Zumthor the shaman.

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.

The drama of the heaven-view is enhanced by the luminous interior, in which daylight is diffused and partly reflected by the walls, which are silver painted, like the mullion fins. The silver surfaces, combined with the curve, tend to dissolve space, to make it wide and almost amorphous. But order is restored by the structure. Laminated timber uprights support the roof and, though they are carefully detached from it by thin metal brackets, they carry the surrounding silver skin. These tall wooden columns are an abstracted version of the groves in which worship began, here made more clear and poignant because of the height of the volume compared to its plan. The congregation sitting on plain whitewood pews is comfortingly contained as a community, yet at the same time is made aware by the space's verticality of the importance of, literally, higher values.

I suppose that Peter Zumthor will not necessarily agree with my analogies: the grove; the democratically modest interpretation of Baroque; or the natural form (incidentally, I am rather pleased with this one, and could go on for some while about shingles as feathers on the bird's wing and so on). And, of course, there is the obvious metaphor of the ship, the nave, the Schiff, in which Christians have set sail for two thousand years. Zumthor does not tell elaborate stories about the meanings of his forms and spaces, as many architects do. He is concerned with creating buildings that affect us at such a deep level that they make us all invent our own tales about them because they resonate with our physicality and psyche.

He believes that 'Architecture has its own realm. It has a special physical relationship with life. I do not think of it primarily as either a message or a symbol, but as an envelope and background for life which goes on in and around it, a sensitive container for the rhythm of footsteps on the floor, for the concentration of work, for the silence of sleep'.s

The chapel demonstrates two of the most important characteristics of Zumthor's work. First, his belief that 'Construction is the art of making a meaningful whole out of many parts ... I believe that the real core of all architectural work lies in the act of construction ... I feel respect for the art of joining, the ability of craftsmen and engineers. I am impressed by the knowledge of how to join things, which lies at the bottom of human skill. I try to design buildings that are worthy of this knowledge.'(6)

The second aspect of Zumthor's architecture clearly shown at Sogn Benedetg is his belief in the importance of rooting buildings. 'When I concentrate on a specific site or place for which I am going to design a building, I try to plumb its depths, its form, its history and its sensuous qualities.'(7) But when trying to 'immerse myself in the place and try to inhabit it in my imagination ... I look beyond it at the world of my other places ... When an architectural design draws solely from tradition and only repeats the dictates of its site, I sense a lack of genuine concern with the world and ... contemporary life'.(8)

So the chapel stands there, a container for congregation and love of God, brave and dignified against the elements; a skylark sings far overhead, and alpine choughs cough throatily as they soar in the dizzy air over the valley. The bastion of faith grows out of the ground as nothing has ever grown before, but its shingle skirts are now blackened by time and weather, and jewelled by dark alpine pinks, yellow trefoil and buttercups, festoons of white cow parsley, indigo harebells and the tiny blue stars of forget-me-not. It is part of its place.

The pagan cave

A similar piercingly beautiful wild flower tapestry is beginning to cover the roof of Zumthor's thermal baths at Vals (AR August 1997). High in the valley of a tributary of the Voder Rhein, the village has the only hot springs in Graubunden and has until recently had a very modest reputation as a charming but remote ski-resort and spa. The community,(9) which owns the source, decided to find funds to rebuild its watering place, and after a competition chose Zumthor as architect. The site is not an easy one, for the community has not always been felicitous in its architects, and two dim 1960s tower blocks disfigure the approach to the village, which is itself still a cluster of old wooden alpine houses. The towers are in fact annexes of the thermal hotel, up the hill behind them. The baths are on the slope slightly below the hotel, so their view of the valley is partly masked by '60s mediocrity, and they can scarcely be glimpsed from the road.

This is a pity, for the new building has almost geological solidity and presence. A big rectangular block grows out of the hillside, faced in slabs of local bluish grey gneiss, laid strata-like, thin edges outwards. The great monolith is carved into with simple square openings, some of which are glazed. A concrete roof beam serves as cornice. From above, the grassy roof is dissected into a Mondrian-like pattern by smooth pale green strips of what on closer inspection turns out to be glass. Their purpose becomes clear later.

