Well, after a string of buildings that collectively form a veritable necklace of architectural pearls, and after years of being generally termed by most of those in the profession, as the ‘Architect’s Architect’, April 12th saw the 67 year old Peter Zumthor finally being bestowed with the 2009 Pritzker Prize for Architecture.

How the cuddly Mr Zumthor managed to fail to be an earlier recipient is beyond me, but maybe we can trace that back to both his geographical and temperamental remoteness. Mr Zumthor has never been one for being seen out and about on the architectural circuit, preferring instead to ensconce himself hermit-like, halfway up a mountain in Haldenstein, a couple of hours outside Zürich in his supremely exquisite example of a self-build. But, like your catholic catechism, this is merely an outward manifestation of inward grace- the fact is that Mr Zumthor in his books ‘Elements of Architectural Style’, and ‘Thinking Architecture’ shows himself as a deeply philosophical and natural thinker on all matters architectural.

And you have to hand it to him. I have not yet dipped my toes into the thermal baths at Vals, been bathed in the dull, all encompassing light of his Bregenz Kunsthaus, or run my hands across the rough inverted scollops of his Brother Claus Field Chapel in Mechernich, but I can sense and touch them all- and there is a sublimity to the spaces that simply bleeds out of any photographic image that has been taken of them. No mean feat for a discipline whose success or failure is generally predicated on an actual physical experience of the space. 

And despite the beauty in the simplicity, something always seems to challenge and unsettle. Last year at the World Architecture Festival Award ceremony I sat next to a portly, macho and cocky East End London developer, who could barely contain his enthusiasm for the Thermal Spa at Vals, but admitted that he drew the line at the black leather curtains to the bath areas ‘because they just make you nervous- he should have used something else.’ And it occurred to me that maybe Zumthor had gone through every material he could think of for that curtain, and settled quite happily on the leather. Zumthor says of his own work ‘Every building is built for a specific use in a specific place and for a specific society. My buildings try to answer the questions that emerge from these simple facts as precisely and critically as they can.’ Maybe he just thinks it important that in order to feel alive, we should all be made to feel a little nervous.