Therme vals Hotel & Hot Springs

The Therme (also known as thermal baths or hot springs) designed by Peter Zumthor in Vals, Switzerland, has gone down in the history of architecture as a "lesson in courage and aesthetics". As early as 1998, two years after opening, it was listed as a historic building. From outside the hotel appears as a self confident ensemble comprised of four buildings completed in 1969. The building composition is unpretentious and functional. The three ancillary buildings and the main building are witnesses of an architectural epoch revitalised through accents of timeless design.

.mountain .stone .water  

building in the stone, building with stone, into the mountain, building out of the mountain, being inside the mountain ; how can the implications and the sensuality in the association of these words be interpreted, architecturally ? The whole concept was designed by following up these questions ; so that it all took form step by step.

Peter Zumthor

Stone by stone. A massive element set in to the gradient of the slope and dovetailed with the flank of the mountain. The great slabs of the roof are grassed over: sections of flower studded alpine meadow.

The architectonic language of the new spa has nothing to do with the design of the hotel complex built in the sixties. It is more profound underlining the essential in the context of a new interpretation of the constructional challenge; emphasising the special relationship of the new Therme to the primordial forces of nature and the geology of the mountainscape, reacting to the impressive topography of the valley and the position of the warm spring which rises out of the primeval mountain just behind the new spa.

The remote alpine village of Vals is best known to the world as the home of Switzerland’s popular Valser mineral water. Since 1996, though, architecture fanatics and spa connoisseurs have known Vals as the home of Peter Zumthor’s Therme spa, an ultra-modernist design statement in grey Valser quartzite, a place that somehow crafts a near-religious experience out of little more than stone, water and judiciously applied light. The combinations of light and shade, open and enclosed spaces and linear elements make for a highly sensuous and restorative experience.