Zumthor, Peter

Zumthor, Peter,

1943–, Swiss architect. He apprenticed with his cabinetmaker father as a teenager, and wood is a recurring material in his work, e.g., his small, shingled St. Benedict Chapel, Sumvitg, Switzerland (1989), and the maze of wooden walls at the Swiss Pavilion, Expo 2000, Hanover, Germany (2000). Zumthor studied at the BauhausBauhaus
, artists' collective and school of art and architecture in Germany (1919–33). The Bauhaus revolutionized art training by combining the teaching of classic arts with the study of crafts.
..... Click the link for more information. -style Arts and Crafts School, Basel, and the Pratt Institute, New York City. He established an architectural practice in Haldenstein, a small Swiss mountain village, in 1979, and continues to work there. A perfectionist, he chooses to design relatively few buildings, and each of his projects is singular and subtle, simple yet sumptuous. He is probably best known for the austere thermal spa he designed for a hotel in Vals, Switzerland (1996). Built into a hillside and constructed of native quartzite slabs, with narrow skylights, his variation on ancient Roman baths focuses contemplative attention on the elemental—water, stone, light, sound, and shadow. Other projects include the art museum in Bregenz, Austria (1997), whose glass walls become vast video screens at night; the elegantly economical, concrete Bruder Klaus Chapel, Mechemich, Germany (2007); and the boxy, modernist Kolumba Museum, Cologne (2007), which sensitively encloses historic ruins. Zumthor has taught in Europe and the United States, and was awarded (2009) the Pritzker PrizePritzker Prize,
officially The Pritzker Architecture Prize
, award for excellence in architecture, given annually since 1979. Largely modeled on the Nobel Prize, it is the premier architectural award in the United States and is named for the family that founded the
..... Click the link for more information. .

Bibliography

See his Three Concepts: Bath Vals, Art Museum Bregenz, "Topography of Terror" Berlin (1996), Peter Zumthor Works: Buildings and Projects 1979–1997 (1998), and Thinking Architecture (1999, rev. ed. 2006); K. Gantenbein, ed., Seeing Zumthor (2009).

Zumthor, Peter

(1943–)1. Swiss architect and winner of the 2009 Pritzker Prize.2. Zumthor is the son of a cabinetmaker and apprenticed to a carpenter in 1958. In 1968, he became a conservationist architect for the Department for the Preservation of Monuments of the canton of Graubünden. This work on historic restoration projects gave him a further understanding of construction and the qualities of different rustic building materials. Zumthor was able to incorporate this knowledge of materials into Modernist construction and detailing. Projects are the Kunsthaus Bregenz (1997), a shimmering glass and concrete cube that overlooks Lake Constance in Austria; the cave-like thermal baths in Vals, Switzerland (1999); the Swiss Pavilion for Expo 2000 in Hannover,Germany an all-timber structure intended to be recycled after the event; the Kolumba (2007), in Cologne, Germany; and the Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, on a farm near Wachendorf, Germany.