This week the Pritzker Prize committee announced this year's winner of architecture's top honor: Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. On May 29, he will receive the formal award--along with a $100,000 grant and a bronze medal--in Buenos Aires.
Zumthor commands the highest accolades from architects worldwide: Just in September 2008 he also won the Japanese version of the Prizker, the Japan Art Association's highly coveted Praemium Imperiale. Zumthor's buildings make poetic use of architecture's most fundamental materials: translucent and transparent glass, as in his Kunsthaus in Bregenz, Austria; locally quarried stone, as in his stupendous Thermal Baths in Vals, Switzerland; wood, laid in shingles as in his St. Benedict chapel; or used as planar siding, as in the house for his wife, Annalisa.
Check out this special TNR slideshow for a retrospective of his best work.
--Sarah Williams Goldhagen
Photo by Helene Binet, courtesy of Peter Zumthor