While I’m on the subject of Mari Lending, the author of Plaster Monuments, she has also just published a conversation with Peter Zumthor, A Feeling of History, beautifully produced in austere sans-serif script, which discusses Zumthor’s approach to history, principally in his two Norwegian projects – most of all, in his Allmannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum, completed in 2016, but also his Steilneset Memorial in Vardø – and with reference, too, to the Kolumba Art Museum and his ambitious plans for the Los Angeles County Museum. I particularly love Zumthor’s distinction between “history-history” – ‘an intellectual system that works from document to document, from paper to paper; ten papers become 100, and so on’ – and ‘the history that is accumulated in landscapes, places, and things’.
A nice distinction, and useful too