The House of the Senses: Experiencing Buildings with Peter Zumthor and Pliny the Younger

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the sensory experience of architecture from classical times to the present day, examining how this finds expression both in one of the earliest literary discussions of an architectural structure, Pliny the Younger’s epistle about his villa at Laurentum, and in the work and writing of the present-day architect Peter Zumthor. Tracing a shared interest in architecture as an immersive experience in these diverse figures, and bringing together architectural and literary analysis, it suggests that a phenomenological experience of architecture is fundamental not only to the experience of buildings themselves, but also to the ways in which they are re-imagined in writing.