Introduction 01 Therme Vals | Peter Zumthor The act of bathing is an ancient ritual; a ritual of cleansing the body through water and a critical element in maintaining a good well-being and a lucid, tranquil state of mind. Public spaces of bathing have been an important factor in terms of cleansing, socialising and healing for thousands of years in many civilizations around the world. The invigorating daily procedure of disrobing and removing the cumulative grime of the daily events is one that is often taken lightly in our fast-pasted contemporary culture. Peter Zumthor offers us with a mystical bathing experience that does not fail in re-establishing the ancient notion of bathing in a modern world. The community of Vals, Switzerland purchased the local hotel complex – built in the 1960’s – early in the 1980’s from a bankrupt German developing company. Shortly after, they approached Peter Zumthor, asking him to design a new thermal spa. The required constituents of the project were that the thermal spa would be located centrally amongst the hotel buildings, “at the heart of the spring,”1 and that the building would be designed in such a way as to not impose on the views from the hotel rooms. Without a doubt, the Therme Vals, Vals, Switzerland, completed in 1996, is a phenomenal piece of architecture. So much so, however, that a mere two years following its completion, it was listed as a protected building.

Form 02 Therme Vals | Peter Zumthor

Form 03 The form of a piece of architecture can be derived from countless processes. “Architecture attaches itself to this world through our experience or our knowledge of building.” (Colquhoun, p. 193) The original concept for Thermal Baths in Vals materialized from Zumthor’s “naïve and childish” (Les Thermes des Pierre) mental images of quarries and spring water emerging from the earth. [Figure 1] The form that would ultimately arise appears older than any of the buildings in the town, as if it were carved out of the mountainside, completely attached to its surroundings. Zumthor responded to the commission requirements, established by the community of Vals, by sinking the baths back into the mountainside leaving only one façade exposed to the town. [Figure 2]

Form 04

The robust fortress of stone is impenetrable, as it has no doors. In order to enter the spiritual bathing atmosphere, the visitor must travel through a passage beneath the mountain from the main hotel building, through which they are removed from the external and enter a place of ancient ritual. [Figure 3] The passage is lined with five copper pipes that continue to leak water from the spring, leaving mineral deposits running down the wall. The forms within the thermal spa were created by metaphorically excavating horizontally into the mountain. [Figure 4] What is left becomes the roof or fragment there of. The spa is, in fact, assembled out of a series of 15 large stone and concrete blocks that fit together like a puzzle. “The high walls and shifting building blocks are out of human scale.” (Les Thermes des Pierre) The blocks are positioned next to each other around the rectangular outdoor pool and the square indoor pool. [Figure 5]

Form 05 Each of the building blocks is an inhabited volume, which contains a hidden chamber inside with a unique experience for the exploring bather. [Figure 6] However, the building blocks never actually touch. They maintain a gap of 8cm between each of the cantilevered roof portions. Zumthor was able to achieve this ‘weightless’ concrete and stone structure by using a cable system embedded within the block. [Figure 7] The form is nearly that of a single stone slab, protruding from the mountain, although it is comprised of several smaller stone building blocks that create a mystical labyrinth around and through water. The building itself, although ‘contemporary’, has no formal classification. Zumthor, in his book entitled Thinking Architecture, says that, “[he] believes that architecture today needs to reflect on the tasks and possibilities which are inherently its own. Architecture is not a vehicle or a symbol for things that do not belong to its essence. In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste forms and meanings, and speak its own language. [He] believe[s] that the language of architecture is not a question of a specific style. Every building is built for a specific use in a specific plan and for a specific society. [His] buildings try to answer the questions that emerge from these simple facts as precisely and critically as they can.” (Zumthor, p. 26)

Form 06

Body 07 Therme Vals | Peter Zumthor

Body 08 The subject of ‘Body’ within architecture is diverse. This essay will begin to describe some of the many aspects of body as it relates to the Therme Vals. We will discuss the building in its focus of the physical and mental health of the body, the femininity and masculinity of the form, tactility and scale relationships, and the essence of time. During the turn of the twentieth century modern medicine and exercise dominated the western world. A huge emphasis was placed on exercise and being outdoors as we way to cleanse the body of impurities. However, this mentality of cleansing the body was not new, but ancient. Peter Zumthor created a space for bathing that unites the modern world with the ancient rituals of cleansing the body. He combines both enclosed nodes for intensely focused healing and an abundance of exposed indoor and outdoor general healing spaces, noted in the diagram. The result is a near-religious experience where the body is internally and externally cleansed through nothing more than water, stone and carefully placed lighting.