You enter the realm of water down a mysterious black tunnel which slopes into the earth. Openings in a stone wall are guarded by soft black leather curtains which conceal the changing rooms: small chambers lined with exquisitely made lockers of chestnut-coloured wood; they have the quality of finely polished musical instruments. Going through similar leather curtains on the other side of these intimate little rooms, scale changes dramatically. You are on a wide gallery that overlooks the main space of the baths.

Astonishment, awe and delight are mixed in equal measure as you lean on the bronze balustrade to contemplate the scene below. Great stone masses define a central pool; streaks and slashes of daylight pierce the subterranean darkness; here, deep within the cave, are snatched glimpses of a tree and the beautiful green slope across the valley. Everywhere, the presence of water is emphasized: reflecting, rippling, shimmering, refracting; tinkling, splashing, trickling, dribbling, squirting, gurgling, spraying - even roaring sometimes as a wave overwhelms a sluice. In contrast to the febrile qualities of water is the solid, silent nature of stone, gently sparkling with tiny fragments of quartz and mica. The spaces that contain the water seem hewn out of the huge stratified block rather than built in a normal way.

Water and stone are mainly revealed in light which, from the gallery, seems largely to be introduced through slots in the smoothly cast concrete roof (hence the glass strips in the meadow on top). They offer the sense of drama and amazement that you get in a natural cavern where part of the shell has fallen and light streams in. A long slot pours a sheet of luminance over the balustrade at which you are standing: the result only becomes clear when you see Edward Hopper-like figures leaning on the bronze handrail. Other slots echo the plan of the big pool, sometimes meeting a stone mass at right angles, when they cast a thin bright slash down the wall. Elsewhere, slots are parallel to the stone, when its stratified nature is emphasized as light washes over the surface and brightly streaks the edges of slightly projecting courses. Though the slabs are cut perfectly, and laid on the thinnest of beds with great precision, like a work of nature, a hand-built wall cannot be absolutely perfect - nor would the architect wish it to be so.

The generous, sociable promenade round the central pool becomes a sort of loggia on the valley side. Parts of the wall are replaced by glass in openings positioned with great dexterity to avoid seeing the '60s tat, and to frame(10) views of the green or white meadows on the other side of the valley, meticulously maintained with traditional farming methods. The loggia continues outside to contain the big open-air pool over which the water, heated by subterranean forces, generates a cloud of steam in all but the hottest weather. You swim in a mist looking up at the jagged outline of the high Alps.

The promenade round the inner pool allows you to visit smaller spaces carved into the perimeter walls and into the mighty supports that define the pool's corners. Here are offered all the sensations enjoyed by the Romans and, I suspect, rather more. Modern equivalents of the tepidarium, caldarium and frigidarium are there, but so is a place in which water full of little bubbles fizzes upwards around you. In the steam baths, a hot cloud is carefully controlled at breast height, so that when you stand you are in a searing mist, and when you sit, it hovers above you, lit dramatically from above. In another space, specially commissioned music sometimes quietly tintinnabulates. Another has water scented by jasmine petals. Each is treated in a different way: smooth concrete, grey or coloured, rough or polished stone; reverberant(11) or still; light or sometimes frighteningly dark; light up, sideways, down, or not at all. You feel the place through your feet and limbs as well as your eyes, ears and nose. Zumthor believes that 'all design work starts from this physical, objective sensuousness of architecture, of its materials. To experience architecture in a concrete way means to touch, see, hear and smell it'.(12) No architect can expect to get his users in a more receptive sensory state, for they are all as near naked as contemporary indoor decorum allows. And it is curious that, though few of the bathers are likely to get starring parts in the pornographic media, almost all, even the most wizened, obese or adolescently challenged, seem to have dignity and a degree of beauty - properties surely conveyed by the building.

