There is nothing in his body of work that can compare with what is produced by very large firms, now known by the fashionable portmanteau “starchitects”, who regularly appear on the shortlists of international competitions. With the exception of Berlin, where he won the competition for the Topography of Terror documentation centre, Zumthor has never been in a position to build in a major city of international standing. It is divided between the canton of Grisons ( Graubünden), where Zumthor lives and works, and where most of his buildings are concentrated, and Austria and Germany, where this German-speaking architect has taken on and completed a small number of projects – such as the Swiss pavilion for Expo 2000 in Hanover and, more recently, the Saint Nicholas of Flue chapel in Wachendorf (2007). Moreover, his production has barely crossed the Swiss borders.
His most important projects – the Therme Vals, in the Swiss canton of Grisons, the Kunsthaus Bregenz ( KUB) on Lake Constance, the Kolumba art museum in Cologne – have neither the scale nor the symbolic strength of major urban public works. Is Peter Zumthor atypical? Since his firm was established in 1979, the Swiss architect has actually only completed around thirty buildings, most of them fairly modest in comparison with the standards reached by the major architectural firms. His “modesty”, “humility” and “courage, indeed temerity” characterise his work, which was described as being “without compromise”. There, with a small team, he dreams up buildings with remarkable sincerity, free from the influences of fashion and passing trends. As the members of the jury explained, “for thirty years, Peter Zumthor has been living in the small, remote village of Haldenstein in the Swiss Alps, keeping his distance from the chaotic activity of the international architectural scene. The jury’s decision was both unexpected and bold, rewarding an atypical and unconventional architect. The Pritzker Architecture Prize, the true “Nobel prize of architecture,” was awarded to Swiss architect Peter Zumthor in 2009.
0 kommentar(er)
