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Peter Zumthor: The Latest Architecture and News

Life after Serpentine: Second Lives of Architecture's Famed Pavilions

If the surest sign of summer in London is the appearance of a new pavilion in front of the Serpentine Gallery, then it’s perhaps fair to say that summer is over once the pavilion is taken down. The installations have gained prominence since its inaugural edition in 2000, acting as a kind of exclusive honor and indication of talent for those chosen to present; celebrated names from the past names include Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, and Olafur Eliasson.

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Peter Zumthor's Kolumba Museum Uses Local Materials to Reframe Historic Experience

Peter Zumthor's quiet, technically pristine, and beautifully detailed work has long been an inspiration for architects. His Kolumba Museum, located in Cologne, Germany, a city that was almost completely destroyed in World War II, houses the Roman Catholic Archdiocese’s collection of art which spans more than a thousand years. Zumthor’s design delicately rises from the ruins of a late-Gothic church, respecting the site’s history and preserving its essence.

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Celebrate World Water Day With These 20 Designs That Feature Water Elements

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© Fernando Guerra | FG + SG

March 22 is World Water Day, an annual international celebration launched and organized by the United Nations. The goal of the day is to raise awareness about a wide range of water-based issues from around the world. This year’s theme is “Nature From Water”, which invites everyone to think about how nature can provide solutions to the water challenges we face today.

To celebrate World Water Day this year, we’ve rounded up 20 of our favorite projects that utilize water as a central design feature. Whether it be Zumthor's Thermal Vals or Chritso and Jeanne-Claude's Floating Piers, water has been playing an important role in architectural design and in demarcating the boundaries of nature against our built environment.

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Fantastic Images of Architecture in the Fog: The Best Photos of the Week

Taking photographs in fog can be an experience as chaotic as it is enchanting. Although working with this phenomenon can be risky, since fog dramatically modifies the available light and the atmosphere of a scene, if you know how to take advantage of it, the result can lead to perfect photographs. Below is a selection of 10 images from prominent photographers such as Kevin Scott, Richard Barnes, and Koichi Torimura.

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Explore Peter Zumthor's 1986 Shelter for Roman Ruins in Quiet Solitude

In 1986, Peter Zumthor completed one of his first projects: a shelter over an Ancient Roman archaeological site in Chur, (Graubünden, Switzerland). Now over three decades old, this film by ArcDog captures the building and the preserved excavations that it sits around with a quiet sophistication. With only timber lamella to allow in light and ventilative air, the project stands as a testament to Zumthor's sensitive architectural approach.

LACMA Reveals New Renderings and Drawings of Zumthor-Led Expansion Project

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© Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner / The Boundary

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has unveiled new renderings and drawings for their $600 million transformation designed by Atelier Peter Zumthor, as an environmental impact report for the project has been released.

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LACMA and Lincoln Center Reveal Divergent Plans

Two large-scale US cultural projects have, this week, announced major updates relating to the renovation of existing buildings – and both involve, to a greater and lesser extent, American business magnate, media mogul, and philanthropist David Geffen.

One—the Lincoln Center's Geffen Hall in New York City—has scrapped plans for a $500 million renovation to be led by Heatherwick Studio and Diamond Schmitt Architects, while another—Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), for which a renovation is being led by Peter Zumthor—has seen a pledge by Geffen of $150 million toward its $600 million price-tag.

Peter Zumthor's Kolumba Museum Through the Lens of Rasmus Hjortshøj

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© Rasmus Hjortshøj

In this series of images, photographer Rasmus Hjortshøj has captured the Kolumba Museum by renowned architect Peter Zumthor in Cologne, Germany. The museum, constructed atop the ruins of a Gothic church destroyed during World War II, was a response to a competition that aimed to protect the remains of the Gothic work and create a space to house the art collection of the archbishopric of Cologne. In his winning design, Zumthor fused the existing ruins with modern architecture ideal for religious art in an elegant and minimalist way.

With his photographs, Rasmus Hjortshøj offers a tour of Zumthor's design, portraying the building within its urban context, while examining the architect's dedication to detail.

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10 Hard-To-Reach Masterpieces And How To Get There

Visiting architectural masterpieces by the greats can often feel like a pilgrimage of sorts, especially when they are far away and hard to find. Not everyone takes the time to visit these buildings when traveling, which makes getting there all the more special. With weird opening hours, hard-to-reach locations and elusive tours we thought we’d show a selection from our archives of masterpieces (modernist to contemporary) and what it takes to make it through their doors. Don’t forget your camera! 

9 Incredibly Famous Architects Who Didn't Possess an Architecture Degree

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Had the worst jury ever? Failed your exams? Worry not! Before you fall on your bed and cry yourself to sleep—after posting a cute, frantic-looking selfie on Instagram, of course (hashtag so dead)—take a look at this list of nine celebrated architects, all of whom share a common trait. You might think that a shiny architecture degree is a requirement to be a successful architect; why else would you put yourself through so many years of architecture school? Well, while the title of "architect" may be protected in many countries, that doesn't mean you can't design amazing architecture—as demonstrated by these nine architects, who threw convention to the wind and took the road less traveled to architectural fame.