The baths are so abundant in the variety of experiences they offer that only a visit can do justice to them - this essay can only hint at their richness. Their mysteries are very powerful. While the chapel is devoted to the Christian God of love and light and purity, the baths evoke more arcane (perhaps darker) deities and rituals. Awe and the everyday, sociability and sensuousness (and indeed sensuality) are mingled in a way rarely seen since the times of the Ancients.

The tower of light

From darkness to light; complexity to apparent simplicity. Zumthor's most recently completed major work is the Kunsthaus at Bregenz, where Austria fleetingly touches the east end of Lake Constance, the Bodensee. Looking from the lake, a new misty-grey rectangle has been placed between the florid late-nineteenth century post building and the aggressively dumb fly-tower at the back of the Kornmarkt theatre.(13) From the town side, a new square has been created by setting the grey slab back to Seestrasse (the road along the lakeside park). A lower rectangular black building is set at right angles to the Kornmarkt and parallel to the side of the theatre making the third side of the space. This smaller three-storey block contains almost all the elements of a gallery not needed for exhibition: library, offices, shop and, most importantly, cafe. Elegant white umbrellas allow the cafe's life to spill through sliding glass walls into the square from the long, thin, black bar.(14) All this works very well but it is a pity that the budget did not run to a more noble paving material than asphalt. Though Zumthor has written touchingly about 'soft asphalt warmed by the sun',(15) surely the ubiquitous setts of the town's pedestrian areas would have been better, and best of all would be stone slabs, like the ones in the baths - and a couple of decent trees.

These can come. What we have now in the gallery building is a mysterious translucent grey monolith, with minimal openings on the ground and no changes at all in its skin above that level. At night, the skin of the building glows softly. By day, you can see traces of forms inside, and the taut slender diagonal steel bracing of the glass wall makes an understated inner visual order to the panels of etched glass. Zumthor describes the skin very precisely: 'It looks like slightly ruffled feathers or like a scaly structure(16) made up of largish glass panels ... which are all the same size ... neither perforated nor cut. They rest on metal consoles [brackets] held in place by large clamps. The edges of the glass are exposed. The wind wafts through the open joints of the scaly structure.'(17)

The galleries themselves, and the stair approaches to them are the wonder of the building. Each of the three upper floors has a ceiling of square glass panels etched on the underside, and linked by chromed connectors which themselves are hung from the bottom of the floor slab above. Slab and ceiling are over two metres apart, so above every floor is a void which acts as a plenum(18) for both air and light. Diffused light pours in through the frosted skin of the building and down via the translucent glass ceiling, where it is supplemented in the middle of each floor, and (according to time and external conditions) at the perimeter by automatically controlled artificial lighting. The result is quite extraordinary, for on each of the gallery floors, you feel that you are immediately under the sky, with only a glare-filtering device in a roof above you. Lighting is not uniform, being noticeably brighter and usually cooler at the perimeter. And it changes according to the weather and time of day, so that inside you are always aware of external conditions. The stairs on the east side are magnificent, with bright daylit ceilings hovering over generously landinged straight flights between concrete walls.

Light falls into galleries basically square in plan, though modulated (like the square within a square of the main pool at Vals) by planes brought forward from the perimeter. The walls are of what Friedrich Achleitner has called 'velvety grey' concrete,(19) cast against smooth shuttering with all evidence of daywork suppressed. The rooms are empty, waiting: space and surfaces gentle and subtle. Heavy pictures are hung on the walls by drilling holes in them and inserting fixings, then making good after the exhibition. The curators are extremely pleased with their efforts in concealing their work, 'Can you see the scars?' they ask. No. But I suspect that Zumthor would like traces of past exhibitions to be detectable. He believes that 'A good building must be capable of absorbing traces of human life, of taking on a specific richness ... I think of the patina of age on materials, of innumerable small scratches on surfaces'.(20)

