, as in the 17th century, there are small windows in larger areas of wall, the impression made is coherent and atmospheric, but the larger the windows become the more the log cabin loses its strength. And here in this house an answer has been found to this problem.”
Peter Zumthor solves this problem by contrasting the massive corner towers with the completely glazed central bays. The latter are six metres wide and have sliding or normal doors, opening onto deep terraces protected from the weather and so meet the clients’ wish for more light and space. Peter Zumthor: “All the rooms are like being in a cinema and all four views are marvellous. There is absolutely nothing that disturbs one. This is rare, it’s like cinemascope.”

Fourth image- archaic quality and alienation
It is hardly surprising that this house has been ambivalently received in the small Grisons village. Familiar basic archaic patterns and modernity seem to circle around it, so to speak. The double symmetrical form of the building is based on a grid of two by four wall panels and follows the logic of traditional building methods. However the creation of space by means of elements and the space between them refers to a modernist concept that can be most tangibly felt on the living room level. Through sophisticated variations with just a few openings the spatial impression on the other two levels is completely different. The strength of the clear spatial order and the visual density of views and surfaces remain unsullied by daily use. But a rustic quality is not created, for the rooms are 2.5 metres high to meet modern needs. And so the three normal floors reach a considerable height. Above an open roof space there sits a wide projecting, self-supporting box-girder construction with a roof slope based on the neighbouring buildings. This creates an overall order that is freed from any hint of obsessiveness by the introduction of small asymmetries. It stands proudly there, as Peter Zumthor states, and alongside the historic weight of the old village core develops a gravitation that is at the least its equal.

Fifth image – leaving a house enough time. The building.
The beginning was the decision to build a house of solid timber. Spruce for the structure, oiled larch for the window frames and the floors. Trees were selected and were felled in winter, they were taken from the hights and the wood was therefore hard and homogeneous. It was only then that the clients began to look for a planner. Actually originally it was supposed to be someone from the village but through mutual acquaintances they came across Peter Zumthor from nearby Haldenstein. The clear ideas held by both clients and architect appealed to each other. “They both came to me,” says Peter Zumthor, “because they wanted something that had to do with the tradition of this place and its old building methods but that was formulated in a contemporary way. They did not have any formal ideas but they had values,” he continues. “When one sees what it means when people live in a culture, know their way around in this culture and then ask an architect to provide something new, something new that respects this culture, well, what more can one ask for?”
Unusual for Peter Zumthor’s work but characteristic of this project was the client’s wish to do some of the work himself, but a modus operandi was found and work could commence. Despite tight restrictions the building permit was granted by the local authorities who showed an understanding for contemporary ideas but this brought with it the first discussions with neighbours and the inhabitants of the village. Not everybody found that the house ‘suited’ the village and the family had to answer for their conviction about building a house the way it really is and not just following certain images. But by now it is the house itself and the calm beauty of its interior that convinces sceptics – or at least most of them. The taking down of an eighty year-old existing building was followed in the second year by the construction of the basement. The construction of the timber building and the fitting out of the interior took a further two years. Staircases and bathrooms were all fixed to the walls to avoid the usual settlement problems. Prefabricated floor-wall elements of black coloured polished concrete house all the water pipework and thus obviate the need for tiling. Their perfection is most impressive, even more so the information that the family cast and polished them themselves and that the stones used come from an nearby place where different geological systems meet. The stones were collected by clearing a stream and their size was checked for suitability for use in making concrete.

Sixth image – auf der Walz
One day on the way to work Valentin Luzi gave a lift to a hitch-hiker, a travelling journeyman from Heidelberg. This young man, a trained staircase builder, was looking for a new job and asked whether Mr Luzi might know of work for him. He then stayed three months in the Luzis’ house – which is as long as the rules of his guild allowed – built the staircases and floors and made himself useful in many other ways. Six months later he came back to continue his work and brought with him an apprentice shipbuilder, also a journeyman, from Lausitz who made two bathtubs from a well-matured oak trunk.
At present there are about 1000 journeypersons in Europe who are ‘auf der Walz’ (on the road), they continue a mediaeval tradition according to which, after completing their apprenticeship, they travel from job to job wearing their black ‘guild’ clothing to increase their knowledge and skills in foreign lands. Most of them travel through Germany, France, Denmark and Switzerland, but the shipbuilder had also worked as a carpenter in Argentina and Siberia. They are not allowed to stay more than three months in one place which should never be closer than 50 kilometres to their home. They travel with a minimum of luggage, no mobile phone and are committed to a code of honour. In an era of total telecommunication and collective consumption this system may seem like an anachronism and indeed in the 1980s was threatened to die out, is recently experiencing a revival.

Seventh image – about the place
In Peter Zumthor’s studio in Haldenstein: “What I have just done for the Luzi family is actually what I have always wanted to do: to take a commission seriously, to take a place seriously and to place a building there that is a source of delight and that represents a small enrichment. At this level it doesn’t matter whether it is the world or a village. The yardstick is not any kind of theoretical criteria but rather life itself.”
“On the one hand I explore the place, follow its traces and at the same time I look outwards into the world of my other places. Or to put it another way: that which is foreign to the place helps me to see the essential characteristics of the place in a new way.”3
“If I perceive people and myself correctly, then I note that people need a place where they feel well. Otherwise they begin to instigate wars. It is an enormous help for a person to have such a place. And at the same time it is good when people see and know as much of the world as possible. This is a piece of traditional wisdom. Looking at the world, for compassion and then realising that one has one’s own place in order to understand that other people must or ought to have their own place too. From this point the range of the two buzzwords regionalism and globlisation is insufficient. Each is blind to the other. In principle this is a dialectical story. The tension of being in the world is built up of this micro and macro, the small, the comprehensible and the large.”

*Synopsis – economy of attention *
Each of the preceding sketches describes a relationship between the place and the world, and the attention that is given to both. Thomas Mann uses Prätigau and Davos as a picturesque backdrop, as an allegorical stage design for a metropolitan counter-world. 250 years after the invention of tourism in Switzerland the Luzi House itself stands in a tradition that is anything but isolated. In an idiosyncratic balance of regional ties and a broader view the clients draw their resources from an intensive exchange with the place and the potential of the surroundings. And so the outcome is not confined to technical solutions, social processes are also started. Everything, that signifies culture beyond its products. Accordingly such a building also becomes a reflection of the surroundings: the stones from the nearby mountains, the manner in which the old houses in the village are built, the abilities of the local carpenter or of a Portuguese mason who has been working in the region for years. And, not least importantly, they met Peter Zumthor for whom the primary concern was not a complex definition of region but the place here and now, as the focus of sustainable attention and the sum of relationships.
In the fourth image we finally encounter an old European tradition of learning and exchange, that combines curiosity, the foreign and patience with the place. To spend 90 days working on a manual task, to get to know a place in the process contributing one’s own rich experiences is more than just the exchange of products, or of information. Globalisation became possible only through the dissolution of places into competing worlds of goods, images and signs and does not mean a territorial war but the competition for attention, as a resource that is in short supply. Whoever devotes his attention to foreign images, whoever is seduced by transnational consumer worlds gets lost for his own place.
The Luzi House demonstrates how place and world stand in a symbiosis, while also showing how much strength a centre of one’s own actually requires. This culture and the resistance it produces are valuable resources that are often confused with their products. At the same time they are exemplary and consequently represent a concept.