Assuming Zumthor does find a sympathetic partner, though, what gets built will have invariably emerged from a long and complicated gestation process. In Bregenz, Austria, Rudolf Sagmeister, the curator of Zumthor’s celebrated Kunsthaus there, which opened in 1997, described how Zumthor parried with locals for ages to get what he wanted.

“It is the dream of architects, especially the ones who hate their lives, to do just a few things but perfectly, each thing a milestone, so architects envy him,” Sagmeister said. We were seated in a cafe beside the museum, facing a small square, which Zumthor also designed, where a pair of toddlers played in a patch of cold winter sunlight.

Sagmeister went on: “He’s the symbol of what architecture can still be, that is, a labor of love, and of how to work, with a dozen or so assistants from around the world, not huge teams of people, but associates who stay for years and work in a quiet office built around a garden — an idyll, where you talk about art, architecture and living. He listens to what you want. He poses clever questions and asks a lot. He wants to know about the surrounding area, he wants to know whether the clients have time, whether they’re willing to wait, to go through a process of discovery. Investors aren’t interested in this sort of thing. They need a schedule. They’re buying a kind of product. That’s not what they get with Peter. And it’s not what he wants in a client.”

Sagmeister recalled how Zumthor resisted calls for a big lakeside window and a restaurant at the top of the Kunsthaus, then stood up to contractors who insisted it would be impossible to achieve the quality of concrete he demanded. “Some people questioned the glass facade and said that the terrazzo floors would crack. But Peter knew he was right, because he had tested everything himself. So he persisted, and now people here are very proud and we have had no problems and even all these years later, thousands of people come to Bregenz just to see the building.”

Not long ago, Zumthor and I set out from Haldenstein to see his most celebrated work, a town-owned spa connected to a hotel in the mountain village of Vals. Gradually, warily, as we drove, he warmed and gave me a little of his life story. Born into a large Catholic family outside Basel, he was brought up to follow in his father’s footsteps as a master cabinetmaker. He remembered his father, not altogether unfondly, as a martinet who taught him “how to be exacting and uncompromising,” as he put it, and how to work with his hands. Zumthor attended a Swiss school for applied arts, modeled after the Bauhaus, with teachers from the Bauhaus, from whom he learned “all the basics of design, the craftsmanship of drawing and looking, of mixing colors, white space and negative space — form, line and surface.” He then studied industrial design in New York at Pratt, but never earned an architecture degree, which now seems to be a point of pride. He loves to complain that young architects, having come to rely on computers, “don’t know how things are constructed” and have “lost a sense of scale.” His studio is famous for producing the most extravagant models in wax, lead, aluminum and clay, sometimes even full-scale ones, installed so clients can walk through them and so that Zumthor can see how a design holds up after months or years. “It’s all talk these days,” he complained in the car. “Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier came from a tradition in which architects still knew how things were made, how to make things well. We should force universities to train carpenters and woodworkers and leather workers. Architects all want to be philosophers or artists now. I’m lucky to have had my education, because in the States, especially, you’ve lost contact with the real business of building.”

I’ve heard Zumthor’s detractors respond to this sort of argument by saying he’s a Swiss clockmaker. They stress that he thrives in a small pond but that the rough-and-tumble of global-scaled 21st-century projects demands a more flexible and grander vision. It is true that his projects are not enormous; there is an intimacy to his work. At places like Bregenz or the Bruder Klaus chapel, visitors respond not just to how his buildings look but also to their sounds, smells, to the light as it changes around them, even to the feel of the walls and floors — to what Zumthor has described as the “beautiful silence that I associate with attributes such as composure, self-evidence, durability, presence and integrity, and with warmth and sensuousness as well.”

As we drove, I came to realize we were going through something of an accelerated version of the process he goes through with clients. The farmers in Wachendorf had told me: “He causes people to want to give their best. People see it in Zumthor, and see it is a unique situation working with him, a rare opportunity in life.” I asked about influences on him, and he talked about artists he first encountered in the ’60s and ’70s — Americans like Richard Serra, Walter De Maria and Michael Heizer, sculptors who adapted Minimalism toward massive projects that extended into the landscape. He also extolled the mercurial German artist Joseph Beuys, the Luftwaffe pilot turned artist-shaman, who endowed eccentric materials, including wax and felt, with all sorts of private and historical allusions, and whose life itself became a kind of performance. “With Beuys,” Zumthor explained, “my interest has had to do with the mythology and sensuousness of his materials, the importance of his personal life in his art. He was looking at objects with history, with a past.”