The building's internal climate is controlled most ingeniously. The problem with most buildings which receive a large amount of daylight is that they overheat because of solar radiation. Most galleries are cooled by artificial means, a very expensive and environmentally destructive process. Cooling at Bregenz comes from a deep underground stream, the temperature of which is tapped by non structural walls 25m deep, through which water is pumped in pipes and then circulated through the tower's concrete walls and floors. Using electronic controls (which can inject heat from a boiler when necessary) the building mass can be held at an even temperature. The system will be less expensive to run, and has involved less than half the capital cost of a conventionally refrigerated air-conditioning system. It is the latest instance of Zumthor's determination to control internal climates in the most discreet and environmentally friendly ways.(21) The trouble with the galleries at Bregenz, which for all their hard materials are delicate and generous, is that they may be too fine for some of the art they show. When I visited the place, there was a particularly crass exhibition (there is no permanent collection) and the clumsy, unintentional coarseness of the artworks was made to look particularly gross and silly by the spaces.

The fleeting Gesamtkunstwerk

While the Kunsthaus predominantly addresses sight, Zumthor's project for the Swiss pavilion at the Hanover 2000 world fair will 'offer all the senses something'.(22) It will be a sort of maze created on a rectangular plan out of parallel walls of building timber 'made like a lumberyard. It is not a metaphor for a lumberyard, it really is one', for the planed spruce will be sold after the exhibition closes (an elaborate system of 'springs and tension wires' will allow for shrinkage in the wood and reduction of the height of the building during the course of the show). Metal roofs will make the pavilion a 'klangkorper'(23) when it rains. The materials alone will speak to senses of sight, touch, hearing and smell. And sensations will be reinforced by the work of other artists. A poet will illuminate the walls with 500 neon words from all the Swiss languages. A playwright will arrange small performances by musicians and ballet dancers. A musician will project notes to 'make the building sound like a beating heart'. A filmmaker will be involved. There will even be a 'gastronomic expert' who will choose food with great precision to enhance the overall effect. Zumthor will conduct the group who 'will tell nothing about Switzerland', but of course, in a sense, they may well tell much more about their country than most of the pavilions, which will be crammed with the strident messages of the PR industry.

The shaman for our times

I have chosen to concentrate on three buildings and a project in this appreciation because I believe that they most clearly demonstrate Zumthor's essence.(24) He is not an easy architect to write about, partly because he does not have a style. But there are common themes in his work: celebration of place, engagement of all the human senses, deep understanding of space, light and materiality. And certain recurrent approaches: total command of services to make them efficient but unobtrusive, moving glass walls, feathers and scales, the carved block, chinks and striations, and framing views to make more poignant the immensely important moment when the individual looks out from the safety of shelter to the wider world. He is a shaman for our times, giving magic and poetry to the everyday. Perhaps he is able to do this because his perceptions have been honed in Graubunden: he combines a Latin, almost Baroque, concern for wholeness and powerful parti with a more northern fascination for tectonics, construction, detailing and materials.

He should sum up: 'Why, I often wonder, is the obvious but difficult solution so rarely tried? Why do we have so little confidence in the basic things architecture is made from: material, structure, construction, bearing and being borne, earth and sky, and confidence in spaces that are really allowed to be spaces - spaces whose enclosing walls and constituent materials, concavity, emptiness, light, air, odour, receptivity and resonance are handled with respect and care?'(25)

Because he orchestrates these constituents of real architecture with such tenderness, invention and insight, he is an example to us all.

I am very grateful to the New Carlsberg Foundation (Ny Carlsberg Fondet), and particularly to Hans Edvard Norregard-Nielsen, its Director and Chairman of the 1998 Carlsberg Architectural Prize jury, who kindly asked me to write this essay and enabled me to make a halcyon summer trip to Switzerland The text is published as a booklet by the Foundation to commemorate the ceremony at which Zumthor received the Prize from the Queen of Denmark in Copenhagen. The format of that publication is very different from this, but it too is illustrated by Helene Binet's powerful pictures. She took all the large pictures shown here, and of the small ones: middle p75, top left p77, bottom left p79. All others by Pelham Davey.

1 Conversation with the author on a beautiful sunny July morning in the orchard of his office near Chur. (Gestaltung means 'putting things together' or 'design').

