Peter Zumthor quotes

Peter Zumthor is a renowned Swiss architect celebrated for his minimalist and sensory architectural designs. His works emphasize materiality, atmosphere, and the experience of space. He is considered one of the most influential architects of his generation and has received numerous prestigious awards. Here are 35 of his quotes:

Designing is a matter of concentration. You go deep into what you want to do. It's about intensive research, really. The concentration is warm and intimate and like the fire inside the earth - intense but not distorted. You can go to a place, really feel it in your heart. It's actually a beautiful feeling.

Peter Zumthor

Architecture is exposed to life. If its body is sensitive enough, it can assume a quality that bears witness to past life.

Peter Zumthor

If you're lucky, and a building succeeds, the real product has many more dimensions than you can ever imagine. You have the sun, the light, the rain, the birds, the feel.

Peter Zumthor

Normally, architects render a service. They implement what other people want. This is not what I do. I like to develop the use of the building together with the client, in a process, so that as we go along we become more intelligent.

Peter Zumthor

My buildings should have an emotional core –a space which, in itself, has an emotional nice feeling.

Peter Zumthor

If you look at the Earth without architecture, its sometimes a little bit unpleasant. So there is this basic human need to do shelter in the broadest sense of the word, whether its a movie theater or a simple log cabin in the mountains. This is the core of architecture: To provide a space for human beings.

Peter Zumthor

I'm not mainly interested in what buildings mean as symbols or vehicles for ideas.

Peter Zumthor

My relationship to plants becomes closer and closer. They make me quiet; I like to be in their company.

Peter Zumthor

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.

Peter Zumthor

There is still a real need for good quality architecture, not paper architecture, but the real stuff.

Peter Zumthor

If, early on, you know how things are put together, then you can build. The architect is in charge of making - he is not an artist.

Peter Zumthor

Small museums are great. Big museums are a drag.

Peter Zumthor

I've said goodbye to the overworked notion that architecture has to save the world.

Peter Zumthor

I think the chance of finding beauty is higher if you don't work on it directly. Beauty in architecture is driven by practicality. This is what you learn from studying the old townscapes of the Swiss farmers.

Peter Zumthor

What I try to do is the art of building, and the art of building is the art of construction; it is not only about forms and shapes and images.

Peter Zumthor

Every time I imagine a garden in an architectural setting, it turns into a magical place. I think of gardens I have seen, that I believe I have seen, that I long to see, surrounded by simple walls, columns, arcades or the facades of buildings - sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.

Peter Zumthor

My first buildings, when I was about 30, were rejected for aesthetic reasons.

Peter Zumthor

The first 10 years of my professional life had only to do with running away from my father. He was a wonderful cabinet-maker, and me being the eldest son, I had to take over his shop, his profession and so on and so on. I tried to escape by going to art school and then going on to industrial design and then interior design.

Peter Zumthor

I design for the use of a building and the place and for the people who use it... the reputation for arrogance comes because when work is offered to me, I look whether I can find a genuine interest in quality.

Peter Zumthor

I am convinced that a good building must be capable of absorbing the traces of human life and taking on a specific richness... I think of the patina of age on materials, of innumerable small scratches on surfaces, of varnish that has grown dull and brittle, and of edges polished by use.

Peter Zumthor

I work anywhere between three and 10 years on a project, depending on the size. My lifetime is finite. Therefore, I have to look carefully at how many projects I want to put into my lifetime.

Peter Zumthor

If I look at history, it seems that most wars and most cruel things have been done by men and not by women.

Peter Zumthor