Translucent Cascade: Peter Zumthor’s Saint Benedict Chapel

Peter Zumthor’s Saint Benedict Chapel, Sumvitg, Switzerland. Photo by Nathan Brown.

This piece is drawn from a longer essay on Peter Zumthor and Friedrich Hölderlin, “Elemental History: From Hölderlin’s ‘Natur’ to Peter Zumthor’s Late Modernist Architecture,” which is written in the form of a travelogue. The essay is part of an ongoing book project, The Irony of Ground: Studies in the Poetics of Romantic Modernity.

***

May 15, 2022. Saint Benedict Chapel (1985­–88) in Sumvitg, Switzerland. One must be cautious in attempting to describe this building, trying to state the sense of its presence. Perhaps it is the most evasive, ambiguous, and profound of Peter Zumthor’s works. What is it about this simple chapel that forever anchors in the psyche? Why does it strike one with the emotional singularity of an unprecedented form, imposing an ambiguous demand?

From Chur, one approaches Sumvitg heading west along the highway, then turns up toward the chapel along a narrow, winding road above a valley, hairpin turns leading you into the foothills. You park near the ruins of the old chapel, destroyed by an avalanche in the early 1980s, its rough stone walls cresting a mound of earth, the contours of its base grounded in the curvature of the slope, extending out toward the expanse of the valley. Further along the upward curving road, then turning up a footpath to the left, Zumthor’s chapel appears against the background of a dense evergreen forest with grey peaks rising above it. Low on the left, with a doorway extending from the narrow end of the building into concrete steps meeting the path, the curvature of the building slopes down the steep hill such that the wider eastern side of the building, down the hill, is twice the height of its narrow western side by the path. The chapel presents a modest entryway, the protruding doorframe angled so as to guide those approaching toward the wooden door composed of narrow vertical slats with a beautiful curved metal handle, extending horizontally above a traditional keyhole notched in a metal square. Larch wood shingles, blending light and dark brown to black, present the curvature of the volume to the eye beneath a ribbon of narrow, vertical windows at the top, delicately divided by narrow wooden slats, opening here and there onto the interior. A slightly arched metal roof above a horizontal ribbon of windows, wooden shingles encasing a sloping volume all the way down to the earth, the door extending organically from the low side of an as-yet-indistinct shape, the ladder structure of a fragile wooden bell tower rising vertically beside the front of the building. This is what you see as you approach the chapel, the valley stretching out to the right into distant recesses, ringed by mountains; grey rocks growing out of the hill to the left, grass flowing down into flowering yards and meadows.

Peter Zumthor’s Saint Benedict Chapel, interior, Sumvitg, Switzerland. Photo by Nathan Brown.

Viewed from the front, the chapel presents a sharp vertical wedge, bending out below the curvature of its roof along its swelling sides. Inside, the interior presents a gestalt of the building’s geometry, grasped piecemeal from outside: the shape of a leaf, or a boat, or a drop of water. From the center of the narthex, one sees a single curve rounding the apse behind a simple alter and widening around a row of light ash wood pews toward the narrow angle of the wedge behind you, closing the shape. On the right side of the pews near the doorway, a copper holy water font, greened inside; a metal cross in the center of the alter; to its left, a Virgin and Child icon housed in a small metal box supported by a delicate metal plinth; worn wooden floors beneath the pews, a beautiful wood beam ceiling above, both made of diagonal boards meeting in the middle of the dewdrop form. Vertical wooden beams, unfinished, rise just inside the curvature of the chapel’s walls like minimal interior buttresses, articulating the space, separated by thin metal rods from a silvery sheath around the walls, which catches the light and the shadow from the ribbon windows above, drawing the unseen outside into the lemniscate curvature of the unified interior space.

Peter Zumthor’s Saint Benedict Chapel, northern slope, Sumvitg, Switzerland. Photo by Nathan Brown.

Stepping back outside, the building pours you down its northern flank to view it from below, where it rises commandingly above the steep slope of the meadow. The tiny chapel now takes on the disproportion of the sublime. It is as though the figuratively quaint form of the Christian ichthys had grown, as one sought to encompass the entirety of its exterior shape, into a colossal Leviathan, imposing and serene. Viewed at an angle from the northeast, or facing the building straight from the east, where it extends furthest down the hill, its form seems strangely unprecedented, sloping organically down the hill yet rising above it toward the sky, mountain peaks in the background, jutting with imperious command toward the valley, intensely defamiliarizing, unearthly in its form yet curiously akin to its environment. Indeed, the chapel protrudes from the hillside like one among the rocks surrounding it, growing out of and punctuating the green meadow with their grey mass. The shingles on the north side of the building have taken on a glowing silvery sheen, like the curved panels around the interior walls. Those on the southern side are a warm brown, flecked with lighter or darker panels and absorbing the gaze just as the grey, shimmering planes on the other side seem to deflect it.

