WHO: Peter Zumthor

Pritzker Prize winning Swedish architect Peter Zumthor has been called “an essentialist of the sensual” (the Neue Zucher Zeitung) who designs spaces that are “conceived from the inside out, usually over many painstaking years.” (The New York Times) In addition to designing the Therme Vals spa in Switzerland, he designed Bruder Klaus, a rural chapel in western Germany, Kolumba museum in Cologne and other projects that embody the spirit and soul of the art of architecture

Zumthor has said, "I think the chance of finding beauty is higher is you don't work on it directly. Beauty in architecture is driven by practicality. This is what you learn from studying the old townscapes of the Swiss farmers. If you do what you should, then at the end there is something, which you can't explain maybe, but if you are lucky, it has to do with life."

"The Ascention of Peter Zumthor," a fascinating profile, appears in the March 13, 2011 New York Times magazine. For more information, please visit http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/index.html.


The Kunsthaus Art Museum, Bregenz, Austria. Image courtesy Wikipedia.