Documentary turns camera on architect Peter Zumthor

After decades of shunning glittering skyscrapers and corporate office towers in favour of museums and memorials, while his peers conquered the planet, a Swiss architect is finally getting a star turn in the limelight. Peter Zumthor, 83, is the focus of a new documentary by acclaimed German director Wim Wenders, coming out just after the architect completed the biggest project of his career: the much-delayed LACMA art museum in Los Angeles.

Filmed in 3D, “From Inside Out: The Architecture of Peter Zumthor” takes viewers on an immersive tour through the limited number of buildings built by the artist-architect who is known for his meticulous and minimalist work.

His best-known projects include a thermal bath building in Vals, Switzerland, a monument to women burned as witches in the Norwegian Arctic, as well as the amoeba-shaped LACMA building which finally opened its doors this year after 20 years of reflection and controversy.

“I don’t like to be a star architect, I like to make these artistic buildings,” Zumthor said at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month where the film about him premiered. “I’m glad if the client has the patience.” The German-speaking designer is the same generation as Swiss heavyweights Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, as well as other European architectural stars from France’s Jean Nouvel, Rem Koolhaas from the Netherlands or Norman Foster in Britain.

All now aged over 75, they have built across the world, riding the Asian construction boom this century and opening offices from Hong Kong to New York. Zumthor, meanwhile, has stayed in his home village of Haldenstein, gradually renovating buildings there to increase the size of his practice, but avoiding the temptation to expand beyond his mountainous Swiss redoubt.

“I can only do what I can control. I can work with a team of 20, maybe 30 – that’s the maximum,” the 2009 winner of the Pritzker Prize, considered architecture’s highest honour, said in an interview. “If it would be paintings or sculptures, it would be more easy to understand that I don’t want to delegate.” That means he turns down far more work than he accepts.

“In Korea, for instance, they like my work. There were three or four rich, cultivated Koreans and they wanted to give me a carte blanche to do anything nice, no function. And I said, ‘I cannot do it’,” Zumthor added to AFP. “I need a purpose. I need a good reason.”

The uncompromising author of “Thinking Architecture” only accepts building projects with a clear social function such as museums, chapels or memorials – and he has never built a high-rise or commercial office. Each project is unique, including up to 80 per cent of custom-made items from furniture to lighting, part of his objective of creating a “feeling” inside a building, rather than an aesthetic.

Zumthor obsesses about context and surroundings, with the aim of producing designs that are minimalist and stark but appear to be “the completion of a landscape that wasn’t finished before,” he says in the film.

The son of a cabinet maker is also uncompromising on details, from ordering dozens of samples of curtains to get the exact finish he wanted for the LACMA windows, to commissioning an artisan to develop pigmented varnishes for the structure’s concrete walls. “My work resembles an artistic process. It’s almost the same,” he said. That also makes him expensive – and a sometimes difficult perfectionist for his clients. He confesses to having a habit of changing his mind, sometimes after a flash of inspiration in the shower. “Peter already had a reputation as being the slowest architect one could imagine,” LACMA director Michael Govan says in the film about his decision to commission Zumthor.

Wenders’ film, set for public release in November, also sees Zumthor open up about his childhood, invite cameras into his home, and offers a touching tribute to his wife who suffered a stroke several years ago. “It was more personal than I thought,” the father-of-three said, having seen the film. “It’s also a sort of declaration of love to my wife, who died this year, and that’s all good. I’m not ashamed.”

Agence France-Presse