It is of course the rotation of the earth around the sun that determines these phenomenal transitions: shimmering grey, soulful brown, alternating in the round. The ground of these appearances is planetary, and this structure grows from the earth like a beacon of some unrecognizable beyond. One cannot overstate the ominous sense of implausible advent emanating from this form. Yet it seems at the same time earthly, descending modestly down a grassy slope and then looming up from the now sudden height of its rounded eastern wall. Through this strange double sense of humility and grandeur, one feels the earth gathered into a sign of itself, meadow and rock, wildflower and mountain, planet and place, growing from the hillside as a form which resists any referent, even as it invites a proliferation of analogies. Drawing one’s gaze out into the valley, indicating it in a manner implicit in the lengthwise ruins of the older church, yet grasped and radicalized by the sharp incline of this location, the structure designates its own site. The casual drift of the base of Zumthor’s Atelier in Haldenstein down the gradual incline of the slope onto which it was built … something was already there that could enter into the profundity realized here: the earth become unearthly while made manifest as ground. The distinction of the building from the rocks to which it is akin: it is not what the sign means but that it is a sign at all which provokes disbelief.

Atelier Peter Zumthor, Haldenstein, Switzerland. Photo by Nathan Brown.

Something of the uncanny imperative of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” speaks through presence of this structure:

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.1

Whereas in Rilke’s poem it is the absent countenance of the sculptural figure that endows the form of its torso with the generative power of the gaze, emanating as if from within, in the case of Zumthor’s chapel it is the incommensurable harmony of exterior and interior worlds which generates the cognitive and emotional negativity of its form. Explaining his aversion to rectilinear forms in churches, Zumthor writes, “The idea that its exterior form would be defined by a single interior space fascinated me. This is the notion of a simple vessel. I wanted to find a soft, maternal form for my vessel.”2 Yet the softness of this interior form, the gentle curvature of its enclosure, finds itself not only in harmony but also in tension with the ominous sculptural presence of the exterior, the heft of a massive diagonal volume rising above the valley. Mediating this contradiction, one realizes, is the horizontal plane of the interior floor, shaped by the interior walls yet indifferent to the exterior slope of the hill. Indeed, the floor of the chapel extends from the entry on the west, nearly level with the path outside, to the midpoint of the eastern wall, which slopes down the valley—i.e., the floor, extending above the sloping hillside on interior supports above a stairstep foundation, approximately bisects the verticality of the chapel’s highest wall.

Inside the chapel, with no windows at eye level, the slope into the valley beneath is perceptually and proprioceptively negated; outside the chapel, faced with the curvature and the diagonal, downward flow of its exterior walls, which seem to grow upwards from the slope of the earth, the horizontal stability of its interior surface is difficult to conceive. It is the horizontal plane of the floor—invisible from without, projecting into the invisible valley from within—that engenders and stabilizes the dialectical torque of this structure, the irreconcilability of interior simplicity and exterior magnificence. Space is actualized as the medium of a dialectical relation between the expansion of distance and the gathering of enclosure, which brings into relation two intimately correlated manifestations of Geist: the expansive exteriority of the world and the sheltered interiority of reflective meditation, each negating the other while nevertheless synthesized by a subject who perceives and who feels—whose body, obdurately located in the space it constitutes and inhabits, comes to know itself as the locus of this synthesis.

Consider the opening strophe of “Celebration of Peace”:

The anciently built hall, blessed by custom,
Is aired, filled with heavenly, quietly resounding,
Gently modulating music; glad clouds
Of scent drift over green carpets and,
Far-shining, abundant with ripest fruits
And gold-wreathed chalices,
Well-ordered, a splendid row,
The tables rise on either side
Above the levelled floor.
For, at the evening hour,
Loving guests have pledged
To come here from afar.3

Although what is depicted likely has no direct empirical referent—is the representation of an imagined scene, laden with the artifice of symbolism—the strophe is nevertheless an act of poetic mimesis in the Homeric sense reconstructed by Eric Havelock in Preface to Plato.4 Poetry, here, is the preservation and transmission of paideia; representation is the mimesis of ethos. Hölderlin sets the table. The guests are expected; they will have their expectations. Readers will read the poem—and this is very much a presentation piece, a program.

