April 12 (Bloomberg) -- A solitary shaft of concrete rises like a primordial monolith in a German farm field. This tiny one-room chapel is one of the few built works of Peter Zumthor, a reclusive, introverted Swiss architect who has won the coveted Prizker Prize.

The jury for the $100,000 award, the most prestigious in architecture, took the temperature of the times and concluded that this was not the year to focus on showy bravura. Zumthor, 65, is revered within the profession (but little known beyond it) for a painstaking process that scrubs his austere forms of the inessential.

Zumthor works in Haldenstein, a Swiss village far from the centers of architecture fashion. He is known for a public bath, two chapels, a couple of museums and a controversial interpretive center at the site of the Nazis’ Gestapo headquarters.

The Pritzker Prize, awarded annually since 1979, was created to emulate the Nobel by the Chicago-based Hyatt Foundation, founded by the Pritzker family. The Pritzkers have developed Hyatt hotels worldwide.

The alluring 1996 thermal baths at the remote Swiss village of Vals has become a pilgrimage place for architects and students. Zumthor created monastic calm in a labyrinth of chambers partly filled with water from mysterious sources. Within this tiny cloistered world, he opened spaces with shafts of indirect sunlight or framed views to the landscape. He faced the thick walls with thin slices of local stone -- geological striations of greens and grays that seem to melt into the turquoise water.

Humble Structures

Zumthor, the son of a cabinetmaker, was born in Basel and studied cabinetmaking himself before taking up design and architecture studies (including a stint at Pratt Institute, in New York). Working to preserve historic farm and village structures in the Canton of Graubunden, he learned how humble structures respected the extraordinary landscape and adapted themselves to the fierce climate with a minimum of means. He settled in this region and built his own studio in the form of a barn.

Among his early works is a series of wood-slat pavilions in Chur that are unapologetically contemporary, yet insist on the primacy of the modest Roman ruins they protect.

Much later, in a 2007 museum of religious artifacts called Kolumba, in Cologne, Germany, he layered heavy walls faced in thin vanilla-colored stone over the ruins of a late Gothic church destroyed during World War II. In other hands, this would be a desecration. Instead, the simplicity of Zumthor’s forms powerfully highlights the delicate tracery of the old stonework. He perforates the upper walls by randomly leaving stones out, showering the ruins inside with a serene half light.

Weedy Remains

For an interpretive center in Berlin, his design slid a long, narrow cagelike structure into the Topography of Terrors, a weed-filled site containing the bulldozed remains of the Gestapo headquarters. He encased one of the few remaining ruined structures while leaving the debris and mounds of earth outside almost undisturbed. With its densely aligned vertical columns, the structure could look utterly transparent or mutely solid.

No site in Germany was more politically charged, and the design -- modest, yet powerful -- possessed a poetic hard to convey in architectural drawings and models. Its cost well exceeded the budget. Zumthor resisted calls to change the design, and 11 years after the project began, officials canceled it and ripped out completed foundation work.

Monk’s Chapel

Zumthor continues to teach and build projects, like the 2007 chapel in the farm field, commissioned and largely built by a farm family. Devoted to a 15th-century monk, the concrete tower was molded around a pyramid of tall saplings, which were later seared intentionally by fire. Tiny glass tubes bring pinpricks of light inside, sharing the glow created by a skylight.

The chapel stands as a mute sentinel, seeming to conceal the secrets of centuries.

Zumthor will receive his prize and a gold medallion at the grand Legislative Palace of the City Council, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, May 29.

(James S. Russell is Bloomberg’s U.S. architecture critic. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: James S. Russell in New York at jamesrussell@earthlink.net.

Last Updated: April 12, 2009 12:59 EDT