Oculus
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 Thermal Baths at Vals, all resulted from competitions.
Richard Ingersoll, Architecture, Oct 1997
Peter Zumthor is not yet a household name among architects, due to his minimal production and his reluctance to publish his work. With the completion of ahealth spa in Vals, Switzerland, and an art museum in Bregenz, Austria--extraordinary works that seem destined to represent the age--the Swiss architect's aloofness can no longer be maintained....Deceptively simple--cubes, oblongs, cylinders--the 54-year-old architect's buildings cannot be captured in photographs; their true essence comes from the experience of textures, the play of light, the celebration of craft, and the kinesthesia of their spaces....Each work goes to extremes to eliminate the superfluous, yielding the paradox of an architecture of pure materials and continuous space that is at once impossibly simple yet wrenchingly mysterious.
