In April this year, the David Geffen Galleries opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: a long arc of concrete and glass carried above the street, and Peter Zumthor's first completed building in the United States. He is 83. Most architects with his reputation would have opened a building like that decades ago, and would have opened forty others besides. Zumthor hasn't, and the reason why is exactly what we admire about him.
Therme Vals, Switzerland, completed in 1996. Peter Zumthor lined the baths in locally quarried quartzite and cut the openings to frame the meadow beyond. RISE Design Studio.
Zumthor was born in Basel in 1943, the son of a cabinetmaker, and trained as a joiner in his father's workshop before studying design in Basel and New York. He spent years surveying historic buildings for the canton of Graubünden before opening his own office in the mountain village of Haldenstein in 1979. From the start he kept the practice small on purpose, so that he could stay close to every decision, from the first sketch to the detailing on site.
That choice has a cost. It means fewer buildings, longer programmes, and turning down work most practices would take without a second thought. But it also means that every building that does leave the office carries his full attention, and it shows. We run a far smaller operation than most people imagine when they hear "architects in London and Barcelona", and that's deliberate for the same reason. The projects that go well are the ones where the people who designed the building are still in the room when it's being built.
The building that made Zumthor's name outside Switzerland is the Therme Vals, the thermal baths he completed in 1996 in the village of Vals. It's built from the local quartzite, cut into long thin courses and laid so the whole structure reads as one geometric mass set into the hillside. You enter through a dark passage, and the building then opens into a sequence of stone chambers where daylight comes down through slots in the roof and moves across the water. Stone, water and light are treated as materials of equal weight.
Earlier, and on a much smaller budget, the Saint Benedict Chapel at Sumvitg (1988) did something similar with timber. The chapel sits on a steep meadow, its plan shaped like a leaf to suit the ground, and it's clad in the same larch shingles the village has always used. The materials are traditional; the space inside is rigorously modern. Nothing about it is nostalgic, and nothing about it could be anywhere else.
That double lesson, take the site seriously and take the local material seriously, translates directly to work in London. Our sites are Victorian terraces and mews rather than Alpine meadows, but the discipline is the same: London stock brick, existing joinery, the particular way light enters a north-facing rear addition. The answer is on the site if you look hard enough.
Zumthor is sometimes filed under minimalism because his spaces are spare, but the label misses what the spareness is for. Everything is stripped back so that light can do the work. At the Kunsthaus Bregenz (1997), an art museum on the shore of Lake Constance, the building is wrapped in etched glass panels and daylight is brought down through glass ceilings into each gallery, so the rooms glow evenly without a visible window. At Kolumba in Cologne (2007), a museum built over the ruins of a church destroyed in the war, daylight filters through perforated brickwork and falls in specks across the old stones.
The Brother Klaus Field Chapel (2007), built for a farming family in Wachendorf, may be the purest example. Local farmers raised a tent of spruce trunks, rammed concrete around it in layers, then burnt the timber out slowly, leaving a charred, fluted interior open to the sky through a single tear-shaped opening. It's a tiny building, built largely by the people who wanted it, and it holds more atmosphere than most buildings a hundred times its size.
We design houses, not chapels, but the principle carries over intact. Get the light right and a modest room feels generous; get it wrong and no amount of floor area saves it. It's why we model daylight early in every project, and why we'd rather move a window than add a metre.
Zumthor's two short books, Thinking Architecture and Atmospheres, are the ones we hand to people most often. In them he writes about architecture through memory and the senses: he traces his earliest architectural experience to the feel of the handle on his aunt's garden door, and he judges buildings by their sound, their temperature, the way a floor receives your step. It's a joiner's way of thinking, inherited from his father's workshop, and it treats construction as the substance of architecture rather than something that happens to a design afterwards.
That is also, quietly, a low energy argument. Zumthor rarely uses the language of sustainability, but buildings made from durable, honest materials, built carefully and loved by the people who use them, are buildings that get kept. The greenest building is the one that doesn't need replacing in forty years. Fabric-first design, which underpins our Passivhaus and retrofit work, is the same conviction with numbers attached: the performance lives in the walls, the windows and the junctions, not in equipment bolted on at the end.
Zumthor's UK work is small but worth seeking out. His 2011 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in Hyde Park was a black rectangle enclosing a garden planted by Piet Oudolf, a building designed entirely around sitting still in front of flowers. And in Devon there is the Secular Retreat (2018), a house of rammed concrete on a hilltop near Salcombe, built for Living Architecture, which you can rent and stay in. It's the most direct way we know to test his central claim: that the quality of a building is something you feel with your whole body, not something you assess from photographs. He was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2009 and the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2013, but a night in one of his buildings makes the case better than either citation.
If you're planning a home where light, material and comfort are the starting point rather than the finishing touches, we'd be glad to talk it through. Please do get in touch and we can discuss your project.
→ Email us at architects@risedesignstudio.co.uk
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