Peter Zumthor

The Pritzker-winning architect offers insight into what motivates his design process, explaining how he creates environments that appeal to a visitor's heart and mind in different ways while instilling a sense of presence, in a third edition that has two additional essays including "Architecture and Landscape" and "The Leis Houses."

Thinking Architecture

The Pritzker-winning architect outlines the creative process he employs while designing the atmosphere of his houses, describing in nine short and self-observant chapters his efforts to instill a feeling of harmonious presence into his environments.

Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects

Atmospheres

Architectural Environments - Surrounding Objects

Mari Lending

While he was working to complete the Allmannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum in southern Norway in 2016, Swiss architect Peter Zumthor asked Norwegian architectural historian Mari Lending to engage in a dialogue about the project. In meandering, impressionistic style, and drawing on their favorite writers, such as Johann Peter Hebel, Stendhal, Nabokov, and T. S. Eliot, their exchanges explore how history, time, and temporalities reverberate across Zumthor's oeuvre. Looking back, Zumthor ponders on how a feeling of history has informed his attempts at emotional reconstruction by means of building, from architectural interventions in dramatic landscapes to his design for the redevelopment of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which conceived the building on a suitably grand urban scale. This small, beautifully designed book records the conversation between Zumthor and Lending, accompanied by photographs taken by the renowned Swiss architectural photographer H�l�ne Binet. The resulting book is a surprisingly revelatory view of one of the most interesting and restlessly creative architects of our era.

A Feeling of History

Myślenie architekturą

Pensar la arquitectura

Serpentine Gallery

For his 2011 Serpentine Pavilion commission, Peter Zumthor provided visitors with a hortus conclusus--a "secret garden" whose contents were designed by Piet Oudolf, hidden within an enigmatic plain black structure. This volume records the pavilion, which received rave reviews, with photographs and a fully illustrated index of the plants used.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011

Peter Zumthor. Hortus Conclusus

Mikka Heikkinen

Zumthor

Inhoud: behuizing Romeinse vindplaats, kapel in Sumvitg, Atelier Zumthor, Gugalun-huis, Spittelhof-wooncomplex, Therme Vals, Kunsthaus Bregenz, wooncomplex voor ouderen, Kunstmuseum Chur en "Topography of Terror".

ピーター・ズントー

Tatiana Bilbao

In March of 2017, Swiss architect Peter Zumthor (1943) visited Mexico to participate in MEXTRÓPOLI. The winner of the 2009 Pritzker Prize and 2013 RIBA Royal Gold Medal had four different conversations with Mexican architects.

Arquitetos Suizos en México

Peter Zumthor en

Peter Zumthor - Atmospheres

Juhani Pallasmaa

Atmosphere is an essential concept for Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. In his text Atmospheres (1996), Zumthor identified a series of themes that play a role in his work in achieving architectonic atmosphere. OASE exchanges ideas with Zumthor about the current relevance of this text, and about the practice of bringing together these elements in the design and construction process. Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa relates atmosphere in architecture to examples and theories from other disciplines like psychology and the visual arts. Zumthor and Pallasmaa also introduce the work of contemporary architects who in their view succeed in truly creating atmosphere through construction.

Building atmosphere

An inspirational set of booklets that invite us to delve into the intellectual world of Peter Zumthor and his guests. In summer 2017, celebrated Swiss architect Peter Zumthor curated the exhibition Dear to Me at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, marking the twentieth anniversary of one of his most famous designs. Part of the program were conversations with philosophers, curators, historians, composers, writers, photographers, collectors, and craftsmen that Zumthor had invited to contribute to the exhibition. His dialogues with them offer insights into the thoughts and practice of fascinating personalities. Together with his counterparts, he explores artistic preferences and practices, reasonings, as well as practical knowledge from artisanal experience. Always charming and affectionate, he follows up persistently, and with gentle determination takes his guests on mutual intellectual strolls. In Dear to Me, Zumthor's equally serious and serene conversations with Anita Albus, Aleida Assmann, Marcel Beyer, Hélène Binet, Hannes Böhringer, Renate Breuss, Claudia Comte, Bice Curiger, Esther Kinsky, Ralf Konersmann, Walter Lietha, Olga Neuwirth, Rebecca Saunders, Karl Schlögel, Martin Seel, Ruedi Walli, and Wim Wenders are collected in seventeen booklets held together in an exquisitely manufactured box. An eighteenth complementary booklet documents the Dear to Me exhibition in Bregenz through concise texts and images.

Peter Zumthor in Conversation

Dear to Me

Peter Zumthor, Pritzker laureate 2009, unarguably ranks among the most important contemporary architects. He is revered worldwide for the stringency of his architectural concepts, the clarity of his designs, his sensitiveness for location and context, and for his conscious and careful use of materials. He is celebrated for the pure and atmospheric spaces he has created, such as Kunsthaus Bregenz (Bregenz, Austria), Therme Vals (Vals, Switzerland), Kolumba Art Museum (Cologne, Germany), or in 2011 the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London, Hortus Conclusus. Yet his lesser known residential buildings in Switzerland or the Field Chapel for Brother Klaus (near Mechernich, Germany) have also won great acclaim from architectural critics. Zumthor is much admired by students and teachers of architecture alike also for his philosophical approach to the task of building and for his writings on architectural thought. The new five-volume set is the first comprehensive monograph on Zumthor's work in more than fifteen years. Around 40 of his buildings and unrealised projects are presented in detail with brief descriptive texts by Zumthor himself, with photographs, sketches, drawings and plans. A complete list of works 1975-2013 rounds out the book. Photographs are contributed by Helene Binet, Hans Danuser and others.

Bauten und Projekte 1985-2013 - 5 Bände

Peter Zumthor is possibly the most innovative European architect working today. His projects inspire enthusiasm with their exactitude, their poetry, and their radically independent aesthetics and vocabulary of form.

Buildings and Projects, 1979-1997

Peter Zumthor, Works

Hélène Binet

Sigrid Hauser

Therme Vals, the spa complex built in the Swiss Alps by celebrated architect Peter Zumthor, became an icon of contemporary architecture soon after its opening in 1996. Inspired by the spa's majestic surroundings, Zumthor built the structure on the sharp grade of an Alpine mountain slope with grass-topped roofs to mimic Swiss meadows, captured here in a series of sumptuous images. This is the only book-length study of this singular building. It features the architects own original sketches and plans for its design as well as striking photographs of the structure. Architectural scholar Sigrid Hauser contributes an essay drawing out the connections between the elemental nature of the spa and mythology, bathing, and purity. Annotations by Peter Zumthor on his design concept and the building process elucidate the structure's symbiotic relationship to its natural surroundings, revealing, for example, why he insisted on using locally quarried stone.

Peter Zumthor Therme Vals

Featuring four essays by Peter Zumthor, this volume exhibits the essence of Zumthor's architectural ideas.

Peter Zumthor penser l'architecture

In order to design a building with a sensuous connection to life, one must think in a way that goes far beyond form and construction. In these essays Peter Zumthor expresses his motivation in designing buildings, which speak to our emotions and understanding in so many ways, and possess a powerful and unmistakable presence and personality.

Peter Zumthor

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