Working out of a wooden barn in the Swiss Alps, Peter Zumthor has completed only a handful of buildings, none of them in the United States, yet at 58 he is something of a cult figure in architectural circles. With Zumthor’s name on the shortlist of architects for most prestigious projects, Paul Goldberger examines the work—high-tech and sensual, hard-edged and serene, modernist and opulent—of a man who began life as a carpenter, experienced the world, and then retreated into his own quiet realm of deeply pragmatic, almost Proustian spirituality.

You can tell a lot about an architect by where he chooses to put his office. Lord Norman Foster works in a vast, coolly sleek, glass-enclosed box overlooking the Thames in the heart of London. Frank Gehry operates out of a warehouse in a newly trendy, once derelict section of Santa Monica. Jean Nouvel has an atelier not far from the Bastille in Paris. And Peter Zumthor works out of a wooden barn in Haldenstein, Switzerland, a hamlet of 700 tucked so deep into the mountains that it takes the better part of a day to get there from Zurich. His studio has a grand piano, and its windows face out onto a grove of fruit trees. It is not surprising, then, that it took some time for the world to hear of him. But if Zumthor is not the sort of architect who jump-started his career by having lunch at Philip Johnson’s table at the Four Seasons, he is now, at 58, one of the most sought-after members of his profession anywhere. He has a tiny oeuvre, and no desire to see it grow by leaps and bounds, which in and of itself makes him different from most of his colleagues. Zumthor has a kind of exotic aura about him. His buildings look as if they were made by hand, and while they are unabashedly modern, they bespeak craftsmanship more than high tech. Whatever happens to him in the next few years, you know that there are not going to be a lot of Zumthor buildings. A couple of projects at a time, done well, is all he seeks. He has yet to build in the United States; in April he was edged out by the New York partnership of Liz Diller and Ric Scofidio in a competition to design a new building for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Right now almost every institution planning an architecturally ambitious new building seems to have Zumthor on its radar screen, and it is a foregone conclusion that he will start building something in the United States in the next few years.

Zumthor’s work is mostly within a few hours of his home in Switzerland, but ever since his two most famous buildings—an art museum in Bregenz, Austria, finished in 1997, and thermal baths in Vals, Switzerland, that he completed the year before—found their way into the architectural press and then into a pair of books he published, he has been something of a cult figure in architectural circles. When he lectured at the Architectural League of New York in 1999, the talk sold out and had to be moved to a larger auditorium, which was remarkable considering how few people outside of the profession had ever heard of Zumthor, and how little work he has actually done. His 1998 monograph Peter Zumthor Works: Buildings and Projects 1979–1997,includes just eight completed buildings and 12 other projects, three of which have since gone into construction.

“I’m not mainly interested in what buildings mean as symbols or vehicles for ideas,” Zumthor told an interviewer for The New York Times. That statement makes his popularity among younger architects all the more striking, since the current generation of architects seems often to believe that impenetrable theory is a better sign of architectural gravitas than exquisite craftsmanship. What matters to him, Zumthor says, is the experience of a building, not the theory behind it. That’s the kind of claim that is usually made by architects who design second-rate commercial buildings and like to denounce the work of their more serious colleagues as pretentious academic froufrou. But Zumthor is no philistine, and he isn’t hiding behind practicality or function or economy. He is as far from a pragmatist, in his way, as Peter Eisenman. But where Eisenman is interested in seeing what kind of architectural experience you will end up with if you push an idea as far as it can go, Zumthor is doing the opposite—he starts by thinking about the physical, not the intellectual, aspects of architecture and pushes them as far into the realm of sensory experience as they can go. He wants to experiment with light and materials and texture and space, and his greatest passion appears to come from figuring out how to make us experience the most traditional materials—stone and wood and glass—in new ways.

