Therme Vals

Zumthor’s baths in a mountain village are built of thin slabs of local gneiss, stacked like a mountain that has been hollowed out. Light falls in through narrow slits in the roof. Each pool has its own temperature, light and sound.

Vals in Graubünden has a hot spring, and in the 1980s the municipality bought an old hotel that needed new baths. Peter Zumthor was given the commission, and the baths were built in 1993–1996. They lie partly in the slope, with a grass-covered surface on top, so that they merge into the landscape.

The baths are built of about 60,000 slabs of gneiss from a nearby quarry. They are laid in layers, with concrete inside, so that the walls look like layered rock. The building consists of a series of blocks, each containing a room: a hot bath, a cold bath, a bath with flowers, a room for sound. Between the blocks are slits where light falls in. Everything is conceived for the body: the temperature of the water and stone, the sound, the darkness and the light.

Therme Vals was listed as a protected monument just a few years after it opened. It made Zumthor world-famous and is regarded as one of the most important buildings of the 1990s. Zumthor received the Pritzker Prize in 2009. The baths show how architecture can be about the senses and atmosphere rather than form.

• Contemporary architecture
• Peter Zumthor