Known for his sensuous materiality and attention to place, 2009 Pritzker Laureate Peter Zumthor (born April 26, 1943) is one the most revered architects of the 21st century. Shooting to fame on the back of The Therme Vals and Kunsthaus Bregenz, completed just a year apart in 1996 and 1997, his work privileges the experiential qualities of individual buildings over the technological, cultural and theoretical focus often favored by his contemporaries.

The Therme Vals. Image © Fernando Guerra | FG+SG

Known for his sensuous materiality and attention to place, 2009 Pritzker Laureate Peter Zumthor (born April 26, 1943) is one the most revered architects of the 21st century. Shooting to fame on the back of The Therme Vals and Kunsthaus Bregenz, completed just a year apart in 1996 and 1997, his work privileges the experiential qualities of individual buildings over the technological, cultural and theoretical focus often favored by his contemporaries.
Peter Zumthor at the Steilneset Memorial. Image © Andrew Meredith

As a teenager, Zumthor's first job was as an apprentice to a carpenter, and after studying architecture in his native Basel and then in New York, he worked as a conservation architect in GraubĂĽnden. Both of these early jobs gave him experience of craft construction and a delicate understanding of materials, and indeed in a 2001 profile in Vanity Fair, Paul Goldberger describes howÂ...