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• “X” Marks The Spot! #23

With Swiss precision: the 2009 Pritzker Prize Winner Peter Zumthor

By Oliver Herwig

Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has a differentiated view of things: For him, there is more to design than just a good form. He is not a designer, yet Alessi markets a pepper mill he created. His buildings are not showy sets of superficial effects, yet they are spectacular. This year, Zumthor won the Pritzker Prize. A portrait.

The master, the magician, the monk – if you turn your attention to Peter Zumthor you will come across many catchwords. Labels stick to the architect like billboards to construction sites. At the age of 66, the Swiss architect has made a reputation for himself with only a dozen buildings or so. This year, the Pritzker Prize has put him in the same league as Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry and Norman Foster – who by contrast manage offices that run like architectural machines, churning out design everywhere, simultaneously, in a respectively uniform formal idiom.

Peter Zumthor. Photo by Gerry Ebner (www.gerryebner.ch)

Even though Zumthor has been planning worldwide for some time now, in Qatar and the Atacama desert in Chile, the center of his working life is Haldenstein, a village three kilometers north of Chur with less than a thousand inhabitants. He has been running his studio there, nestled at the foot of the Calanda Massif, for 30 years now. And the Pritzker Prize, often referred to as the Nobel Prize for Architecture, has brought just a little turbulence to Haldenstein – with TV and radio coverage, not to mention innumerable interviews. Otherwise, nothing appears to have changed.

Outside view of the Kolumba Diocese Museum (2007) in Cologne. Photo by Hélène Binet (www.helenebinet.com).

In Zumthor’s home, which doubles up as his office, models and sketches are stacked up like archaeological finds. The entire house seems to be wrapped around the atrium with green light falling through the plants onto the desk and computer workstation. A perfectly ironed white shirt, dark pants and carefully trimmed beard: the architect likes things to be precise. In the terms he uses, too: “Design has a somewhat negative flavor to it among architects. I prefer to think of myself as giving things shape,” he says. “I don’t design in the strict sense,” he continues, “as design is the superficial part. It also has its value, but it is not my world.”

Interior of the Kolumba Diocese Museum (2007) in Cologne. Photo by Hélène Binet (www.helenebinet.com).

In 2001, when Alessi tried to persuade him to contribute to their “Tea & Coffee Towers”, he declined. It was not until many years later that he presented objects there which he had designed for himself, candleholders of lathed aluminum and a pepper mill 29.5 cm high, turned from a single piece of wood, with the grain running through from top to bottom. He was inspired by mountain cabins in the Valais with their mushroom-shaped supports defying rain and snow. Zumthor’s creed can be discerned in those pieces of mountain maple and walnut: the architect does not deny his crafts origins, his training as a cabinetmaker. On the contrary, he emphasizes materiality, mass and scale.

A good craftsman would do the same. And Zumthor goes one further: elegance that does not derive from the necessary. Zumthor works on his objects and spaces like a sculptor extracting the essence of an object from the material. It is the nuances which energize his constructions: the light with whose help he infuses the material with an aura of its own. Or better still, bathes it in mood.

Clear, straight, exact: Kunsthaus Bregenz is made of glass panels, steel and cast concrete. Zumthor terms it a “luminescent body” that radiates light and color and allows us to guess what its interior must be like. Photo by Hélène Binet (www.helenebinet.com).

How does he do it? You need talent. You can’t become a Roger Federer simply by wanting to play good tennis. You have to work and persevere. And thinking about things helps, too. There are no recipes, he says. “Spaces are not made of blank paper.”

What Zumthor displays alongside his talent for aura-filled places and his obsession with material is a penchant for the old-fashioned, for handcrafts, origins and mood. Based on this triad, he designs uncompromising buildings. Zumthor is the toughest of task masters among the architects – he is someone who stacks stone and pours concrete as if trying to compete with the pyramids. Yet at the same time he is the softest, transforming a giant stack of wood into a perforated screen at EXPO 2000.

The Kunsthaus Bregenz. Photo by Hélène Binet (www.helenebinet.com).

He insists on being thoughtful, exact, intellectual: “Many houses have been built to earn money. This has something to do with education, many people have no feeling for it,” he comments, “they are not really interested in how things are – or they are simply too easy to satisfiy.” Zumthor’s buildings, by contrast, grow slowly. And each takes its place in history: The glass Kunsthaus in Bregenz, the wooden Swiss pavilion at the EXPO, or the stone Kolumba, Art Museum of the Archdiocese of Cologne. When complimented on his buildings, Zumthor simply replies, “It is important to make things beautiful, so that they are alive.”

This article was previously published in the Special Issue "Designing Architecture", attached to form Magazine #228, September/October 2009.