Quotes from Peter Zumthor

There was a time when I experienced architecture without thinking about it.

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.

I've built two wooden houses near Vals. I built them for my wife. Those were private projects.

I grew up in a craftsman's home, where things were done with our own hands. I did cabinetmaking for four years and I hated it.

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

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.

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.

You feel a certain way in a glass or concrete or limestone building. It has an effect on your skin - the same with plywood or veneer, or solid timber. Wood doesn't steal energy from your body the way glass and concrete steal heat. When it's hot, a wood house feels cooler than a concrete one, and when it's cold, the other way around.

Small museums are great. Big museums are a drag.

Architecture has its place in the concrete world. This is where it exists. This is where it makes its statement.

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

The bottom line may be that my inventing buildings is, indeed, a very private kind of activity. But it's done to be shared. It is comforting and consoling. From the reactions I get I can see I'm not doing something strange.

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.

I can't be bought with money. If someone calls me and asks me to work for them for three or four years, and they'll pay me well to build their vacation home, I ask myself why I should work three or four years on something like that.

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.

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

In order to design buildings with a sensuous connection to life, one must think in a way that goes far beyond form and construction.

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