Zumthor is an apostle of the real. “Architecture has its place in the concrete world,” he has written. “This is where it exists. This is where it makes its statement.” He began his career as a carpenter, and all of his architecture has the qualities a great cabinetmaker brings to his work: it is precise, and its glory lies in the perfection of its details and in the excellence of its materials. There is a lightness and a delicacy to most of Zumthor’s buildings that make them different from those of Louis Kahn, but in other ways Kahn and Zumthor are not dissimilar: Kahn also had a reputation as something of a mystic, and he loved to talk about searching for an essential spirit of architecture, and about memory and light and the sensual quality of different materials, and Zumthor talks about all of these things, too. And like Kahn, Zumthor is a lot more practical—and significantly more ambitious—than the reputation he cultivates. Zumthor may choose to live in Haldenstein, but his world has never been confined by it. He was born in Basel, he spent the late 1960s as a visiting student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and he has taught architecture at Santa Monica’s SCI-Arc and Harvard. This man is not Rousseau’s noble savage, untouched by the corruption of the world. He is more of an artist who has seen the world and chosen to withdraw just a little bit from it, all the better to have an impact on it.

Ihave come increasingly to think of Zumthor as a cross between Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Proust, with perhaps a tiny bit of Bob Dylan thrown in. If you remember the beginnings of Mies, before the plague of banal glass office towers made his legacy less than perfect, you think of elegant, sensual buildings, austere and rich at the same time, modernism as a kind of pristine opulence. And so it is with Zumthor. The art museum in Bregenz is a shimmering box of glass, glowing, its panels almost like translucent shingles. There is not a single detail that is anything like Mies van der Rohe, but Zumthor’s design merges lightness and technology with a grace that comes closer to Mies in spirit than most of the architecture that imitates him directly. The museum in Bregenz is not the architecture of the machine age or the architecture of the computer age, but one of those rare instances of modernism making a whole new way of seeing, at once hard-edged and utterly serene.

Zumthor is hardly the first architect to search for serenity in his work, but his determination to do it in combination with austerity makes him remarkable, at least among Westerners. The spareness of Zumthor’s architecture makes for obvious comparisons to Japanese design, and while these aren’t altogether wrong, they miss the point, which is how much Zumthor places the self at the heart of the architectural experience. He is interested less in transcendence than in forcing out of everyday experience a sense of grace. Not for nothing does he talk about the paintings of Edward Hopper and the poetry of William Carlos Williams. Zumthor, unlike the Japanese, seems to view his own memories as the defining elements in his aesthetic. “There was a time when I experienced architecture without thinking about it,” he has written about his aunt’s house. “Sometimes I can almost feel a particular door handle in my hand, a piece of metal shaped like the back of a spoon. That door handle still seems to me like a special sign of entry into a world of different moods and smells. I remember the sound of the gravel under my feet, the soft gleam of the waxed oak staircase, I can hear the heavy front door closing behind me. . . . Memories like these contain the deepest architectural experience that I know. They are the reservoirs of the architectural atmospheres and images that I explore in my work as an architect.”

This Proustian side would be romantic, almost sentimental, if Zumthor were not so rigorous in his actual work. The interior of the art museum is concrete, beautifully made and stunning in its restraint. So, too, the thermal baths at Vals, whose interior of greenish striated stone slabs seems like a kind of Miesian cave, as if the Barcelona Pavilion had been placed underground and flooded with water, and whose exterior is open to the steep mountainside, a window to the land that is at once monumental and deferential. Zumthor’s lines are not soft, but his ethos is. His Benedictine Chapel, near the baths at Vals, is a wooden barn set into the hillside, whose curves stand up to the mountains and are given their rhythms by the mist that swirls over them; Zumthor has balanced the boat-shaped mass of his building against the ephemera of the mist, and made it seem almost to sail across the mountain.

For the Swiss Pavilion at the 2000 world’s fair, in Hannover, Germany, Zumthor produced a magnificent structure of open-jointed planks and beams of wood, assembled without nails or bolts, whose lines and masses softly echo the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright, but which also calls to mind associations ranging from the pure and perfect joinery of classical Japanese architecture to the geometries of Sol LeWitt. Zumthor’s buildings, like all great art, make you think of other things, because you want to connect them to the whole of your life experience. You want to be in them, to touch them, to feel how their reality ripples across everything else you know. Zumthor creates astonishingly beautiful objects, but they are never just objects. They get their meaning from the life that goes on within them. The greatest feeling a building can confer, Zumthor has written, is of “a consciousness of time passing and an awareness of the human lives that have been acted out in these places. At these moments, architecture’s aesthetic and practical values, stylistic and historical significance are of secondary importance. What matters now is only the feeling of deep melancholy. Architecture is exposed to life.”

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