Peter Zumthor’s recently completed project in Norway was fourteen years in the making, due in part to its challenging site and to the Pritzker prize-winning architect’s highly deliberate way of working. Consisting of a gallery building, a café, and a comfort station perched on the sides of mountains overlooking a riverbed, the project, called Allmannajuvet, commemorates the history of zinc mining on the site, which helped fuel the development of the nearby town of Sauda in the late 19th century.
Commissioned by the Norwegian government for the country’s National Tourists Routes—a series of landscape-based interventions designed by architects, artists, and landscape architects to highlight the country’s dramatic natural beauty—the project is a hybrid of an art installation, historic site, and a rest stop, using an architectural language inspired by utilitarian structures of the mining industry. “I like to guide people to understand a place and to connect to local history,” Zumthor says.
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