Peter Zumthor's most renowned creation, the thermal spa in Vals, Switzerland. Photograph: Martin Ruetschi/AP
The Swiss architect, Peter Zumthor, who is admired within the profession for his precision and integrity, has won the 2009 Pritzker Architecture Prize. The prize is widely regarded as the top honor in architecture, having been set up in the 1970s by the Pritzkers, one of America's most wealthy families, who own the Hyatt group of hotels. The award, which is always given to a living architect displaying "talent, vision and commitment", was modelled on the Nobel prize. Peter Zumthor is an architect's architect: he is hugely admired within the profession as a designer of precision and integrity and a master craftsman working in a range of materials from sandblasted glass to cedar shingles. The Pritzker award will earn him $100,000 in prize money. A panel of judges, chaired by the chairman of London's Serpentine Gallery, Lord Palumbo, deliberated in secret. In their citation they described Zumthor as a "master architect" who is "focused, uncompromising and exceptionally determined". The panel praised his detachment from current trends, saying his buildings were "untouched by fad or fashion ... humility resides alongside strength. "While some have called his architecture quiet, his buildings masterfully assert their presence." Zumthor's most renowned creation is the 1996 rebuilding of a thermal spa in Vals, Switzerland. He used giant slabs of Valser gneiss to set the building into the mountainside, with slabs of the roof grassed over and bursting with flowers in spring. The judges also singled out his Field Chapel to St Nikolaus von der Flüe in Mechernich, Germany, which was built using more than 100 tree trunks overlayed with concrete. The panel particularly admired the Kolumba Museum in Cologne, which it said was a "startling contemporary work that is completely at ease with its many layers of history". Amid the global multimillion dollar practices that have been established by some of his predecessors on the roll-call of Pritzker prize winners, Zumthor stands out for the low-key modesty of his way of working. His practice is located in the remote village of Haldenstein in the Swiss mountains, which, as the prize judges pointed out, keeps him removed from the flurry of activity of the international architectural scene. There he employs fewer than 20 staff. Zumthor has said he likes to keep his operation minimalist as it allows him to own the entire process of developing a new building from start to finish. His desire is to be the author of everything. "I'm not a producer of images. I'm this guy who, when I take on a commission, I do it inside out, everything myself, with my team," he told the New York Times. Along with the smallness of scale comes discrimination over the projects that he takes on, which sees him reject far more offers of commissions than he accepts. He has written: "In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and meanings, and speak its own language."