The tables themselves are set upon a levelled floor. Thus they balance the gold-wreathed chalices and the bowls of fruit. The tables are wohlangeordnet: they are properly arranged. The hall is altegebaute and Seeliggewohnte: it is aged, well-known, sanctified, welcoming. What is implied here is a system of cultural norms that has been not only properly but “splendidly” (prächtige) adhered to. It’s important to note that it is not particularly relevant, as it certainly was in Homeric epic, whether or not these are the norms of Hölderlin’s culture: what matters is the representation of an ethos as one’s own. This contingency is one aspect of the “sentimental” disposition of Hölderlin’s modern poetry, a disposition that applies not only to the representation of nature but also to the representation of culture, which may treat the mimesis of tradition as if one belonged to it—as how things ought to be—though it may well stem from another time or another place.

The hall is aired (gelüftet). Architecture is the medium through which the elements enter into the interior space of their intentional deployment, of their constructedness. The passage of air between exterior and interior space seems almost given, least in need of intentional design, yet it is also that element most closely identical to the shape of space itself. The hall, in Hölderlin’s poem, is the interior space of expectation—it designates the site of an arrival from afar—and it is prepared through exposure to exteriority, the air which passes through it. If the incommensurable moods occasioned by the outside and inside of Zumthor’s chapel—the disproportion of the sublime and the simple harmony of the beautiful—emphasize the power of architectural mediation to divide and yet synthesize the given and made, to construct a unitary tension between these, so too do the form and the content of Hölderlin’s strophe. For while its content is the mimesis of ceremonial propriety, “Celebration of Peace” opens with a headnote begging the reader’s patience with the impropriety of its verse, which breaks with regular measures of Hölderlin’s previous odes, elegies, and hexameters. If “some should think such a language too unconventional, I must confess to them: I cannot do otherwise.” The floor of the hall is levelled, but the form of the verse is uneven—and this is the case, Hölderlin insists, insofar as his song stems from nature: “On a beautiful day—they should consider—almost every mode of song [jede Sangart] makes itself heard; and nature, whence it originates, also receives it again.”5 Just as nature receives every manner of song it gives rise to, so should the unconventional verses Hölderlin cannot help but compose (ich kann nicht anders) be received as participants in the choir of the Whole.

Poetry, unlike architecture, is not subject to the law of gravity. Within the anciently built hall, the floor must be level so that the tables can hold the chalices which hold the wine; they must support the bowls that hold the fruit. The floor of Zumthor’s chapel may bend and flex, with the slightest incline toward the center, but it must support the alter that holds the cross. Yet space passes through the hall or the chapel, ungrounded, and poetry may include the words “table” or “chalice” in uneven measures without spilling the imagined yet unmentioned wine. Air is said to hover over Hölderlin’s green carpets, it really does surround Zumthor’s ash wood pews, and every kind of song one may hear on a beautiful day must pass through this elemental medium. Yet air—elemental space—is nevertheless shaped by architectural form as it passes through the valley, around the curvature of the building, or as it circulates within its enclosure. And the song of poetry—unmoored from the gravity of ground—is measured by verse, even if that verse is irregular.

Something about this play between regularity and irregularity, convention and its displacement, is as vital to Zumthor’s chapel as it is to Hölderlin’s opening strophe. Through the dialectic of slope and plane which distinguishes exterior and interior physiognomy, through the uneven earthliness of its foundation and the horizontal projection of its horizontal floor, the chapel foregrounds the give and take of architecture’s negotiation with gravitational force, even as it also foregrounds the shaping of space itself: the rounding of its evanescence, the leeway of light from on high. The disjunction of interior harmony and exterior disproportion nonetheless partakes of the same form, the same contour. What would come to be called free verse—the singularity of Hölderlin’s lines—also involves this play between propriety and disproportion. As the form of the poem—the space it occupies on the page and the song it traces in the air—is shaped by the play between measure and unmeasure, between rhythmic ground, the stability of the left margin, and the gravitationless flux of sound and signifier, the content of the poem tells us that the tension it thus constructs involves an elemental passage between nature and culture, into and out of the shapes we make with the space we are given: “und gelüftet is der altgebaute, / Seeliggewohnte Saal.”