Therme Vals

The baths opened in 1996, half buried in the hillside above the village. The governing image, stated by the architect, is a quarry: a mass from which blocks have been cut, so that what remains and the voids between are the building. Some sixty thousand slabs of Valser gneiss, each a metre long, were quarried nearby and laid in courses of three varying heights, which is why the wall reads as geology rather than as masonry. Zumthor reduced the programme to bathing itself — a hot bath, a cold bath, a flower bath, steam rooms — and refused every leisure-pool device: no slides, no jets. Water comes from the Saint Peter spring. The commune of Vals owned the complex when it was built; the baths won the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture in 1998, the year they were placed under cantonal monument protection.