23 Examples of Impressive Museum Architecture

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Designing a museum is always an exciting architectural challenge. Museums often come with their own unique needs and constraints--from the art museum that needs specialist spaces for preserving works, to the huge collection that requires extensive archive space, and even the respected institution whose existing heritage building presents a challenge for any new extension. In honor of International Museum Day, we’ve selected 23 stand-out museums from our database, with each ArchDaily editor explaining what makes these buildings some of the best examples of museum architecture out there.

Peter Zumthor Unveils Designs for Beyeler Foundation Addition

Atelier Peter Zumthor has revealed conceptual designs for their CHF 100 million ($100 million USD) addition of the Beyeler Foundation in Riehen, Switzerland, just outside of the city of Basel. Located on land formerly off-limits to the public, the extension will add an array of new event and gallery spaces to the existing museum, designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop and opened in 1997.

Drawing from the “village-like character” of Riehen, the addition will consist of three, relatively small new buildings that blend harmoniously into the museum’s nature-filled setting: a stoic building for administration and service, a glass pavilion for events, and a grand House for Art. Together, their arrangement will help to create a subtle link between the new and old areas of the site.

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New Renderings Show Major Changes to Zumthor's LACMA Redesign

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has released the newest renderings of their planned Atelier Peter Zumthor-led $600 million renovation, and one thing in particular stands out: the building is no longer black.

While the third major revision to the design sees the building retain the overall shape of its previous iteration, many aspects have changed, including how the floating mass touches the ground and the facade’s new sandy color.

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Think You Know Swiss Architecture? Think Again.

In one of his 1922 travel essays for the Toronto Star Ernest Hemingway wrote, in a typically thewy tone, of “a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways and all stuck over with large brown hotels built [in] the cuckoo style of architecture.” This was his Switzerland: a country cornered in the heartland of Europe and yet distant from so much of its history. A nation which, for better or worse and particularly over the course of the 20th Century, has cultivated and become subject to a singularly one-dimensional reputation when it comes to architectural culture and the built environment.

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Thom Mayne, Ando, Kuma & Zumthor Contribute Rooms for "House of Architects" Hotel in Vals

Four top architects – Thom Mayne (Morphosis), Tadao Ando, Kengo Kuma and Peter Zumthor – have been tapped to contribute designs for the new “House of Architects” at the 7132 Hotel in Vals Switzerland. The latest addition to the hotel, The House of Architects features a lobby and entrance also designed by Morphosis Architects, and 7 room designs centered around a single material.

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A Capsule of "Almost-Forgotten History": Surface Magazine Visits Peter Zumthor's Allmannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum

Below is an excerpt of the cover story of this month’s Surface magazine: an in-depth look at Peter Zumthor’s recently completed Allmannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum, featuring exclusive quotes from the architect himself.

The first thing you notice when you arrive at the new Allmannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum outside Sauda, Norway, is that it looks nothing like a museum—or at least, what we think of as a museum. On a steep site framed by elegantly rugged walls of dry stone, three black, shed-like and zinc-roofed structures look far too small to house exhibits, much less hordes of visitors. But this isn’t a museum in the conventional sense. Consisting of a service building with restrooms, a café, and a gallery—all perched on tall timber supports—it’s more a memorial to those who toiled in the zinc mine that operated on the site from 1881 to 1899 in the spectacularly beautiful Allmannajuvet Ravine. The mine and its accompanying trail were long ago abandoned, the original buildings a distant memory.

The Noble Simplicity of Peter Zumthor's Allmannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum

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© Aldo Amoretti

After previously documenting the Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, photographer Aldo Amoretti once again captures the grounded simplicity of Peter Zumthor, this time with images of his Allmannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum in Sauda, Norway. The three-building campus calls upon the aesthetics of the country's abandoned zinc mines from the 1800s, evoking the toilsome labor of the workers in its rough stone and exposed joint work. The museum is situated on one of Norway's National Tourist Routes and was commissioned by the state as part of an effort to increase tourism in the region. As such, the buildings are poised in and above the landscape, providing views of the natural gorge that unfold as visitors move through Zumthor's dark, shaftlike interiors.

Amoretti's photos express the modesty of the project, from the blackness of the interior galleries to the thin stilts that support the buildings within their rocky surroundings. The museum structures are suspended in balance with the harsh, gray climate—a noble representation of the working conditions of the miners the project aims to memorialize.

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Peter Zumthor's Therme Vals Through the Lens of Fernando Guerra

In this stunning photo shoot Fernando Guerra, of Últimas Reportagens, captures the Therme Vals, one of the most iconic works of the 2009 Pritzker Prize-winner Peter Zumthor.

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