Embodied Temporality. A Phenomenological Reading of Peter Zumthor’s Bruder Klaus Field Chapel

‘A building’, wrote Martin Heidegger in his 1971 essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, is not ‘an object to be admired […] rather, it is primarily part of an ongoing human experience’. The revelation of phenomenology, as it relates to architectural space, lay in its departure from a neo-Kantian understanding of form as an abstract category apprehended intellectually, toward the disclosure of architectural meaning at the spatial level through embodied experience – a newfound interest in, or perhaps a return to, corporeality as the domain through which the conditions of spatiality and temporality, as fundamental dimensions of being-in-the-world, are revealed.

This study proposes a phenomenological reading of Peter Zumthor’s Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, wherein temporality, not merely reduced to symbolic representation or formal abstraction, acquires the status of ontological principle – and simultaneously becomes a key to understanding the ideas that underpin the architect’s work more broadly. Through an approach that is both critical and personal, the essay traces the relationship between Heideggerian temporality and the broader field of phenomenology as it applies to architectural space, in its conception and its lived experience alike.

In the chapel at Wachendorf, this kind of embodied temporality, although not overtly expressed as such, functions as the generative principle of both form and experience, unfolding, on the one hand, conceptually – through spatial archetypes – and, on the other, at the level of the construction process, through material traces by which time is, in a sense, “trapped” in matter, rendered visible, tangible, and inhabitable through sensorial traces left behind. These dimensions converge at the level of inhabitation through spatial qualities that engage the totality of the human being as embodied and multisensory. It is thus only at the level of inhabitation that the notion of temporality can be understood.