Peter Zumthor Works: Buildings Projects [Hardcover]

Princeton Arch Staff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1998

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.

This publication, exquisitely designed to the architect's exacting standards, is the first complete survey of Zumthor's oeuvre. As exceptional as the architect's work itself, the book investigates eight realized buildings in detail, including the Home for the Elderly in Chur, the Gugalun House in Safiental, the Art Museum in Bregenz, Austria, and his best-known work, the Thermal Baths in Vals, Switzerland. Each of these projects is extensively illustrated with duotone photographs by British architectural photographer Helene Binet and is accompanied by plans as well as commentary written by Zumthor himself. This title also includes a list of projects, a biography of the architect, and an introduction by Zumthor.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A year later in The New York Times, on January 7 of this year, Dian Ketchum's story, "Architecture's Swiss Mystic," further fanned the hype about this form cabinetmaker, whom she admitted "has barely a dozen buildings to his credit." With just a few commissions, Zumthor, the new superstar architect, has reinvented Modernism as minimalism derived from the Swiss vernacular combined with his own sense of translucent atmospherics. And he writes. In the introduction to Peter Zumthor Works: Buildings and Projects 1979-1997. Zumthor himself describes the origins of his sensibility-a near state of grace between tectonics and poetics that relies on ephemeral and often mysterious intuitive forces.

Works features 8 buildings and 12 projects, ranging from small rural houses (including Zumthor's own studio of 1985-86) to public architecture and provincial museums. Since 1978, like most architects, he has been entering design competitions-losing more than he wins. But his major commissions, like the Thermal Baths at Vals, all resulted from competitions. -- Oculus

Peter Zumthor is not yet a household name among architects, due to his minimal production and his reluctance to publish his work. With the completion of ahealth spa in Vals, Switzerland, and an art museum in Bregenz, Austria--extraordinary works that seem destined to represent the age--the Swiss architect's aloofness can no longer be maintained....Deceptively simple--cubes, oblongs, cylinders--the 54-year-old architect's buildings cannot be captured in photographs; their true essence comes from the experience of textures, the play of light, the celebration of craft, and the kinesthesia of their spaces....Each work goes to extremes to eliminate the superfluous, yielding the paradox of an architecture of pure materials and continuous space that is at once impossibly simple yet wrenchingly mysterious. -- Richard Ingersoll, Architecture, Oct 1997

The Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has over the last years completed a series of built works that have captivated us with their object simplicity and their material sophistication. More than anyone he has reinforced the physical power of architecture. Avoiding rhetorical gesture he has managed to complete a series of buildings that are joyful in their manifestation of form, material, and construction....While fashionable minimalism achieves its results by exclusion, Zumthor's work is informed by complex understanding and the working-through of problems....More than any other contemporary architect Peter Zumthor has persisted in maintaining architecture as a constructive craft. Through his built work he shows us how architecture can be invested with idea, how idea does not have to conspire with ideology. He demonstrates that through a multiple and layered process architecture can have intent without rhetoric, purpose without dogma, gravity and light. -- David Chipperfield, AA Files

Language Notes

Text: German --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 318 pages
• Publisher: Lars Muller (July 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568981430
• ISBN-13: 978-1568981437
• Product Dimensions: 12 x 9.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,548,702 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Jewel of a Book, March 5, 2006

By 

J. Balmer (Toronto) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Peter Zumthor Works: Buildings Projects (Hardcover)

Because the Swiss architect has such a loyal following among architects around the world, and because Zumthor refuses to allow his books go into extra printings, this jewel of a book documenting a half dozen of Zumthor's project is much coveted by collectors. The photographs are sumptuously lit, and beautifully printed.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully presented book of evocative photos of work., July 29, 1998

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[e-mail] (Vancouver, BC, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Peter Zumthor Works: Buildings Projects (Hardcover)

This is a very handsome book of mainly black and white photos of the Swiss modernist's work. There are some small color photos but I would have preferred to have seen more. The Architectural Review did a recent spread on the Baths and the blue of the stone used was very evocative. Still this is a beautiful book on a very impressive architect.