The last and first time I read about him was in an exhaustive article in the New York Times, which did not strike me much then but must be good to adhere in my memory: "The Ascension of Peter Zumthor" (Mar. 11, 2011) by Michael Kimmelman.
He is 68 years old and an inhabitant of a Swiss village, with his office in Chur. His father was a cabinetmaker and put him under considerable pressure to take over; instead Mr. Zumthor went off to study art, industrial and interior design, and ended up informally in the architectural field. Eventually he was officially designated as an architect by the Swiss government, waiving the formal qualifications. In 2009 he won the Pritzker Prize.
Rowan Moore's Observer article has good descriptions of his architectural style. His famous projects have so far included a baths (Therme Vals, 1996), field chapels, and a construction in Cologne where he had to work with the ruins beneath. More recently he completed a commission from philosopher Alain de Botton, building a low hilltop house in South Devon, England, as one of five holiday homes within the "Living Architecture" project. (The houses, which can be rented, pursue de Botton's aim to endear the best and brightest in modern architecture to hoi polloi.) These works are very individual and his architectural team is little; he neither seems to sprawl internationally nor expel a worldly urban flair like Zaha Hadid or Frank Gehry. (Sir Norman Foster, for instance, cooperates with around 600 people. Zumthor is also unusually prone to picking and choosing what he wants to do, which enables admirable creative independence.)
Two years ago, Jonathan Glancey captured something of the high regard in which Mr. Zumthor is held as he wrote, for the Guardian's website,
I find it thrilling when I come across something – be it a school, a factory, a place of worship, a Tube station – that could be a lasting memorial for our own age and endeavours. I see this in the work of contemporary architects such as Peter Zumthor, Caruso St John, Tadao Ando, Oscar Niemeyer and Alvaro Siza.Zumthor's work is generally sombre (it is tempting to take Glancey's "memorial" literally, as "funerary"), though he would probably not appreciate such a reduction, and has a Scandinavian spareness and severity of line that echo the sterner alpine geology and historical religious strains in Switzerland. It also counteracts the idiosyncratic (for instance) Austrian tendency to seek brightness in its art, trim houses with geraniums and petunias and folk crafts, and turn to neatness and colour and transalpine Mediterranean warmth in its architecture. In his Bruder Klaus chapel, for instance, the inverse-ribbed walls are dark and though a circle and shaft of light emanates from the top the joy of religion seems too contemplative to be very present.
In his Serpentine Gallery pavilion, the projected image shows a big, slant-edged rectangular roof aperture in a tombesque room of slate grey, which opens a flower garden to be arranged by Piet Oudolf to the air. Glancey elucidates that the walls will be made out of timber and finished with "scrim and black paste made with sand." Previous pavilions, ten in all, were designed among others by Hadid, Gehry, and Daniel Libeskind.
"Zumthor Rising" [New York Times], slideshow by Hendrik Kerstens, and Julian Faulhaber for the Times (March 13, 2003)
"Peter Zumthor - in pictures" [Observer] by various photographers (June 19, 2011)
"Peter Zumthor: In pursuit of perfection" [Observer] by Rowan Moore (June 19, 2011)
"Swiss architect untouched by fad or fashion wins prized Pritzker award" [Guardian], by Ed Pilkington (April 14, 2009)
"Jonathan Glancey on architect Charles Holden" [Guardian], by Jonathan Glancey (Nov. 5, 2009)
"Alain de Botton commissions holiday homes to promote modernist architecture" [Guardian], by Robert Booth (May 9, 2010)
"Peter Zumthor unveils secret garden for Serpentine pavilion" [Guardian] by Jonathan Glancey (April 4, 2011)
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