Peter Zumthor

Peter Zumthor’s June 2026 extension scheme for the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen is the first time another Pritzker laureate has been asked to expand a Renzo Piano museum. The handoff is unusually clean: Renzo Piano won the Pritzker in 1998, the year after his Beyeler building opened; Peter Zumthor won it in 2009; and the two now share the same six-hectare park on the Swiss-German border. The Fondation Beyeler is one of the small set of post-war private museums whose architecture is as legible as its collection, and the 2026 commission turns it into a two-author site without removing anything that already exists. ...

Twenty years is a long time to wait for a building. When Peter Zumthor’s David Geffen Galleries opened to the public on April 19, the inevitable question was whether the result could possibly justify the duration — the demolished buildings, the displaced collections, the cost overruns, the public debate that at various points turned genuinely hostile. The answer, like most things Zumthor designs, is both simpler and more complex than expected. Here is a building that does not look like the cultural argument it is, that hides its polemics under a coat of board-formed concrete and a tinted-glass eyebrow, and that has at last been built — not as the project the city debated, but as the project the architect drew. ...