Place of Grace

The thoroughly astonishing Thermal Baths in Vals is Zumthor's most famous and most revered building. Equaling St. Benedict in its stark monumentality, the Baths differs from its predecessor in almost every other dimension: scale (it is much larger), composition, organization, materials, construction methods, and relationship to site. Zumthor's buildings bear no signature style. In Vals, rising out of a steep, wildflower-covered slope is a rectangular stacked-granite monolith, punctuated by three differently sized square apertures arranged in a contrapuntal rhythm and variously open and glazed. The aesthetic, materials, and construction methods of the Thermal Baths are, as in St. Benedict, drawn from the building's surroundings, but in this case the referent is not architecture but nature. Interior and exterior walls, which sheath the building's concrete core, are stacked into place with elongated, thinly sliced slabs of volcanic granite gneiss quarried from a cliff less than a kilometer away. The elements of his architecture--strong forms, rigorous compositions, layered fluid spaces, a tightly controlled palette of materials, and explicit details--are orchestrated only in situ, with the particularities of the commission, the building's projected use, its role in the cityscape or landscape, and the historical and contemporary character of its site.

Entrance to the baths is by way of a subterranean corridor, accessed through the small 1960s-vintage hotel to which the monumental Baths is, technically speaking, an addition. This shadow-filled corridor leads into granite-clad locker rooms--nice, but unexceptional--and it is from these locker rooms that one passes into the thermae, a moment that steals breath away. Standing on top of the ramp leading to the water immerses you in pools of space and light of shimmering grandeur. The layered rock walls that outside rise from unmowed fields stretch here, uninterrupted, from floor to ceiling, containing the bluish-green rectangles and square fields of water spreading below, arranged with the same musical sense of complex rhythm that activates the facade. Narrow granite slabs seemingly extracted from the walls at regular intervals form steps leading into the mineral-rich waters. Floating here you catch occasional glimpses, through enormous square floor-to-ceiling windows, of the steep mountain slope across the narrow valley that uncannily seems to have cooperated with Zumthor's artistic sense of composition by laying out a picturesque scene of artemisia, narrow footpaths, and hand-built shepherd's huts. Aqua-stained light streams through tinted glass blocks, arranged in a grid pattern and set into the concrete ceiling. An otherworldly wash of daylight spills down the granite walls, emitted from glazed horizontal slats set into the edges of the ceiling.

The Thermal Baths are by turns austere, sublime, and playful. The glazed slats in the concrete ceiling make a mystery of what supports its large span; the answer is that not all the building's walls are load-bearing, and its ceilings are cantilevered off and anchored into supporting walls. The pools, each a different temperature, are lit from below; the warmest, secreted away, is also the smallest--barely larger than a California hot tub--and seemingly on fire, bathed in hot red light. Adjacent to the resting areas, are two little rooms of mindfulness, one devoted to sound, another to smell. In the Baths' largest pool, you enter indoors and end up outside, where you paddle about, taking in framed views of the hillside, listening to the underground spring water gushing in through three carefully placed spouts. Quietude reigns.

This taut, polyphonic symphony of stone, shadow, water, and light equals architecture's greatest places--take your pick: the Pantheon in Rome, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the Alhambra in Granada, Le Corbusier's Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, Louis Kahn's Parliament Building in Dhaka. Zumthor's Thermal Baths, like these other buildings, alter your understanding of what architecture can be while at the same time changing you. Kahn, justifying the vast expanses that he projected for his unbuilt Meeting Hall for the Salk Institute in La Jolla, once described the transformative power of great monumental buildings and spaces thus: "If you look at the Baths of Caracalla … we know that we can bathe just as well under an 8-foot ceiling as we can under a 150-foot ceiling, but I believe there's something about a 150-foot ceiling that makes a man a different kind of man." Woman or man, at the Thermal Baths, you do not simply take the waters. You engage in a profound ritual of cleansing and purification practiced by multitudes, in divergent cultures, over thousands of years, a ritual imbued with hosts of symbolic associations, contemplative transformations, and spiritual dimensions. Here moments and spaces lodge into your being, lasting memories of those scarce moments of beauty made by man.

The Thermal Baths, like St. Benedict, draws materials, forms, and methods of construction from its locale's built traditions and the site's topography, geography, and climate. Yet neither building melts into its surroundings, because the design of both, like all of Zumthor's projects, is guided by a rigorous, painstakingly formulated set of rules. "I like to believe," Zumthor explains, "there is an inner order to a well-made thing." His is an aesthetic that seeks internal formal unity. Rules underlie projects from their overall aspect to their smallest detail; rules direct the structure and the means of construction; rules govern the choice of materials, their relationship to one another, and their role in the overall composition. Yet never are these buildings arid, pedantic, or complacent. Once the rules for a project's design are settled--in the lumberyard-like maze of the Swiss pavilion for the Hannover Expo in 2000, the number of rules climbed to twenty-two--Zumthor loosens up. "My happiest moments," he jokes, "are when I can violate my own rules." Compositional surprises are many.

These buildings never feel formulaic, because, as in the minimalist sculpture that Zumthor appreciates, they become comprehensible only through motion and use. The brief for the Swiss pavilion, for example, in addition to the usual mandate of trade expositions to represent its commissioning country, specified a sustainable design. Zumthor's solution came when he remembered shopping for wood with his furniture-making father: "Let's build a lumberyard!" The precise lumberyard-like design of the "Swiss Sound Box," fresh-cut timber assembled with pressure springs instead of nails (dismantled at the end of the Expo, materials were returned to suppliers' retail shelves for sale), makes little sense from the exterior. The project unfolds slowly, as visitors ambulate through it as a maze, happening upon little bits of Swiss culture tucked away in its spaces: live music and dance performances, waiters offering fondue and bürli.