{"id":621008,"date":"2026-10-05T06:26:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T06:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/621008\/"},"modified":"2026-10-05T06:26:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T06:26:08","slug":"if-its-too-slick-it-looks-like-a-fashion-mag-peter-zumthor-on-his-110m-rammed-concrete-gallery-architecture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/621008\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018If it\u2019s too slick, it looks like a fashion mag\u2019: Peter Zumthor on his \u00a3110m rammed concrete gallery | Architecture"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the early 1960s, when Peter Zumthor was a teenage apprentice in his father\u2019s cabinet-making workshop, he designed his first cupboard. He later recalled the satisfaction of fitting the door so perfectly that it closed \u201cwith a special sucking sound\u201d, saying his father instilled in him \u201cthe Basel pride in the well-built object\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Six decades on, with a fleet of globally celebrated projects to his name, the 83-year-old Swiss architect is back in Basel, beaming with the same local pride. He is gazing out at his latest well-built object, which is also his first project here: a monolithic new gallery that looks chiselled from the earth, its layers of pale crumbly concrete hammered into shape, its big oak and bronze doors \u2013 their handles wrapped with leather cord \u2013 closing with that same satisfyingly expensive Swiss swoosh.<\/p>\n

double quotation markThe glass lamps were blown by the only two men in Italy with the lung capacity<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was an old feeling,\u201d Zumthor tells me, describing working in his home town to build the \u00a3110m addition to the Beyeler Foundation<\/a>. \u201cI encountered craftspeople who remembered my father, who had this special knowledge of how to make things. They weren\u2019t surprised if something had to be custom-made.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Wooden womb\u2019 \u2026 the pavilion is conceived as an open public lounge. Photograph: Mark Niedermann \u00a9 2026 Calder Foundation, New York \/ Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York<\/p>\n

It was quite a change from his previous building site. Fresh from the recent opening of the tortuous, two-decade-long, $724m addition to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art<\/a>, Zumthor is visibly relieved to be back on home turf. \u201cThe normal American architect is used to sourcing products, not looking for somebody who can make something custom-made,\u201d he says, with a furrowed brow. \u201cTheir buildings are an assembly of products.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not so in Switzerland<\/a>. From the pear wood handrails to the leather benches and blown glass lamps, every piece of his new gallery has been meticulously handmade. But is the sum of these bespoke parts a worthy companion to one of the country\u2019s \u2013 if not the world\u2019s \u2013 most beloved art museums?<\/p>\n

Designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, the Beyeler Foundation was hailed<\/a> as a model of elegant restraint when it opened in October 1997 \u2013 the same month as Frank Gehry\u2019s billowing Bilbao Guggenheim<\/a> \u2013 praised as a sober foil to the \u201ciconic\u201d tendencies of the time. Sited in Riehen, just outside Basel, in the grounds of an 18th-century villa, the museum was commissioned by Ernst Beyeler, Europe\u2019s pre-eminent modern art dealer and co-founder of Art Basel, and his wife Hildy, to house their staggering collection of Monets and Mir\u00f3s, Matisses and Picassos.<\/p>\n

A long, low, temple-like shed nestled in a garden, the foundation contains within its porphyry walls a luminous sequence of galleries, with daylight flooding through slender rooftop louvers. Piano took his hi-tech fetish and wrapped it in a luxurious stone skin, foreshadowing his bigger museums to come. But it was too small right from the day it opened. Two years later, it was extended by 12 metres and soon became the most visited art museum in the country, receiving 500,000 visitors a year. The challenge was how to extend a museum already deemed perfect by its art world patrons.<\/p>\n

Public square of sorts \u2026 Zumthor\u2019s Erlen Torhaus office and art-handling block, with fountain in the foreground. Photograph: Mark Niedermann<\/p>\n

\u201cThey wanted something completely different,\u201d says Zumthor, who was selected from a shortlist of 11 architects in 2016, after 100 were approached for their ideas. \u201cRenzo\u2019s building is more industrial, whereas mine is almost domestic. It is the villa that this garden was missing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The foundation acquired the Iselin-Weber park, a formerly private woodland adjacent to the museum campus, which now doubles its size, and where Zumthor\u2019s gallery rises like a rocky outcrop. It is one of three new structures he has designed, along with a five-storey, timber-clad office and art-handling block, and an auditorium pavilion, conceived as an open public lounge \u2013 a particularly appealing space that can be accessed without a ticket. \u201cNinety per cent of the time,\u201d says the foundation\u2019s director, Sam Keller, \u201cmuseum auditoriums are dead spaces. So we\u2019ve turned it into a social space for people to come and hang out, read books, listen to podcasts or do some work, a real extension of the park.\u201d<\/p>\n

