Peter Zumthor

Prize winner

In courageous opposition to a world full of borrowed or falsified conventions, Peter Zumthor’s work places the “real” things at the centre. Materials, building techniques and spaces once again become what they used to be; albeit not with an uncritical (and consequently anachronistic) recourse to the past, but, on the contrary, by means of placing them into a new semantic context. Zunthor’s thoroughly independent attitude withstands rational examination, at the same time opening a multivalent, poetic universe, which leads anyone, who is willing to become engaged with it, to an existential reflection.

Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani