Nestled in the Swiss Alps, 100 miles South of Zurich with a population of less than 1,000, Vals is known for its spring water which is sold throughout Switzerland. In the 1980s, when a local hotel owner went bankrupt, the village stepped in and purchased the hotels, hoping to transform one of them into a hydrotherapy center. The village then commissioned Peter Zumthor to design the baths which would not only be an amenity for the community but an attraction for visitors.
Since its opening in 1996, the village has seen a dramatic increase in the number of tourists making tourism Vals’ primary source of income accounting for 2/3 of the local economy. Architecture aficionados and travelers alike are drawn to this magnificent building to experience how the architecture has established a dialogue with the powerful landscape that surrounds it and the healing qualities of the thermal bath water.
The design creates a series of spaces that are organized within and between structural box columns of concrete, faced in indigenous Valser quartzite. The roof is a system of thin cantilevered concrete slabs that are supported by the box columns. The roof slabs do not touch, allowing the natural light to dramatically enter the baths through linear glass skylights.
As you enter the baths, you pass through an acrylic curtain, into a world meant to delight the senses. It seems paradoxical that one of the most masterful works of contemporary architecture should have such an understated and unusual entrance.
The baths, ranging from a tepidarium that is 40 degrees Celsius to a much cooler outdoor pool, are organized in a complex labyrinth of chambers inside and between the structural column-rooms. The concrete inside the tepidarium is integrally colored a deep red.
The Therme Vals is more than just great architecture that can be appreciated in relation to the unbuilt Danteum project by the Italian modernist Giuseppi Terragni. It also demonstrates how a small village can be creative and entrepreneurial. The Therme Vals offers a seductive shift from the paradigm of the Bilbao effect where architecture is a vehicle for economic health through spectacle and display to architecture as a space of desire – for the engagement of mind, body and soul, and community – and an equally powerful driver of local economy.
For more information on the Therme Vals, please visit:
http://www.therme-vals.ch/bad/index_en.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therme_Vals
Photographs taken from Flickr account members: sim and Dee Adams
August 28th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Bruce,
Great post! Is architecture a driver of the local economy? Or does the local economy drive architecture? I think the former. For centuries great architecture has been the centerpiece of urban space. Whether through places of worship, governmental, commercial, or cultural, buildings have been the epicenter of community. From piazzas in Italy, to Petra in Jorna, to the Pantheon in Greece. What do you think?
August 29th, 2008 at 12:18 am
If you make a place beautiful and healthy for the soul, people will invest time and money to get there. Once there, they will linger.
Rana is right. Public beauty (or private beauty that is open to the public) creates an instant sense of place and a focus for common identity. It attracts people of every social class, and welcomes them as long as their behavior is appropriate.
Sports stadiums do much the same thing. In America we have invested billions of public dollars on stadiums, but somehow we have had a harder time shelling out for public beauty. We could choose to live in a beautiful place, and our souls would rejoice. But a lot of us seem to feel that investment in public beauty is frivolous, wasteful, even sinful (is this a remnant of our Puritan heritage?). So I argue that if my town wants to attract tourists (and residents who can choose where to live), it cannot afford NOT to invest in public beauty.
Beautiful places also are ‘green’. See Stephen Mouzon’s new website “The Original Green”, on the topic of sustainable places and buildings:
“The first of the four foundations of sustainable buildings is Lovability, because it does not matter how efficiently the building performs if it is demolished and carted off to the landfill in a generation or two because it cannot be loved.”
Mouzon distinguishes between beauty and lovability. He claims: “Even a landmark so revered by the architectural profession as the Boston City Hall is now in danger of [being torn down] because it is famously unlovable.” He is right: mere appearance is not enough – the building must suit the way that people want to use it. Christopher Alexander (A Timeless Way of Building) calls this ‘the quality without a name’: “There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named”. You know it when you experience it. Alexander tries out the words “alive”, “whole”, “comfortable”, “free”, “exact”, “egoless”, “eternal”; and finds each of them inadequate to describe what he means. (I tend to call that quality ‘beauty’, but perhaps ‘lovability’ is better.) A place that has this quality does not just please the eye. It fits its use: a spot that invites us to sit and read should have enough light for reading; a public plaza should be proportioned so that pedestrians can discern each others’ faces, and thus feel more safe in an exposed place…. Such a place attracts human activity.
It sounds as though the new Therme Vals has this quality, whatever you call it, in spades. People want to be there, and they spend money to do so. Improvement of the local economy is a natural consequence.
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Wow, Bruce, thanx for the great info on Therme Vals! It’s definitely on my “places to visit” list now.