Lingering Atmospheres: Collaborations between Architecture, Craft, Music, Landscape, and Film in Peter Zumthor’s Gesamtkunstwerk

This dissertation explores the connections between multidisciplinary design and multisensory experience by investigating the collaborations between architecture, craft, music, landscape, and film in Swiss Architect Peter Zumthor’s Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Work of Art). If sense perception is understood as fundamentally multisensory in nature, and the experience of architecture is dependent on the people, situations, and events it houses, how might we re-examine occularcentric and unidisciplinary narratives of architectural history? I focus on four temporary exhibitions that Zumthor co-curated: Swiss Sound Box (Hannover Expo 2000), Peter Zumthor: Buildings and Projects 1986-2007 (Kunsthaus Bregenz 2007), Hortus Conclusus (Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011), and Peter Zumthor: Dear to Me (Kunsthaus Bregenz 2017). These projects make explicit the centrality of cross-disciplinary collaboration and cross-modal perception in Zumthor’s practice. They are lingering atmospheres: designed as Gesamtkunstwerk and realised through collaborations with musicians, literary critics and writers, chefs and hospitality experts, artists, filmmakers, landscape designers, and engineers. They shift focus away from architecture as a hermetically sealed discipline toward an architecture that is inherently intertwined with other disciplines. By investigating Zumthor’s images as imaginative gestures that engage with other disciplines as well as past and future atmospheres, this research offers new insight on Zumthor’s creative process and works. I differentiate between three kinds of images in relation to Zumthor’s practice: ‘beforeimages’ as concrete dreams in the embodied mind that catalyse each project, ‘images’ as physical drawings, models, and words that embody and translate ‘beforeimages,’ and ‘afterimages’ as photographs, audiovisual recordings, and multimedia representations that extend atmospheres. I argue that Zumthor co-creates atmospheres by intertwining four types of imagination: material, sonic, landscape, and filmic. As the title to the 2017 publication Dear to Me: Peter Zumthor in Conversation suggests, it is not the Peter Zumthor as sole proprietor, but rather Peter Zumthor “in conversation with” that fosters the most evocative atmospheres. I aim to elucidate how his design process foregrounds the interdependent nature of architecture and its surrounding disciplines and reveal the importance of ‘afterimages’ as synesthetic embodiments that enable co-created atmospheres to linger past the moment of experience.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Architecture

Grantor dc:publisher

Carleton University

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Washco, Kristin Nicole

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright © 2025 the author(s). Theses may be used for non-commercial research, educational, or related academic purposes only. Such uses include personal study, distribution to students, research and scholarship. Theses may only be shared by linking to the Carleton University Institutional Repository and no part may be copied without proper attribution to the author; no part may be used for commercial purposes directly or indirectly via a for-profit platform; no adaptation or derivative works are permitted without consent from the copyright owner.

Language dc:language.iso

en

DOI

10.22215/etd/2025-16427

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:carleton.scholaris.ca:20.500.14718/43570