Profiting from Experience

Last June I spent a week in a 200-year-old villa on a Swiss hillside, staffed with an in-house cook. I sketched my impressions of a medieval village and toured the sublime projects of the cult-inspiring architect Peter Zumthor. No, this isn’t a rundown of what I did on my summer vacation. Rather, it’s the itinerary of an international retreat sponsored by the architecture firm Hanbury Evans Wright Vlattas + Company for eight of its employees (and one embedded design journalist).

The trip is an expression of the firm’s investment in a culture of learning that stretches beyond the occasional guest lecture or AIA conference. Organized through the architecture department at Virginia Tech (VT), teams from Hanbury Evans—which has offices in Norfolk and Wytheville, Virginia, as well as Tampa, Florida—have toured such culturally rich cities as Barcelona, Venice, and Cairo. This year’s pilgrimage encompassed four projects by Zumthor, a sizable chunk of the unprolific Swiss architect’s oeuvre, including his most famous: the otherworldly thermal baths in Vals, Switzerland, constructed from striated stone, and the handsome glass-walled Kunsthaus, in Bregenz, Austria. (The curriculum was determined by VT professors before the notoriously reclusive man was thrust into the limelight after winning the Pritzker Prize earlier this year.)

The thinking behind the program is simple: in order to understand a piece of architecture, you must see and interact with it. And perhaps no other living architect demonstrates that principle more than Zumthor, whose obsessive attention to craftsmanship, local materials, and context can only be fully appreciated firsthand. “Zumthor uses the senses and light to create these subtleties that really can’t be photographed easily,” says Wesley Page, a principal designer at the firm. “You have to go in to feel and touch them yourself. That’s really powerful architecture.”

So how will the architects translate Zumthor’s sui generis designs into the campus residences and student centers the firm is known for? Perhaps the master’s influence will be felt in their choice of local materials, an inventive use of light, or a new respect for simplicity. Regardless of how the experience resonates formally, the trip is good for collegiality. While participants are granted time to explore on their own, traveling with a group of fellow practitioners leads to eye-opening conversations—especially when those discussions happen over free-flowing wine, as was invariably the case at the end of each full day. “They have a shared experience in a context that they’re unfamiliar with,” says Jack Davis, VT’s dean of architecture and one of two professors on the trip. “That kind of bonding agent is easily transferable to the projects they work on together, to the meals they occasionally share, and even the act of passing each other in the hallway.”

On our last night, however, everyone just seemed grateful for the temporary reprieve from such humdrum concerns as deadlines, client demands, and building codes. “Next week’s going to be brutal,” Page sighed.