Peter Zumthor is possibly the most innovative European architect working today. His projects inspire enthusiasm with their exactitude, their poetry, and their radically independent aesthetics and vocabulary of form.

What really constitutes an architectural atmosphere," Peter Zumthor says, is this singular density and mood, this feeling of presence, well-being, harmony, beauty ... under whose spell I experience what I otherwise would not experience in precisely this way." Zumthor's passion is the creation of buildings that produce this kind of effect, but how can one actually set out to achieve it? In nine short, illustrated chapters framed as a process of self-observation, Peter Zumthor describes what he has on his mind as he sets about creating the atmosphere of his houses. Images of spaces and buildings that affect him are every bit as important as particular pieces of music or books that inspire him. From the composition and presence" of the materials to the handling of proportions and the effect of light, this poetics of architecture enables the reader to recapitulate what really matters in the process of house design.

Film stills of "Shelter for Roman Ruins I Peter Zumthor", a documentary film of Shelter for Roman Ruins in Chur, designed by Pritzker Prize winner Swiss architect Peter Zumthor in 1986.

While he was working to complete the Allmannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum in southern Norway in 2016, Swiss architect Peter Zumthor asked Norwegian architectural historian Mari Lending to engage in a dialogue about the project. In meandering, impressionistic style, and drawing on their favorite writers, such as Johann Peter Hebel, Stendhal, Nabokov, and T. S. Eliot, their exchanges explore how history, time, and temporalities reverberate across Zumthor's oeuvre. Looking back, Zumthor ponders on how a feeling of history has informed his attempts at emotional reconstruction by means of building, from architectural interventions in dramatic landscapes to his design for the redevelopment of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which conceived the building on a suitably grand urban scale. This small, beautifully designed book records the conversation between Zumthor and Lending, accompanied by photographs taken by the renowned Swiss architectural photographer H l ne Binet. The resulting book is a surprisingly revelatory view of one of the most interesting and restlessly creative architects of our era.

Peter Zumthor was selected to construct the Swiss Pavilion at the EXPO2000 in Hanover, and to this end, he created an unusual wood structure, the "Soundbodies" of Switzerland. Swiss architecture, music, the written word, fashion design and gastronomy are all drawn together to create a place to discover, to enjoy and to relax in.

Therme Vals, the spa complex built in the Swiss Alps by celebrated architect Peter Zumthor, became an icon of contemporary architecture soon after its opening in 1996. Inspired by the spa's majestic surroundings, Zumthor built the structure on the sharp grade of an Alpine mountain slope with grass-topped roofs to mimic Swiss meadows, captured here in a series of sumptuous images. This is the only book-length study of this singular building. It features the architects own original sketches and plans for its design as well as striking photographs of the structure. Architectural scholar Sigrid Hauser contributes an essay drawing out the connections between the elemental nature of the spa and mythology, bathing, and purity. Annotations by Peter Zumthor on his design concept and the building process elucidate the structure's symbiotic relationship to its natural surroundings, revealing, for example, why he insisted on using locally quarried stone.