SWISS MYSTIQUE

Working out of a wooden barn in the Swiss Alps, Peter Zumthor has completed only a handful of buildings, none of them in the United States, yet at 58 he is something of a cult figure in architectural circles. With Zumthor's name on the shortlist of architects for most prestigious projects, PAUL GOLDBERGER examines the work—high-tech and sensual, hard-edged and serene, modernist and opulent—of a man who began life as a carpenter, experienced the world, and then retreated into his own quiet realm of deeply pragmatic, almost Proustian spirituality