Peter Zumthor, a 65-year-old Swiss architect known for buildings in spectacular alpine settings that mix spare, powerfully elemental forms with a rich range of materials and sly accommodations of history, will on Monday be named the winner of the 2009 Pritzker Prize, the field's top honor.

Zumthor and Heidegger

The Vals spa- famed among architects for evocative sequence of spaces and its exquisite construction details, presents intriguing correspondences between Heidegger’s writing and Zumthor’s architecture. Writing in his architectural manifesto, Thinking Architecture, Zumthor mirrors Heidegger’s celebration of experience and emotion as measuring tools. A chapter entitled “A way of looking at things” begins by describing a door handle:

[1]

I used to take hold of it when I went into my aunt’s garden. 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 gravel under my feet, the soft gleam of waxed oak staircase. I can hear the heavy front door closing behind me as i walk along the dark corridor and enter the kitchen[...].(1998:9)

Zumthor always emphasises the sensory aspects of the architectural experience. To him, the physicality of materials can involve an individual with the world, evoking experiences and texturing horizons of place through memory. He recalls places he once measured out at his aunt’s house through their sensual qualities. Here he echoes architectural practitioner and writer Juhani Pallasmaa who argues that, in a world where technologies operate so fast that sight is the only human sense which remains more immediately resonant (1996).

Zumthor’s Vals spa recounts the thinking he describes in his essay, making appeals to all the senses. The architect choreographs materials according to their evocative qualities. Flamed and polished stone, chrome, brass, leather and velvet were deployed with care to enhance the inhabitant’s sense of embodiment when clothed and naked. The touch, smell, and perhaps even taste of these materials where orchestrated obsessively. The theatricality of steaming and bubbling water was enhanced by natural and artificial light, with murky darkness composed as intensely as light. Materials were crafted and joined to enhance or suppress their apparent mass. Their sensory potential was relentlessly exploited with these tactics, Zumthor aimed to celebrate the liturgy of bathing by evoking emotions.

Among the dozens of projects mentioned by the Pritzker jury were the Kolumba Museum in Cologne, Germany, a modern building set in the ruins of a late gothic church destroyed in World War II, and the Thermal Baths in Vals [Spa], Switzerland, a maze of pools enclosed by concrete and stone mined from the surrounding hills.

"When you are there, it is extraordinary how this monumental stone work just dissolves in the pleasure of its many surprises," architect and Rice University architecture professor Carlos Jimenez, a Pritzker juror, said of the baths.

"We are in a time of economic turmoil, and I think Zumthor's work reminds us that there is a luxury in architecture that can be found that has nothing to do with extravagant budgets and extravagant formal gestures," Jimenez said.

wonderful pdf photograph and text booklets from pritzker


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