Peter Zumthor Works

A year later in The New York Times, on January 7 of this year, Dian Ketchum's story, "Architecture's Swiss Mystic," further fanned the hype about this form cabinetmaker, whom she admitted "has barely a dozen buildings to his credit." With just a few commissions, Zumthor, the new superstar architect, has... Read More

A year later in The New York Times, on January 7 of this year, Dian Ketchum's story, "Architecture's Swiss Mystic," further fanned the hype about this form cabinetmaker, whom she admitted "has barely a dozen buildings to his credit." With just a few commissions, Zumthor, the new superstar architect, has reinvented Modernism as minimalism derived from the Swiss vernacular combined with his own sense of translucent atmospherics. And he writes. In the introduction to Peter Zumthor Works: Buildings and Projects 1979-1997. Zumthor himself describes the origins of his sensibility-a near state of grace between tectonics and poetics that relies on ephemeral and often mysterious intuitive forces.
Works features 8 buildings and 12 projects, ranging from small rural houses (including Zumthor's own studio of 1985-86) to public architecture and provincial museums. Since 1978, like most architects, he has been entering design competitions-losing more than he wins. But his major commissions, like the See Less