| | For the past 30 years, Peter Zumthor has run a small practice of no more than 20 people in the remote Swiss mountain village of Haldenstein, turning down most of the commissions he is offered, and designing projects mainly in Germany and his native Switzerland. When he received the Pritzker Prize this year, few who knew his name were surprised – but outside of architectural circles, most still do not.
The Pritzker is widely regarded as the architectural equivalent of the Nobel Prize, and celebrates annually the consistent and significant contributions of a living architect to humanity and the built environment.
Speculation as to who would win architecture's highest honour this year was roughly split (in Zumthor's favour) between the Swiss architect and the two Japanese nominees, Toyo Ito and SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa), who looked fit for the prize after a run of European laureates in previous years. If there was any controversy regarding Zumthor's work, it was that not enough of it was built to warrant what is essentially an award for an influential lifetime body of work.
Some see parallels between Zumthor's laureation in 2009, in the midst of a global recession, and that of Glenn Murcutt in 2002, which closely followed the September 11 attacks. Both architects are regarded as masters of architecture as a craft. They are reclusive or at least very local, and produce sensuous buildings with a passionate attention to materiality, scale, and detail; manifesting what Zumthor calls "the magic of the real". Their works, in many ways conservative, run against the grain in times of postmodern uncertainty, when architecture is 'read' as a text, treated as a vessel for meaning, or else regarded as a physical arrangement of symbols which make sense only when arrested as a whole, in the mind. It is as if their buildings, which aim simply to be, rather than to represent, are what we turn to in these times for durability, presence, and by virtue of their functionalism, a degree of political innocence – but perhaps most of all, homeliness, which in architecture is often called humility. It might be a comfort to learn of architects who still today turn their discipline and intelligence to creating architecture which is "an envelope and background for life which goes on in and around it, a sensitive container for the rhythm of footsteps on the floor, for the concentration of work, for the silence of sleep". These envelopes are a resistance to the arbitrary and the vague, to which postmodern life surrenders everything but the most immediate facts of life.
Two things come to mind when contemplating Peter Zumthor's architecture. The first is, literally, things – or the materiality of his buildings. Zumthor aims to use materials in a way that is "beyond all culturally conveyed meaning", that is innate to the material and specific to the site, the building, and its program. This is the most celebrated aspect of Zumthor's architecture, which is redolent with examples of creative and precise but usually low-tech details and construction methods. These treatments of materials, usually subtle but salient, include the finger joints of the solid wood Luzi House, the use of etched glass shingles which deflect and diffuse the light entering the Kunsthaus Bregenz, and the method of construction of the Brother Klaus Field Chapel in Wachendorf. That chapel was constructed by erecting a tepee-like arrangement of 112 tree trunks, around which layers of concrete were poured and compacted. A smouldering fire was left burning in the form for 3 weeks, after which the dry trunks could be extracted.
Second is the idea that all architectural design is, in a sense, nostalgic. "The roots of our understanding of architecture lie in our childhood, in youth"; he writes, "they lie in our biography". He recalls the kitchen of his childhood home, the grip of a door handle, the sights, smells, the sense and architectural atmosphere that shape our understanding of space and inevitably become a point of comparison for what we experience in the future. To Zumthor, the experience of a space which dignifies and empathises with the inhabitant is what truly inspires his work. To create this architectural atmosphere, as with beauty, one needs to be aware of the stuff out of which architecture is made: materials, like polished granite and cedar shingles and steel, which must be discovered and remembered before engaging in the "alchemy" of turning material into sense and emotion. He is adamant that architecture is a matter of things, and must be built in the way music must be performed.
Zumthor in fact does not use models in the conventional sense, opting for installations of actual building material over the cardboard models typical of architecture offices. In his practice, he aims not to bring preconceived spaces and images to the project to be modified to fit the site, but to identify the mood and sense he wants to create, and to choreograph the materials and structure of a building like a body, sometimes sinuous, sometimes rigid, to this end – and hopefully to be surprised by the result of this process. Zumthor's architecture is not formally consistent, so much as it is born of a consistent methodology, which the Pritzker jury notes is conceived "almost as carefully as each of his projects".
