Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has been awarded this year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize, the highest architecture honour.
The judges’ citation stated: “Zumthor has a keen ability to create places that are much more than a single building. His architecture expresses respect for the primacy of the site, the legacy of a local culture and the invaluable lessons of architectural history.”
The architect is responsible for the Kolumba Museum in Cologne, which the judges described as emerging ‘from the remains of a bombed church in the most inevitable and lyrical of ways, intertwining place and memory in an entirely new palimpsest’.
Zumthor will be presented with a medallion and a $100,000 grant at a ceremony on 29 May 2009 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The Pritzker Architecture Prize is presented once a year to a living architect.
By staff writer.
