Place of Grace

Over a decade ago, I trundled my good-natured family across miles of southern Switzerland to see every building I could by Peter Zumthor, who is this year's winner of the Pritzker Prize. Then as now, most of Zumthor's work was off the beaten track, not only literally but metaphorically, little known to the general public although admired by professionals. What drew me to make the trek to his work was what, from pictures, appeared to be its conceptual rigor, its unabashed monumentality, and an attention to detail so fanatical that every threshold, corner, and joint seemed to become an opportunity to rethink the way hands make buildings.

I bought a detailed map of Switzerland, on which I drew bright red circles around the names of obscure places: Haldenstein, the hillside enclave outside Chur where Zumthor lives and works; Sumvitg, the remote farming village where he built his first church, the Chapel of St. Benedict; Vals, the high-altitude hiking resort of his Thermal Baths. On our way back home we stopped in Paris, where we chanced upon a lovely American woman of wealth who was scouring Europe in search of an architect for a museum her family planned to build. We spoke about Zumthor's buildings with such earnest admiration that she determined to visit them herself. Across the café table went my map.

Ten days later, immersed again in the daily routines of our lives, we returned one afternoon to a message on our answering machine. "It's me," said a somewhat ethereal voice, the distance between us evident in the faintness of the predigital connection. "I'm at the Baths. I've been here for two days. I called because you're the only people I know who could possibly understand what I'm experiencing…." Our new friend's friends, like most people, had likely never heard of Zumthor. During her time at the Baths she came to appreciate why we had insisted upon the importance of this work. Even more than is the case with any building, comprehending one by Zumthor requires you to be there. Worlds unto themselves, Zumthor's buildings change your world. Pictures cannot show that. This man understands the difference between a building and a photograph, and he designs the former, not the latter.

Zumthor is known to be uncompromising when it comes to his designs, and he exhibits his work rarely. He also tries to maintain an ethical orientation to design and practice, working mainly on public and institutional projects, and repeatedly turning down lucrative offers from developers and private clients. This reluctance to engage in many of the profession's customary practices and established rituals of self-promotion, combined with his contemplative and exacting approach to design and construction (which takes time and money), explains the lamentable scarcity of his realized projects, and why his work is not better known. Unlike most Pritzker winners, the list of Zumthor's completed buildings is short, and the list of his unbuilt projects is long.

Many of Zumthor's projects, from his Protective Housing for Roman Archaeological Ruins in Chur in 1986 to his recent Art Museum Kolumba in Cologne in 2007, reconsider the relationship of contemporary experience to historically rich and complicated events or institutions. In Chur, a complex of crate-like boxes woven from interlaced timber slats rest so lightly on the ground that the structures seem cast like nets atop a large excavated site of Roman ruins, conveying the ineffable fragility of present moments, as if all could be washed or bulldozed away before tomorrow morning. In Cologne, Zumthor constructed a museum for the Archdiocese around the remains of the gothic St. Kolumba Church, which, after its destruction in World War II, had become a large archaeological excavation site with ruins dating back to the seventh century, and was capped by a memorial chapel built in 1949 by the eminent German architect Gottfried Böhm. The dusty-brick museum wraps around and re-colonizing this historically laden site, creating from it an elegant exhibition space for artworks ranging from Romanesque sculpture to twentieth-century objects of daily use.

Zumthor's propensity to engage the past extends to one of architecture's most fraught challenges: honoring tragedy and loss through building, which is an essentially optimistic act. Such efforts include two projects in Norway, the museum of a long defunct zinc mine and a memorial to a seventeenth-century witch-burning (a collaboration with Louise Bourgeois), as well as the better-known Topography of Terror in Berlin, a documentation center on the site of the former SS and Gestapo headquarters, near the Potsdamer Platz. This last project became an eleven-year-long, almost Nordic saga: its spectacular design of thin, closely spaced concrete bars and glass panels was well under construction when the German federal government, which took over the project from the city of Berlin, balked--stories vary as to who was to blame for the escalating costs of construction and growing doubts about its desirability--and canceled the project, eventually razing the site.