Peter Zumthor Works: Buildings and Projects 1979-1997 - Tapa dura

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."The Swiss architect 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 ideadoes 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