Robin Pogrebin reports in the New York Times that the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has won the 2009 Pritzker Prize, the highest recognition for architects. “He has conceived his method of practice almost as carefully as each of his projects,” the citation from the nine-member Pritzker jury says. “Declining a majority of the commissions that come his way, he only accepts a project if he feels a deep affinity for its program, and from the moment of commitment, his devotion is complete.”

Zumthor’s buildings do not share a common vernacular, writes Pogrebin. For his Field Chapel to St. Nikolaus von der Flüe, completed in 2007, in Mechernich, Germany, Zumthor formed the interior from 112 tree trunks configured like a tent. Over twenty-four days, layers of concrete were poured around the structure. Then for three weeks a fire was kept burning inside so that the dried tree trunks could be easily removed from the concrete shell. The chapel floor was covered with lead, which was melted on site and manually ladled onto the floor. For an art museum in Bregenz, Austria—a four-story cube of concrete, steel, and glass that opened in 1997—Zumthor used glass walls that at night can become giant billboards or video screens. His Kolumba Art Museum in Cologne, Germany, completed in 2007, rises out of the ruins of the Gothic St. Kolumba Church, destroyed in World War II. The Pritzker jury called the project “a startling contemporary work, but also one that is completely at ease with its many layers of history.”

For Zumthor, winning the Pritzker is a kind of vindication. “You can do your work, you do your thing, and it gets recognized,” he said in a telephone interview from Haldenstein, the Swiss village where he lives and works. Zumthor is the thirty-third laureate to receive the prize, which consists of a one-hundred-thousand-dollar grant and a bronze medallion, and is awarded at a different architecturally significant location each year.