Body 09 A sense of cleanliness and hygiene has had dominance in how we approach architecture. Beatiz Colomina states that, "even more significant is the impact of medical thought on domestic architecture, the constant preoccupation with ventilation, sunlight, hygiene, and white walls." (Colomina, 1997) While Zumthor negates the white walls, he only allows clean, natural and local materials into the design. The water used in the pools of the Therme Vals comes from a naturally occurring spring beneath the building. As the diagram shows, impure water is naturally filtered through the mountain and emerges at the head of the spring as cleansed, pure water, suitable only for the most ritualistic bathing experiences. An additional sense of natural experience comes from the Valser quartzite stone that surrounds each and every space. The stone is quarried from the same valley as the spring.

Body 10 This diagram explains how Zumthor was able to make a heavy and dominantly masculine material such as stone seem elegant and graceful, depicting the feminine body. The massive stone walls, in this case remaining very masculine, transform at the ceiling. The heavy stone ceiling, cantilevered over the open spaces off the stone walls, seem to float in the air. The edges of the ceiling slab don’t physically touch any other structure except the wall it is suspended from. Somehow Zumthor manages to do the impossible of combining both masculinity and feminism into a single design. This is impossible according to Diana Agrest, who states that, “asking, ‘what body?’ is synonymous to asking ‘which gender?’ for a genderless body is an impossible body.” (Agrest, 1993)

Body 11 The topic of texture and tactility arises throughout phenomenological discussions of sensory observation. It is completely unsatisfying to experience the world merely with vision alone. Juhani Pallasmaa’s book entitled The Eyes of the Skin is an invaluable resource for this topic. His predecessors also provided valuable input in terms of a complete multi sensory observation. One of these individuals was Merleau-Ponty who in 1964 published in his book Sense and Non-Sense, “My perception is not a sum of visual, tactile and audible givens: I perceive in a total way with my whole being: I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964) Zumthor succeeded in judiciously applying all three of those perceptions; the visual, the tactile and the audible. Each of which acts as a collective experience.

Body 12 The concept of scale is used in dramatic contrast. The large volumes of the Therme Vals seem to be largely out of scale with those that inhabit the space. The large cavernous spaces feel as if you are passing through the quartzite tunnels of the quarry itself. The users are only, “reassured by the thin stone slabs they can grasp in their hands.” (Architecture Film, 2000) These slabs that run in continuous bands around the entirety of the baths are grouped together in sets of three. Although they seem quite randomly used, each set of three bands always equal 15 centimeters, allowing the user to still feel as if he were the master of this space.

Body 13 Time is a crucial element to all bodies as well as our daily lives. In fact, often our lives completely revolve around time. Time is an element that Peter Zumthor tried to eliminate within the confines of the baths. His goal was to, “suspend time,” (Architecture Film, 2000) for the bather and eliminate the pressures of the outside world. Before opening, he reluctantly agreed to install two slender brass poles with a small clock embedded into the end, noted as time nodes in the diagram, allowing the eager bather to check the time at their discretion. The diagram illustrates the proximity the bather is to a time node at any location within the facility.

Technique 14 Therme Vals | Peter Zumthor

Technique 15 condition _ 01 The first set of diagrams deals with the condition of projecting a path of movement, or a specific method of programmatic usability, onto a normative grid. As in the case of the Therme Vals, it is clear that the fixed grid does not lend itself seamlessly to the integration of program or movement through the interconnected volumes. Through a series of manipulative tools (i.e. warping, pulling, trimming, etc.) the normative grid can become a descriptive network that deforms in a specific response to the superimposed variables. This logic generates the basic building blocks Zumthor used to organize the space. condition _ 02 By taking objects derived from programmatic generation, one can begin to create an additional adjacent inhabitable space through the deformation of that object. The Therme Vals simply takes nodes along the upper and lower planes of the initial object (building block) and extrudes them until a neighbouring object interferes with their trajectory. These extruded planes form both the covered portions of space and the floor slabs between the building blocks, which enables bathers to move throughout the building in a controlled environment. However, these nodes can be located anywhere on the initial object and do not necessarily require an adjacent object as a means of terminating. This manipulation gives an observable spatial condition to the ‘in-between’ spaces.