The architect's best known project is the Thermal Bath at Vals, in Graubünden, Switzerland. Even this project was presented to the village using a water-filled stone model which surely was meant to evoke the sensuous experience of being surrounded by the broken thin slabs of local gneiss, lit by sensitively placed slits in the ceiling which allow small amounts of daylight to wash down the face of the walls; and to be bathing in the thermal water tapped from the mountains surrounding the village.
Peter Zumthor, born in Basel in 1943, served an apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker. He studied at the Basel Arts and Crafts School and the Pratt Institute, and started work at the Department for the Preservation of Monuments in Graubünden in 1967. He established his practice in Haldenstein in 1979, where he still works. + 1. Zumthor's most celebrated building is nestled in the hillside surrounds of Vals, Switzerland, at the source of the village's thermal springs. It sits among five hotel buildings constructed in the 1960s, which were bought up by the village and converted into a therapeutic spa complex after their German developer went bankrupt. Few who have enjoyed the primal, textured experience of bathing at the Therme Vals leave unmoved by the interplay of stone and water, the geometric disciple of the building and the sense of it being carved out of the mountainside, or of the seemingly immutable walls and ceilings of solid concrete and Vals gneiss, edged with lines of daylight. To enter the baths, one must pass through a tunnel cut into the mountain, where Vals water is allowed to trickle down and stain the walls. The baths are in a sense a ritual setting, and the tunnel is an entrance to a world of textures, surfaces, light, and of water of different temperatures; of austerity and sensuality at once. It was with great reluctance and only at the client's insistence that Zumthor installed clocks in the building – which are about the size of a wristwatch and built into the top of two brass posts among the pools. 2. In the architect's own words, the Kunsthaus Bregenz "was designed without windows. And yet daylight is everywhere". The building is clad in etched glass shingles, which refract and diffuse daylight, admitting it to the interior horizontally, through the cavities above each floor. 3. The Art Museum of the Cologne Archdiocese was said by the Pritzker jury to be "completely at ease with its many layers of history". In the new building, ruins of the Saint Kolumba Church, destroyed in the Second World War, and Madonna in the Ruins, the chapel designed by Gottfried Böhm soon after the war, are embedded. The museum's ground floor houses an archaeological excavation of previous churches dating back to the 7th century.
4. Like the timber houses dotted around it in the upper Rhine Valley, the intimate St Benedict Chapel is clad in larch wood shingles, and employs a simple, deliberately expressed timber structure. 5-7. Commissioned by a local farmer and his wife, the Brother Klaus Field Chapel was constructed largely by the clients and their friends. It took 24 working days to pour earth and concrete into the form created by the tepee-like arrangement of 112 tree trunks, after which the trunks were shrunk using a slow-burning fire over three weeks and then extracted - leaving the interior charred and ready to receive the splinters of daylight through the walls' small penetrations. IMAGES Peter Zumthor portrait courtesy and Copyright of Gerry Ebner. All other images obtained through Creative Commons Licenses: 1. Photo by wj:Lb CC-BY-ND 2.0 (Generic): from Flickr and free to share the work provided attribution is given and no derivative works are made, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/ 2. Photo by Rory Hyde CC-BY-SA 2.0 (Generic): both from Flickr and free to share and remix the work provided attribution is given and distributed under same or similar license if altered, see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ 3. Photo by Elke Wetzig CCBY-SA 3.0 (Unported) from Wikimedia Commons and free to share and remix the work provided attribution is given and distributed under same or similar license if altered, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ 4. Photo by p2cl CC-BY-SA 2.0 (Generic) from Flickr and free to share and remix the work provided attribution is given and distributed under same or similar license if altered, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ 5. Photo by karain CC-BY 2.0 (Generic) from Flickr and free to share and remix the work provided attribution is given, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ 6 . Photo by SEIER+SEIER CC-BY 2.0 (Generic) from Flickr and free to share and remix the work provided attribution is given, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ 7. Photo by karain CC-BY 2.0 (Generic) from Flickr and free to share and remix the work provided attribution is given, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
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