Zumthor the shaman - Peter Zumthor, winner of the 1998 Carlsberg Prize for Architecture

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1998 by Peter Davey

Peter Zumthor is the winner of the 1998 Carlsberg Prize for Architecture. The two previous recipients were Tadao Ando and Juha Leiviska. Like them, Zumthor explores the essence of architecture in buildings which celebrate place and engage all the human senses. Jury member Peter Davey explains why Zumthor was premiated.

Peter Zumthor's oeuvre is not large, but it is very diverse, because each of his buildings is a deeply considered particular response to site and programme. Each is clearly the product of a sensitivity concerned with place, materiality, space and light, and with human responses to these fundamental elements of architecture. And most of them have more in common than authorship, for until recently, almost all the work has been in Graubunden, the most easterly canton of Switzerland, and in some ways, its most complex. Here Latin and Teutonic culture intermingle; Romansch and German are spoken in adjacent settlements and, while Chur (the cantonal capital) could almost be in northern Italy, the nearby village in which Zumthor Dives and works is a cousin of hamlets in Bavaria and Austria.

Zumthor knows intimately the piazzas and arcades of the towns, and the big gabled farm houses and barns of the countryside throughout Graubunden, as he served for 12 years in the canton's department for the preservation of monuments. He is (or has been up to now) a regionalist, for though he has learned about things like materials, climate and siting from old buildings, he understands the work of the past far too well to want to simply copy.

Yet the sources of his sensibility are much wider and deeper than his experiences in Graubunden. He arrived in the canton which now seems so much his natural place at the age of 24 in 1967. (The main reason for working in the historic monuments department for so long was that after the turbulent political and intellectual events of the late '60s, 'Gestaltung was the last thing that could be done').(1) He was born near Basel, the son of a furniture manufacturer and master joiner. Though he rebelled against his father's plan to make his eldest son the next head of the firm, he clearly learned much. 'He was an incredible craftsman, not afraid of any problem. So I'm never afraid of anything.' And 'I was brought up in surroundings not devoted to buying and consuming but making things.'(2)

He was apprenticed as a cabinet maker, and then studied design (not architecture) at the Basel school of arts and crafts, followed by a spell at the Pratt Institute in New York. With his rigorous craft training coupled to a sophisticated understanding of Modern (and now post-Modern) thought and feeling, he is far from being the dreamy ruralist some have depicted.

The bastion of faith

The first of his works to achieve international acclaim a decade ago was indeed rustic: the little chapel at Sogn Benedetg, a tiny hamlet frighteningly high on the almost vertical meadows of the valley of the Voder Rhein (AR January 1991).(3) Seen from between the houses at the foot of the field, Zumthor's building at first seems to be a shaggy keep covered in shingles that have now weathered according to their exposure: light ruddy brown and almost black on the more exposed flank, grey on the side against the hill. A simple timber clerestory is topped by a very shallow copper roof. The chapel is proud, dignified and tower-like at the top of the flower-strewn grass slope, with its presence emphasized by the dark green of the forest behind. A very simple detached campanile, a tail slender wooden frame holding a single bell, announces the purpose of the place.

As you go up the little lane towards it, the building changes shape, revealing itself to have an almost perfectly streamlined plan, like a section through a bird's wing, in which the blunt front first meets the onrush of air. The chapel's round end faces the turbulent valley winds, and the taper is directed toward the hill. Here is the entrance, inflected gently away from the point to welcome the pilgrim with a wooden door always open in summer, and never locked in winter.

Inside, another reason for the plan becomes clear, for the roundness is an apse in which the altar stands, its presence emphasized by the widening volume. The place is filled with light from the strip of windows under the roof, which are detailed in a very strange way. Each mullion tapers back as a fin into the interior, almost like a very small version of the shape of the whole building. The fins are so arranged that, from wherever you look, you see a clearly framed section of sky, which seems to be a portion of the great vault selected just for you. To left and right of your piece of the firmament, the fins obscure other panes of the clerestory, which continue to pour light into the interior, while not diluting or obscuring with glare your particular experience. Clearly, people in the chapel during its weekly service(4) spend most of the time looking toward priest and altar, and above them to the framed heavens - a poignant commentary on the relationship of humanity to God. And in its modest way, and for our times, a reflection on the great Baroque tradition of dynamically engaging light in worship.