In the early 1960s, Peter Zumthor began his career as a teenage apprentice in his father’s cabinet-making workshop. It was there he designed his first cupboard, learning the deep satisfaction of crafting a door that closed with a distinct “sucking sound.” This formative experience instilled in him what he calls “the Basel pride in the well-built object,” a philosophy that has defined his architectural career over the last six decades.
Now 83, the Swiss architect has returned to his hometown to oversee the £110 million expansion of the Beyeler Foundation. This project marks a significant homecoming for Zumthor, who noted that working in Basel allowed him to reconnect with local craftspeople who understood his approach. Unlike his recent experience completing the $724 million, two-decade-long project at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where he often struggled to find local expertise for custom-made elements, the Basel site proved far more collaborative. 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, six decades on. “It was an old feeling,” Zumthor tells me, describing working in his home town to build the £110m addition to the Beyeler Foundation. “I encountered craftspeople who remembered my father, who had this special knowledge of how to make things. They weren’t surprised if something had to be custom-made.”. 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.
The Beyeler Foundation, originally designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, opened in October 1997. Praised for its elegant, sober design, it was intended to house the private art collection of Ernst Beyeler, a prominent dealer and co-founder of Art Basel, and his wife Hildy. Though the museum became the most visited in Switzerland, receiving 500,000 guests annually, space constraints necessitated the expansion. Zumthor was selected from a shortlist of 11 candidates in 2016 following a wider search involving 100 architectural firms. The Beyeler Foundation was hailed as a model of elegant restraint when it opened in October 1997 – the same month as Frank Gehry’s billowing Bilbao Guggenheim – praised as a sober foil to the “iconic” tendencies of the time, designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano.
While Piano’s original building is often described as industrial and technical, Zumthor characterizes his new contribution as domestic in scale. The expansion includes three structures: the primary gallery space, a five-storey timber-clad office and art-handling block, and an auditorium pavilion designed as an open public lounge. The gallery itself rises from the ground like a rugged, rocky outcrop, fitting into the campus’s 18th-century villa grounds.
Zumthor’s commitment to artisanal craftsmanship is evident throughout the site. From hand-wrought pear wood handrails to leather-topped benches and bespoke blown-glass lamps, the building celebrates the handmade. These lights were created by Italian artisans specifically tasked with the project due to the extreme lung capacity required to blow them. Even the exterior wall benches, carved directly into the museum’s facade, invite passersby to rest and interact with the structure. But is the sum of these bespoke parts a worthy companion to one of the country’s – if not the world’s – most beloved art museums.
A central feature of the gallery is the use of “rammed concrete,” a technique Zumthor has employed in previous notable works like the Bruder Klaus field chapel in Germany. He mixed Jura stone into the concrete, having workers tamp the mixture by hand in daily layers of no more than 45cm. He describes this as “farmer concrete,” a style commonly seen in mountain regions that retains a rough, historical character rather than a sleek, machine-made finish. He warns that if the finish were too smooth, the building would lose its soul and look like a fashion magazine.
The project’s environmental footprint was a subject of consideration, but Zumthor remains firm on his choice of material. Dismissing the possibility of a timber-based museum, he argued that concrete provides the best environment for preserving and displaying art. This design philosophy is explored further in a new documentary, From Inside Out, directed by Wim Wenders, which captures the architect’s emotional connection to the project. 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 – their handles wrapped with leather cord – closing with that same satisfyingly expensive Swiss swoosh, he is gazing out at his latest well-built object.
The new buildings are positioned across a lane from the original museum, framing a public square that functions like a traditional mountain village. A new drinking fountain serves as a communal gathering point, emphasizing the architect’s desire for the museum to feel integrated into the community. As the gallery nears completion, it stands as a testament to Zumthor’s enduring respect for the local craft traditions that shaped his early life.
