press release

VMDO welcomes Peter Zumthor to Charlottesville, Virginia

VMDO kicked off a week-long celebration for Peter Zumthor before he accepted the prestigious Thomas Jefferson Medallist Award

April 14, 2006 – Local architects and enthusiasts were entertained by Peter Zumthor on Thursday, April 13, when he stopped by VMDO on his way to accept the 2006 Jefferson Medallist Award at the University of Virginia. Approximately fifty people attended the gathering at VMDO’s downtown office in Charlottesville, where Zumthor discussed his work briefly and held a question and answer session for fellow architects. He then attended the formal ceremony held at UVA’s Old Cabell Hall Auditorium where he accepted his honor and officially became the 41st recipient of the award annually bestowed on an individual who has demonstrated excellence in architecture and design.

Zumthor, who is a native of Switzerland, is best known for his minimalist exploration of the tactile and sensory qualities of space and materials. Having learned carpentry skills from his father at a young age, Zumthor studied design at New York’s Pratt Institute in the 1960s. After working on historic building restoration projects for several years, he founded his own practice in 1979 based in Haldenstein, Switzerland. His work includes many examples of thoughtfully-crafted public architecture, modest rural residences, and small-town museums. “Deceptively simple - cubes, oblongs, cylinders – [Zumthor’s] buildings cannot be captured in photographs; their true essence comes from the experience of textures, the play of light, the celebration of craft, and the kinesthesia of their spaces,” noted critic Richard Ingersoll in Architecture. Among Peter Zumthor’s many celebrated designs are: Gugalun House; St. Benedict’s Chapel; and the Cloud Rock Wilderness Lodge Moab. Zumthor received the 1998 Carlsberg Architectural Prize for his Kunsthaus (art museum) at Bregenz, Austria, and the Thermal Baths at Vals, Switzerland. In 1999 he was awarded the Mies van der Rohe Prize for European Architecture. Peter Zumthor has taught design at SCI-Arc, The University of Zurich, The Harvard Graduate School of Design and Tulane University among many other institutions.

VMDO Architects was founded in 1976 and is youngest firm to receive the T. David Fitz-Gibbon Virginia Architecture Award, the most prestigious honor given by the Virginia Society of American Institute of Architects.