2 Ibid.

3 One of the two rivers that come together further north-east to make the Rhine itself.

4 The place is so small that the parish priest can hold mass only on a weekday, being busy with bigger congregations further down the valley on Sundays. The chapel replaces an ancient one that was destroyed in a landslide. Zumthor got the commission after a competition.

5 Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture, Lars Muller, Baden/Switzerland, 1998, p13. The book s a compilation of Zumthor's lectures. This one was given in 1988 at SCI-ARC, California in 1998.

6 Ibid, pp11-12, same lecture.

7 Ibid, p36. lecture delivered to the Alvar Aalto Symposium, Jyvaskyla, Finland, 1994.

8 Idem.

9 The community is only about a thousand strong, but it can give itself planning permissions and when necessary raise large sums of money, in this case 250 million Swiss Franks.

10 Zumthor's brilliance in framing is at its most intense in two of the smaller rooms, where you lie on long curved chaises-longues, made of slats of the same mahogany like wood as the lockers. You look beyond your feet to a small square window which has a view of the hillside selected precisely for you.

11 Here there is none of the whooping and shouting that cacophonize most public baths; in fact, in the smaller rooms, water noises, intensified by small tall spaces and hard surfaces, often seem to dominate those of people. The pools are never more than about four feet deep, so there is no diving, and little of the stupefying dreariness of health freaks doing their self-allotted number of lengths. In the happy omission of athletic approaches to the public bath, and the return to a semblance of the Roman habit of social bathing, the building itself interacts with the users.

12 Zumthor, Thinking, op cit, p58. The lecture was to his students at the Accademia di Architettura, Mendrisio, Switzerland in 1996.

13 The lakeside seems never to have had much coherence, and at present includes the star on and a huge semi-permanent set for the town's annual drama festival built like a chunk of destroyed urban motorway in Bladerunner. The disparate scales and styles are related by a pretty waterfront park.

14 This is a favourite device used to great effect in, for instance, the old people's home at Chur where the public side can be opened to the sun and air of the hills by lange sections of storey-height glass movable by even frail old ladies.

15 Zumthor, Thinking, op cit, p58.

16 I have only just found this quotation but, you see, I was right about the chapel's cladding: he is clearly fascinated by feathers And you could think of the plan of the chapel as a streamlined longitudinal section through a fish, and the shingles as scales.

17 Zumthor, Peter in Kunsthaus Bregenz, Hatje, Stuttgart, 1997, p13.

18 A plenum is a volume full of something (in this case air and light). As opposed to a vacuum.

19 Achleitner, Friedrich 'The Kunsthaus Bregenz as an Architecture of Art'. Kunsthaus Bregenz, op cit, p35.

20 Zumthor, Thinking, op cit, p24.

21 Details of the Bregenz system are in AR December 1997, pp51-52 Zumthor's fascination with the potential of massive concrete as thermal flywheel can be seen as early as the little wooden farm extension at Versam (1990), where a wood-burning stove heats a massive internal concrete wall with hypocaust like ducts. At Vals, the walls radiate heat from inbuilt pipes. The temperature is controlled by using subterranean warmth with a sophisticated heat exchange system, so artificial heating is needed only rarely on the coldest days. (Places on which you sit are kept warmer than surrounding walls.)

22 Conversation, see footnote 1. The following short quotations are from the same discussion.

23 Resonant body.

24 Though the total body of work is comparatively small, there is far more built than I can describe here, and there is much to come, notably the Cologne Diocesan Museum, and the troubled and terrifying documentation centre on the site of the focus of Nazi evil, the headquarters of the SS and Gestapo at the Prinz Albrecht Palais in Berlin. The most comprehensive review of buildings and projects is Zumthor, Peter, Peter Zumthor Works, Lars Muller, Baden, Switzerland, 1998. It has excellent photographs by Helene Binet. More of his work (including early buildings) can be seen in Birkhauser Architectural Guide, Switzerland 20th Century, Birkhauser, Basel, Berlin, New York, 1997.

25 Zumthor, Thinking, op cit. p32. The lecture was to the Symposium Piran, Slovenia, 1991.