Back when I was a child, I believed in God.
At the time, I was preoccupied with two problems:
My father was seriously ill and I was bad at school.
I was convinced that daily prayer would make my father recover
and me a good student.
But it didn't help. My father died.
On the day of his funeral, I refused to say goodbye to him in the church.
For nothing in the world would I miss school.
I wanted to please my father in heaven as a diligent student.
Much later, churches started to attract me
more and more.
As if there were something to find there
that I was missing.
Something that can only be found in such places.
I set out to explore the attraction of this architecture.
ARCHITECTURE OF INFINITY
by Christoph Schaub
There are places that give us shelter from vast spaces,
and at the same time create a feeling of space.
It seems to me as if only through limitation can we get an idea of infinity.
The primary experience is that this is actually great:
You can cut a small piece out of an infinite space,
frame it and enclose it.
And that's what we do, when we build our first hut.
Or what we already find when we enter a cave.
This is where spatial experience begins.
First, it was a cosy touching feeling.
Because it had to do with my mother.
Brother Klaus was her favourite saint.
That's why he accompanied me throughout my childhood.
And that's why I went to see it.
The farmer couple - especially the husband -
wanted a kind of wayside shrine or chapel.
The Scheidtweilers live within walking distance of the chapel.
Every morning at 10 o'clock they come here to unlock it.
They replenish the stock of candles,
then they pray a little.
One can think of it
as a meditative space.
A place where one can be ... well not exactly thrown back on oneself
but where in a confined space, one enters a new world,
a spiritual, religious world.
Or whatever you want to call it.
In this building the threshold situation is very pronounced.
It is very closed.
One "goes inside from outside"
in a narrow space through a spiral entrance.
In the evenings the Scheidtweilers come again.
They remove the wax drippings ...
and say a prayer.
Then they touch the bronze Maria before leaving.
On Monday the Scheidtweilers do not open their chapel.
It also needs its peace and quiet every now and then, they say.
I want it to suit the initiators.
To correspond with what they wanted.
He wanted to thank the Lord,
as he told me in the end - not at the beginning.
He with his weak heart had been prophesied a short life.
And since he had lasted so long,
he wanted to thank the Lord with a chapel on his field.
The Christian doctrine did not touch me very much.
However, the church did. The space within.
This is a very emotional story for me,
as I realize.
Because it has to do with my family.
With growing up
and with a lot of things that are no more.
It also has to do with ...
all the promises,
of being cradled in religion,
and of a loving God who looks after one ...
Then I hear that from my youth.
And I think: "That would be nice..."
That would be really nice.
Looking at the procession, you realize
that right from the beginning, from the village, up the hill,
to the square, then into the baroque church, then down again
into the rock chapel, the chapel of grace...
you realize that the whole procession is actually an architectural event.
Peter MÃ¤rkli runs his own architecture office in Zurich.
But he prefers working alone in his studio.
We are going on a journey into the depths of time.
And then we decided to drive to the Atlantic.
From the depths of Burgundy we drove directly to the Atlantic.
We went to a department store and bought a thin little guidebook.
We looked around and were totally impressed
by the buildings,
standing there.
The surprising thing was that these buildings
had an incredibly expressive character.
This character has arisen
through the ongoing building stages.
Or through reinforcements because of unstable terrain over time.
They had to install buttresses, etc. These are "impure" buildings.
There is the portal
then there are different ways to hang the bell.
Sometimes the facade is heightened because there are rarely towers.
And finally there is the nave.
Later on, building continued
on a rather different principle.
And then it usually got higher. Never lower, but higher.
That is how these buildings took their shape.
Today we think we know the world.
In those days religion explained the world.
Much was unknown and that was scary.
Evil was omnipresent, with dangers overwhelming,
and goodness was unreachable without God.
On the other hand, the promise of paradise.
The garden of Eden.
Imagined by the people as a benignly illuminated world.
Surrounded by a protective wall.
Without dangers.
Peaceful and safe.
I can show you a map like that. A world map.
And at the edges ...
At the edges it shows numerous "unknowns".
Where the unknown begins.
There were ghosts and mythical creatures,
that populated the edge of the world.
Unknown beings, frightening.
Bad dreams.
The Alien.
All this must be kept outside.
At every moment - however short - the present becomes the past.
In the beginning everything is ideal.
The fresh apple.
