Peter Zumthor

Swiss minimalist and post-modernist architect (b. 26 April 1943, Basel). Peter Zumthor has been running his private bureau in Haldenstein since 1979, with several prominent buildings erected, including Kunsthaus Bregenz (1997), a glass and concrete cube on the Bodensee lake in Austria, cave-like Therme Vals (96) in Switzerland, the Kolumba Diocesan Museum (2007) in Germany and the Serpentine Gallery's 2011 annual summer pavilion (co-designed with Piet Oudolf). Zumthor has been a professor at the Swiss Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio (AAM) since 1996. He had various other academic positions in Europe and the United States, including the University Of Southern California's Institute of Architecture and SCI-Arc in Los Angeles, California (1988), the Technical University of Munich (89), Tulane University (92) in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Harvard's Graduate School of Design (1999). Peter Zumthor grew up in Switzerland and studied at Basel's Arts & Crafts School. In 1966, he traveled to the USA as an exchange student, studying industrial design and architecture at Pratt Institute in New York. After returning to Switzerland in 1968, Zumthor became a conservationist at Graubünden's canton Department for the Monuments Preservation, where he gained unique knowledge and understanding of rare building materials and traditional European construction techniques. In November 2009, the Los Angeles County Museum Of Art revealed its plans to employ Zumthor's bureau to rebuild the main campus. (His proposed design gained heavy criticism from local communities, architectural critics and museum curators, with reduced gallery space and questionable aesthetics at exorbitant costs. LACMA defended the project; in 2020, four buildings were demolished to clear up space to construct Zumthor's new campus.)