Pritzker Prize for Peter Zumthor

Klosi News 

This year’s Pritzker Prize, considered one of the highest honours and an equal to the Nobel Prize in Architecture, has been awarded to Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, known for his “crisp look” buildings and his approach to design and the nature of his practice.

With a small office of about 15 people located in the village of Haldenstein in the Swiss mountains, Mr. Zumthor has produced an architecture, as the Pritzker jury puts it, “of great integrity — untouched by fad or fashion.”

Mr. Zumthor believes that “every building is built for a specific use in a specific place and for a specific society.” His buildings “try to answer the questions that emerge from these simple facts as precisely and critically as they can.” He is known to have declined many projects that came his way, choosing to work only with the ones he feels “a deep affinity for its programme.”

The Thermal Bath at Vals, Switzerland, built in 1996, is considered a masterpiece, and celebrated as “a superb example of simple detailing.” The Kolumba Art Museum in Germany, the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria and the Saint Benedict Chapel in Switzerland, are some of his other well known works.

Mr. Zumthor believes that the language of architecture is not about specific styles. Instead, it has to speak its own language that will resist the celebration of the inessential and “counter the waste of forms and meanings.”

He is known for the sumptuous use of materials that engage “many of our senses and not just our sight.” The citation says: “In Zumthor’s skilful hands, like those of the consummate craftsman, materials from cedar shingles to sandblasted glass are used in a way that celebrates their own unique qualities, all in the service of an architecture of permanence.”

The Pritzker Architecture Prize is awarded annually and carries a grant of $100,000 and a bronze medallion. It will be presented on May 29 in Buenos Aires.