Once, it is said in Vals, several gallery owners from New York met in the lobby of the best hotel on the square without having had an appointment there. But they had a common goal – the thermal baths of the small town in Graubünden. The angular building with its grey stone façade, which is half-dug into the mountain slope, was designed by Peter Zumthor. The architect became a star in 1996 thanks to the thermal baths, to whose buildings the International of Architecture Enthusiasts has been making pilgrimages ever since.
Matthias Alexander
Deputy head of department in the feuilleton.
- Follow I follow
Zumthor has taken advantage of the opportunities that come with prominence without paying tribute to their temptations. The architect only accepts commissions that suit him personally. And in which he can follow his design principles. Zumthor's buildings are of enormous physicality. He prefers to develop the most striking image of their shape from the topography of the respective location, while deriving the materials to be used from its history – gneiss in the case of the Valser Therme, light-coloured clinker brick at the Kolumba Museum in Cologne, earth-coloured rammed concrete at the Bruder-Klaus-Kapelle in the Eifel. In ever new variations, Zumthor tries out how form and building materials and lighting combine to create harmonious interiors. In the end, even with profane uses, there is an atmosphere that is perceived by many viewers as sacred – very similar to the other great minimalist of our time, John Pawson.
Zumthor belongs to a generation of architects who have been taught architectural history at best for the purpose of learning how not to build. As a monument conservator, as he worked for ten years in Graubünden after completing his studies, he learned to overcome this ahistorical understanding of modernity. Postmodernism, on the other hand, had already subsided by the time he finally became an architect. In this way, he was able to become a pioneer of the second modernism.
Investors who deal with a fixed space program and rigid specifications do not even need to turn to him; You won't find any office buildings in Zumthor's list of works, and there is no architecture in them that is committed to commerce. If you want to build with Zumthor, you should first check yourself to see if you are up to the task: Only those who are willing to exchange ideas and change plans, who understand the work on the design as an open process that may continue into the construction phase, should get involved. If successful, the reward goes beyond architecture. He is still friends with all his builders today, Zumthor once said.
Inevitable failure in Berlin
In retrospect, the disaster surrounding the topography of terror in Berlin seems almost inevitable. Zumthor's way of working is incompatible with the decision-making processes of the public sector, which is determined by the erratic logic of political opinion-forming, delegation of responsibilities and consideration for fluctuating public opinion. The halt of the project, which could have raised the architectural handling of the Nazi legacy to a previously unknown level, was finally justified by additional costs, the amount of which is downright ridiculous compared to the experiences of the past years. Since then, Zumthor has not worked with the public sector as a client.
In general, his oeuvre – unlike, for example, that of his colleagues Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, who also came from Basel and were themselves awarded the Pritzker Prize – is small; he employs just over 30 people in his studio in Haldenstein near Chur. The work there must be imagined as a kind of private building school: concentrated and based on the free exchange of opinions, but nevertheless committed to the principles of the master. In the role of the sage from the alpine province, Zumthor, who cultivates an almost monastic habitus, seems to like himself. The basis of his charisma is not guru-like exaltation, but that enviably calm and polite determination that is more often found in Switzerland than elsewhere.
Zumthor is self-confident, but not arrogant: Always ready to patiently explain his designs in town hall meetings, for example, the only thing he expects from his listeners is a willingness to use his own imagination. Renderings that show photorealistic views of the planned buildings are not his thing. He prefers to work with models that illustrate the basic idea of the respective design. Today, Wednesday, Peter Zumthor, the great magician of minimalism, turns eighty years old.