The three buildings stand as an eclectic ensemble on either side of a lane, framing a public square of sorts, where a new drinking fountain trickles into a big stone trough, as in a traditional mountain village, welcoming art pilgrims to Zumthor-ville. Stone benches built into the museum facade greet weary wanderers. \u201cA building is something you ought to be able to lean against every now and then,\u201d says the architect, as Maurizio Cattelan\u2019s unnerving sculpture of a drummer boy<\/a> perches perilously on the parapet overhead, intermittently hammering his drum from the rooftop.<\/p>\n

The chance for Zumthor to finally build in Basel, a few kilometres from his birthplace, clearly brought back fond memories. In a schmaltzy new two-hour documentary by Wim Wenders called From Inside Out, the misty-eyed architect explains that this \u201cintimate building\u201d has \u201ca lot to do with me growing up here\u201d. He recounts that Jura limestone was \u201cthe stone of my youth\u201d, describing how the village fountains and the cattle troughs \u201call glowed\u201d. He wanted his own building to glow, too, so he mixed Jura stone into the concrete, and had workers tamp the dry mixture by hand, laying it at a rate of no more than 45cm a day. This is all filmed with a stirring musical backdrop. He wanted the wobbly joints between each day\u2019s work left visible, like strata of sedimentary rock.<\/p>\n

Brighter upstairs \u2026 large picture windows framing pastoral views. Photograph: Mark Niedermann<\/p>\n

\u201cI call it \u2018farmer concrete\u2019,\u201d he says. \u201cYou see it everywhere in the mountains. They make it themselves, and they don\u2019t vibrate the mixture, so it looks rough like this. You can see the building has a history, that hands have worked on it. It\u2019s nice if you can see those traces. If it\u2019s too slick, you just look like a fashion magazine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zumthor\u2019s rugged brand of \u201crammed concrete\u201d has become one of his highly published trademarks (and has indeed featured in fashion magazines<\/a>). There is a sense of him bringing his greatest hits to the Beyeler ensemble. He used the technique for the Bruder Klaus field chapel<\/a> in rural Germany and a holiday house in Devon<\/a> for Alain de Botton\u2019s Living Architecture company. The admin block, meanwhile, bears a distinct resemblance to his atelier building in Haldenstein<\/a>, also in Switzerland, its elegant oak facade (masking a concrete frame) crowned with a slender corrugated canopy.<\/p>\n

And the pavilion draws on yet another language. It\u2019s like a warm wooden womb that\u2019s been dug into the landscape, surrounded by walls of glass and topped with a low upholstered acoustic ceiling, full of armchairs encouraging visitors to lounge awhile. Zumthor had to wait so long for a commission in his home town, he has turned one project into three.<\/p>\n

\u2018It looks rough\u2019 \u2026 the pharaonic staircase. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright<\/p>\n

The galleries themselves are quite a departure from Piano\u2019s top-lit white cubes. After the gleaming stone exterior, the interior feels almost cave-like, Monet\u2019s waterlilies looking muddier than ever in the ground-floor gloom. Things get brighter upstairs, with large picture windows framing pastoral views in different directions as you ascend the three floors, looking towards the Black Forest on one side and the Jura mountains on the other. Limestone terrazzo floors, lime-washed walls and pale concrete ceilings create an all-encompassing world of beige, which somehow flattens the work on show, relieved only by dark timber-lined nooks for loos and lifts.<\/p>\n

Lozenge-shaped glass lamps (\u201cmade by the only two men in Italy who have the lung capacity to do it\u201d, I am told) provide some ambient light, while spots highlight particular works. But you might find yourself pining for the celestial top-light of Piano\u2019s galleries next door. Despite the architect\u2019s protestations, it oozes the aura of a luxury boutique. As one visiting Angelino noted: \u201cIt feels like a new Skims store<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The creamy promenade culminates in a roof terrace, with more views of pretty Swiss countryside, before visitors are shuttled down a pharaonic external stairway between the concrete walls, punched with triangular openings on one side, giving glimpses of the park and a mature ginkgo tree, around which the arms of the Y-shaped building extend. Questioned about the need for all this concrete, and its attendant carbon footprint, Zumthor is adamant. \u201cI could not make a wooden museum,\u201d he says. \u201cI think it is not good for art. This kind of classical art needs more substance.\u201d<\/p>\n

He might have questioned his own assumptions. When it first opened, the Beyeler was praised for its brave departure from the fashions of the time. Thirty years on, Zumthor, for all his talk of sensitivity to place, has created something that feels as globally ubiquitous as the Louise Bourgeois spider that crouches in the garden outside. Like the menagerie of buildings by noted architects at the Vitra campus<\/a> nearby, the foundation has succeeded in adding another familiar collectible to its haul of prized works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the early 1960s, when Peter Zumthor was a teenage apprentice in his father\u2019s cabinet-making workshop, he designed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":621009,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-621008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621008"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621008\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/621009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=621008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=621008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}