Peter Zumthor
Peter Zumthor works from a small village in Graubünden and builds few but painstakingly worked-out buildings. The baths at Vals and the Bruder Klaus Chapel show an architecture of material, light and mood.
Peter Zumthor was born in 1943 in Basel, the son of a cabinetmaker, and learned joinery himself. He studied design in Basel and at the Pratt Institute in New York. From 1968 he worked for ten years in the heritage department of the canton of Graubünden, where he surveyed and restored old buildings. That gave him a deep knowledge of local materials and crafts. In 1979 he opened his own office in Haldenstein, a village near Chur.
Zumthor’s early works were shelters for Roman excavations in Chur and the Sogn Benedetg chapel in Sumvitg, a chapel clad in wooden shingles. The baths at Vals, 1996, made him famous. The Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria is a glowing glass cube, and the Kolumba museum in Cologne is built on the ruins of a Gothic church. The Bruder Klaus Chapel in Mechernich was cast in concrete around tree trunks that were then burned away. In Norway he designed the memorial to the witch trials in Vardø, together with the artist Louise Bourgeois. He has also designed a new building for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Zumthor received the Pritzker Prize in 2009. He has written the books Thinking Architecture and Atmospheres, in which he describes how architecture is experienced with all the senses. He works with a small office and turns down many commissions. His way of working has inspired architects who want to return to material and craft, not least in the Nordic countries.