Interview with Royal Gold Medallist Peter Zumthor

AJ exclusive:&nbsp;James Pallister&nbsp;spoke with Swiss starchitect Peter&nbsp;Zumthor on the eve of his RIBA Gold Medal lecture

This week Peter Zumthor was awarded the RIBA&rsquo;s highest honour &ndash; the Royal Gold Medal, adding to the 69-year-old&rsquo;s haul of plaudits, which includes the Pritzker Prize, The Praemium Imperiale and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture.&nbsp;
Many details that make your work so rich seem to come from very close observation of daily life. Do you think architects&rsquo; work would be better if they learnt to relax and play a little more?I know exactly what you mean but it gives the wrong impression of how I work. I try to create emotional spaces that feel right for the purpose and the place. So I try to go into the use of the building very deeply and see what could be beautiful and comfortable.&nbsp;
Sometimes it&rsquo;s hard to get there. If I can tell something is missing, or I&rsquo;m not quite there yet, I must be honest with myself. I must tell the client: &lsquo;Please be patient for another month or two, or a year. You will have the rewards for that if you are patient now&rsquo;.&nbsp;
This is not easy sometimes. In judging what I am doing I have to be playful and serene and open and emotional because that &ndash; as we know &ndash; is how architecture is perceived, and not in abstract. I want to please people with my buildings unconsciously, emotionally. That&rsquo;s all. I don&rsquo;t want to lecture them. But it&rsquo;s hard labour to get there.&nbsp;

Developing the sensibility for minutiae your work shows &ndash; how thin a rail should be, how it should feel &ndash; seems to be at odds with spending all hours working in a practice, as many architects must in the UK. Is it?I customised my practice in the way I wanted to work. I think everybody can do that. You can always say &lsquo;this is how I want to live, this is how I want to w