Zumthor opens £110m rammed concrete Beyeler gallery — SkimNews
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- Peter Zumthor, 83, completed a £110m rammed concrete gallery at the Beyeler Foundation in Riehen, near Basel — his first building in his hometown, six decades after designing his first cupboard as a teenage apprentice there.
- The project comprises three new structures — the gallery, a five-storey timber-clad office and art-handling block, and an auditorium pavilion reimagined as a free public lounge — doubling the campus onto the newly acquired Iselin-Weber park.
- Every element was handmade by Swiss craftspeople, including Jura limestone mixed into what Zumthor calls "farmer concrete," tamped by hand and laid at no more than 45cm a day, plus lozenge-shaped glass lamps blown by "the only two men in Italy" with the lung capacity.
- Zumthor was selected from a shortlist of 11 architects in 2016 after 100 were approached; he described his building as "almost domestic" and "the villa that this garden was missing," in contrast to Renzo Piano's more industrial 1997 original.
- The Beyeler Foundation, which receives 500,000 visitors a year and was extended by 12 metres just two years after Piano's building opened in October 1997, now houses work from Monets and Mirós to Matisses and Picassos from the collection of co-founder Ernst Beyeler.
- Critics found the new gallery's beige limestone-terrazzo interiors cave-like and flattening for the art, with one visiting Angelino comparing the atmosphere to "a new Skims store," while Zumthor defended his material choice: "I could not make a wooden museum… This kind of classical art needs more substance."
Why it matters: The £110m expansion doubles the footprint of Switzerland's most-visited art museum (500,000 visitors a year) and gives the 83-year-old Pritzker winner his first realized building in his hometown of Basel — a career capstone whose three handmade structures will be judged against Renzo Piano's widely admired 1997 original for decades.
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