Zumthor is a cabinetmaker's son who trained as a furniture joiner in his father's workshop at Oberwil before studying interior design in Basel and architecture at Pratt Institute in New York. He then spent ten years as a conservation officer for the canton of Graubünden, working on historic fabric in Alpine side valleys — an unusual apprenticeship that left him with a builder's attention to how a joint is made and how a surface ages. He opened his own office at Haldenstein in 1979 and has kept it deliberately small, refusing more work than he takes. The buildings are few and slow: the chapel at Sumvitg, the thermal baths at Vals, the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Kolumba in Cologne. He received the Pritzker Prize in 2009 and the Royal Gold Medal in 2013.