Technique 16 condition _ 03 Within an otherwise volumetric condition out of human scale, deploying an ordered set of tangible components onto a surface produces a comforting and haptic phenomenon. By conditioning the components populating a surface through an ordered framework, the observer begins to gain an understanding of how that surface might be assembled. The Therme Vals generates this understanding by specifically sequencing the order in which thin slabs of stone are stacked to construct volumes that are ultimately out of human scale, as seen in the diagram condition _ 03a. The initial mass volumes that are generated within the space reach more than five metres, while the thin stone slabs reassure us of our mastery and power with a slender profile of only 15cm per cluster of three slabs. When components are not in a structured or ordered arrangement, they seem to produce little more than some sort of specific surface treatment.

Technique 17

Technique 18

Space 19 Therme Vals | Peter Zumthor

Space 20 Space and Time are two terms that are commonly expressed in conjunction with each other as an experiential condition and, for that reason, are necessary to coexist in the same instance. When one of them is eradicated, what remains is infinite void. However, when one is merely suspended, yet still present, our experience can change in amazing and horrifying ways. Sensory deprivation suspends space, making it seem as if only the tortures of time control your consciousness. Conversely, Zumthor chooses to suspend the element of worldly time in Therme Vals. It is an experience that, if embraced, can be euphoric.

Space 21

Zumthor also utilizes the suspension of time in a different sense; to tell a story of timelessness through the spaces of Therme Vals. Although the building is relatively new (constructed in 1998) it feels as if it has been there as long as the mountains themselves. This suspension of time, achieved through a combination of the articulation of space and materiality of the space, also serves to ensure that the building will seemingly age at the same rate as the mountains surrounding it. The diagram depicts the evolutionary process that could easily be imagined as the process of generation; the Therme Vals, both growing and eroding from the side of the mountain, like the baths themselves were their own tectonic plate.

Space 22 The simplicity of materials within the spatial construct allows the occupant to interact with the most elemental smooth and striated spaces – water and stone. While all spaces are bounded by the impermeable striation of stone slabs, the water allows the occupant to experience one of the truest forms of smooth space. It is a space that allows one to move in any direction with minimal resistance and neglecting the laws of gravity. The diagram demonstrates the free and smooth environment of the water in contrast with the restrictive boundaries of the continuous striations present within the stone surfaces.

Space 23 The contrast between smooth and striated space is also evident from the exterior. As Deleuze describes these two phenomena, “the striated is that which intertwines fixed and variable elements, produces an order and succession of distinct forms, and organizes horizontal melodic lines and vertical harmonic planes. The smooth is the continuous variation, continuous development of form; it is the fusion of harmony and melody in favor of the production of properly rythmic values, the pure act of the drawing of a diagonal across the vertical and the horizontal.” (478) The intersection between the boundaries of the Therme Vals and the smooth grassy slope of the mountain are clearly evident from above. The smooth continuous space of the grassy mountain landscape terminates by the organized striations that the building blocks project onto the landscaped roof above. The diagram depicts this intersection, demonstrating the striated space of the roof set amongst the smooth space of the mountainside.

Sources 24 _____________________

Bibliography Agrest, Diana I. Architecture from Without: Body, Logic, and Sex. 1993.

Colomina, Beatiz. The Medical Body in Modern Architecture. MIT Press, 1997.

Colquhoun, Alan. Essays in Architectural Criticism: Modern Architecture and Historical Change: “Form and Figure”. MIT

Press, 1981.

Deleuze, G and F. Guattari. A Thousand Plateus: 1440: The Smooth and the Striated. U of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. Northwestern University Press, 1992.

Zumthor, Peter. Thinking Architecture. Birkhäuser Basel, 2006.

FILM: Architecture: Les Thermes de Pierre film, director Richard Copans, Arte France and Centre Pompidou, 2000.