Peter Zumthor

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Small museums are great. Big museums are a drag.”

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

“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.”

“I would describe the distinction between city and landscape like this: cities tend to excite and agitate me; they make me feel big or small, self-confident, proud, curious, excited, tense, annoyed... or they intimidate me. But the landscape, if I give it the chance, offers me freedom and serenity. Nature has a different sense of time. Time is big in the landscape while in the city it is condensed, just like the city's space.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 need a close contact to the client, whoever it is, and a commitment of the client to go out and do a process together. I want to do the best for him. I need his respect and his patience. I want to work with a sophisticated person who's interested in a good building and not in my name.”

“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.”