2009 Pritzker Prize recipient Peter Zumthor compares creative process to love affair

Pritzker Prize winner compares work to love affair

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Peter Zumthor, winner of the 2009 Pritzker Architecture Prize, compares his creative process to the arc of a love affair.

“There’s a kind of chemical reaction,” the 66-year-old Swiss architect told The Associated Press in an interview Friday just before receiving what’s considered the Nobel Prize of architecture.

He walks the site of a new project, observing, absorbing and brainstorming.

“Dreams start,” he said. “It’s like falling in love.”

And as with love, the hard work comes after the infatuation, Zumthor said, laughing. “But it’s important not to lose the beauty of the first image,” he added.

The international Pritzker prize is awarded every year in a different city to a living architect for his or her body of work. Established by the Pritzker family of Chicago in 1979, it has gone to every big-name modern architect, including I.M. Pei and Frank Gehry.

But the jury of architects, academics, writers and designers this year recognized Zumthor for his spectacular approach to works of modest scale — without the profile of Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Los Angeles or Pei’s Louvre Pyramid in Paris.

Zumthor received a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion at an award ceremony later.

“His work commands attention and respect the world over,” jury chairman Lord Peter Palumbo said at the ceremony. But, Palumbo added, “He is not remotely interested in the cult of celebrity. Public relations, glamor, spin are to him an anathema.”

Zumthor’s works include chapels, museums, senior housing and a hot springs complex, most in central Europe within a tight radius of his Swiss home. The Pritzker jury especially highlighted the Thermal Baths in Vals, Switzerland, a maze of pools enclosed by concrete and stone mined from the surrounding hills, and the Kolumba Museum in Cologne, Germany, a modern building set in the ruins of a late Gothic church destroyed in World War II.

The prestige of the prize confers a certain momentum and flexibility to his creative process, Zumthor said in his acceptance speech.

“Dreaming becomes even easier, and maybe I can be happy to go on dreaming even stronger,” he said.

Known as a hands-on architect who sees his projects from conception to completion, Zumthor said he considers himself more an “auteur than an implementer.”

“I’m not rendering a service,” he told the AP. “If you order a building from me, I’ll be the guy to know the door handle in the basement to the left side.”

Some critics have hinted that Zumthor may be too removed, and that architecture should embody social activism and environmental sustainability, rather than art for art’s sake.

Zumthor “exists in a whole separate world that produces these amazing objects and beautiful acts of architecture, but that is … different from the world we operate in,” said Liz Ogbu, associate design director at the San Francisco-based nonprofit Public Architecture.

Zumthor countered that his work has a more timeless element to it.

Born in Basel, Switzerland, Zumthor trained for five years as a cabinet maker before beginning his university studies, which included time at New York’s Pratt Institute.

In 1979, after working as a building and planning consultant for the eastern Swiss state of Graubunden, he established his practice in the small Swiss town of Haldenstein, where he works with a modest staff of 20 people.