The smooth skin of a young person.
But then the apple shrivels.
The skin gets wrinkled, then furrowed.
The black hair turns grey.
It is an uncontrollable process
that disrupts order,
and creates confusion.
Confusion as a measure of change.
And also as a measure of age.
A process that never stops and never ends.
Even the churches will disintegrate - one day.
First into a pile of stones,
which will finally turn to dust.
On the packs there are awful pictures.
Pictures of scars, of sick people...
Someone who grabs a packet in the morning,
is immediately distressed and feels sick.
That's why I do this every morning.
The secretary sticks paper over it,
and I draw a nice picture instead.
So I don't get depressed already at ten in the morning.
When the architect Alvaro Siza Vieira got the order to build a church here,
he was convinced that it had to be something unifying,
midst in all this urban chaos.
A generous space in front of the church creates a place for being.
In this white world, space seems to dissolve into a clear boundary.
Is Alvaro Siza trying to make the infinite perceptible?
I feel like I am floating,
At the beginning of design process,
what greatly influenced
my approach,
was the memory of my childhood.
Because like almost all little Portuguese boys at that time,
I was brought up Catholic.
I had to learn the catechism, celebrate the communion.
And on Sundays I went to mass with my mother and siblings.
What fascinated me, were these tall windows
with a balcony.
And I never saw anyone at these windows.
Windows with ... verandah.
As if they were meant for someone to get up and look down.
But I never saw anyone. For me it was inexplicable.
I didn't even know how to get up there.
For a child that was very impressive.
This was a secret of that church in Matosinhos.
This freedom for example,
to just let a pillar break off.
In the middle of the wall, without closure.
It is precisely this freedom that this visit to Saintonge showed me.
Contrary to the classically formulated characteristics of facade design,
it gave me a virtual impulse, to look at everything again more freely.
That has triggered a lot.
But it could only be triggered because I already had the training.
Education always arises when what we already know
is broken through by something new.
Without the known as a prerequisite it would never have had this effect.
MÃ¤rkli already had the idea for this building
before he discovered the Romanesque churches in Saintonge.
But his experience there empowered him to continue on his own path.
And - as he says - to find his own grammar of architecture.
It's like I'm being told here about earlier times,
of an archaic past.
From the inside of the world?
At the same time I am here now,
in the modern world of today.
I move from one time to another.
Transcendent...
It's not a church. It is a space where art is exhibited.
Peter MÃ¤rkli says it is not a museum either.
Simply a space for works of art by Hans Josephsohn.
I think that music and architecture are very related.
An architect in the traditional sense is an architect of space.
A musician or drummer is an architect of time.
We work with very similar rules.
With proportions, rhythm, aesthetics,
stability, statics, dynamics. They are very similar laws.
I feel MÃ¤rkli's fascination for lines and numbers.
For proportions.
The measure determines the rhythm and creates the emotional effect.
The talent for measure, etc. is a crafting thing
you have to bring, otherwise you are lost in this profession.
The visible elements of a building, the material things...
An opening, a door, a vertical pillar,
Or a column, if any are left ...
These are elements that everyone knows and with which everyone builds.
But the relationship between these elements...
Peter Zumthor's work is always about staging the history of a place.
He wants to make the past visible,
liveable.
The connection between what was and what is new is something I find most beautiful.
It doesn't have to be within a single building.
It can be connecting a new building to a landscape or part of town or village.
That's why it's nice that the things left by people from the past,
can stay that way and be part of my life.
I like to look at something and think:
"Somebody made this. Not bad".
"Good thing it's still here".
History and present side by side.
Peter Zumthor's concept for the Kolumba.
He calls his approach "an emotional reconstruction of history".
The old church ground plan
is not Roman.
In the late Gothic church ground plan is an early Gothic one,
and in that one a Romanic plan and then an early Romanic, etc.
There are about 7 layers, and finally there's even a Roman part.
It's kind of a time machine this excavation.
So the passerelle makes room for those who really want to look at it.
"Aha, that's Roman and that's early Gothic and this is Romanic".
In the Gothic era painting in churches stopped
and transcendence arose through the abstraction of light.
Abstraction of walls and construction.
Dissolution in a light medium.
That was huge, of course.
But this was a new era, a different attitude to life.
God is light. Light is divine.
A powerful formula if you make it your leitmotif for a building.
