Therme Vals

In the village of Vals, at the head of a side valley of the Graubünden Alps, Peter Zumthor built a bathhouse that reads as if it had been quarried out of the mountain rather than put on it. Completed in 1996, it is a low block set into the slope beside the village's spa hotel, and it is made almost entirely of one material: the grey-green quartzite of the valley itself, laid in some 60,000 thin slabs. It is widely counted among the most important buildings of its time, and only two years after opening it was placed under heritage protection.

Zumthor's starting image was a stone quarry. The interior is organised as fifteen massive stone blocks, each hollowed out to hold a small room, with the main bath flowing between them. Between the concrete roof slabs of the blocks run narrow glazed gaps about eight centimetres wide, so that daylight falls as thin lines across the stone and the heavy roof seems to float. The whole building plays on alternation: from dim, intimate chambers to the large meandering pool, from enclosure to openings on the valley outside.

The water comes from the local St Peter's spring, which rises at about 30°C. Inside, six pools are tuned to temperature and sensation, from a hot fire bath to an ice-cold plunge, each in its own stone room. Zumthor, who received the Pritzker Prize in 2009, is known for buildings in which material and atmosphere carry the design, and Vals is the clearest demonstration of it. In 2012 the hotel and baths were sold to a private investor and renamed 7132, after the village's postal code.

Getting there

Vals lies about 37 km from Chur as the crow flies. The closest airport by distance is Lugano (LUG), about 72 km away across the Alps, but most visitors come by train through Zurich and Chur. From Chur a regional train runs to Ilanz, where PostBus line 431 connects with the trains and climbs the Vals valley in about 45 minutes to the stop Vals, Therme; from Zurich the whole trip usually takes around two and a half to three hours.