In the Second World War everything in DÃ¼ren was razed to the ground.
Out of the rubble arose the walls of a new church.
The thick walls remind me of the Romanesque churches in Saintonge.
The dominance of light of the Gothic architecture.
The bright areas point out the vastness of heaven.
Like cutting out a piece of infinity.
A construction with light and stone - here too.
Am I looking out from the inside, or from the outside to the inside?
The high room, which leads to the sky.
The compacted room as an expression of earthly existence.
When we landed on the moon, we humans said we are now in space.
But we are anyway in space...
I got that idea from James Turrell.
There are no limits to thoughts, we like to say,
unless one sets the limits oneself, one should add.
I look up into the stars and want to think infinity.
But I don't succeed, not at all,
in imagining an end without end.
All this makes me nervous and irreconcilable.
And yet I cannot let go of infinity,
when my mind wants to get an idea of it.
On the other hand there was Nicholas von Kues,
in the 15th century, when America hadn't yet been discovered...
He was a theologian and said...
You have to imagine: that was before Galileo Galilei ...
He said that for him the universe
could be described this way:
that the centre is everywhere
and the boundaries nowhere.
His simple formulation,
is actually the state of the universe.
The centre everywhere and the limits nowhere.
James Turrell tries to remove boundaries by setting limits.
Thereby clearing the view upward.
Turrell would probably correct me because what's up is also down.
Here in Skyspace I'm on Earth, I have no doubt about that.
Then I look to the sky and get carried away
from my earthly existence.
This place brings me close to myself, because it protects and liberates at the same time.
In the past, people thought the world was a flat disk.
If you travelled to its edge,
you would be confronted there by scary creatures and spirits.
But behind all that: what is there?
Nothingness. And that is scary too.
Today we know that behind this horizontal line
we would see the city of Halifax in Canada,
if the world were not a sphere...
This ball spins around the sun, which is located in a galaxy.
Light needs a hundred thousand years, to get from one end of it to the other.
But there are thousands, maybe millions,
or billions of galaxies.
We just don't know.
And the space between the galaxies is expanding every second.
Infinity keeps getting more infinite.
And yet the universe apparently has a beginning and an end.
Somehow calming.
But that is...
The infinite has a lot to do with today's world.
We think we can underline everything twice.
That means, upwards all questions are open - upwards.
If Josephsohn makes a sculpture or you build a house,
it's a point on a scale that never ends.
And that is the consolation.
The consolation is that there is no certainty.
I think that's wonderful.
For a long time I was afraid that I too would die young, like my father.
This fear came every time I looked into the infinite vastness of the starry sky.
Does infinity also stand for death?
Both are radical and without end.
A place of fear or a place of yearning.
In this forest cemetery near Stockholm the trees determine the rhythm.
A pleasant disarray.
The tree trunks, vertical, and the meadow, horizontal in between,
create a bright space.
The gravestones as if they were furniture.
In this cemetery, I feel close to life reconciled with the inevitable.
I am slowly departing from time into a future beyond all stars.
And what I was, and am, and always will be,
goes with me, without impatience and haste.
As if I had never been. Or hardly.
I'm such a tiny part
of a big and beautiful process, that nobody understands.
Nature. The principle of life.
That is for me something comforting.
If I had to worry, if there was a heavenly army
and I'd have to pass 3.5 exams yet, etc ...
As they say about Peter who stands at the entrance: "In, out, down, back ..."
No, that is actually a comforting idea.
It's the same for all of us.
Sometimes, in rare moments, the world slips away.
The journey goes inward, into a space without limits.
A state that is lethargic, gentle and pleasant.
To be a child again.
There is only the inner world, and outside is nothing.
There is light that is extremely old, billions of years old.
The sun that sent this light, maybe went out long ago.
But its light is still underway, somewhere in the universe,
although it hasn't reached us yet.
That's how the past only becomes visible in the future.
Back when, as a child, I refused to say goodbye to my father in church,
I did not know, what that would mean for me.
That for a long time I would miss a place of farewell.
Today I know: there are places that are soothing.
Spaces that speak of eternity,
that help to fill the void and to remember.
The centre is everywhere and the boundaries are nowhere.
Does this describe infinity?
Yes.
The infinity within, in the inner space, in the mind.
There is the art,
music, love.
I build this house myself. I am my own architect of infinity.