![]() These are the changing booths, screened in curtains of black leather.īehind these drapes, each volume for undressing has flush walls of lockers and a single leather banquette. The vertical surface towards the pool becomes a flank of horizontally-laid stone broken in five identical places. The wall to the right is homogeneous concrete, indented only with ' some square fountain heads (dripping into a continuous gap between wall and floor). To the left, a gap offers a peripheral glimpse down onto the main internal pool and out one of the big openings to the valley below. This brings you to the upper level of a tiered section. There follows a knight's move through 90 degrees to clear a tubular turnstile and through another 90 degrees again to align yourself with a long, shadowy corridor from which you can hear the trickle of several faucets. The subterranean nature of this connection is crucial as it dislocates the individual from the world outside. It's also extremely sensuous.Īccess to the Baths is along a curving tunnel from the hotel. Not so much a building as an earthwork, Zumthor's design is about digging and mounding up it's archaic and primary. From the road below, the building appears as an embankment, a monolith of compressed stone with large ocular openings. The roof is protected from the 'meagre meadow', and from the hotel complex to the north, by a simple railing but then erodes towards the south to reveal a swimming pool and sunbathers on flat slabs of rock. In this field are fissures of translucent glass and a square bed of downlighters, a little like mechanical sunflowers. ![]() The hillside meadow slopes down to spread horizontally out onto a terrace which will soon read as a carpet of blue flowers. The winner was Peter Zumthor, who has as usual worked in intense contact with the project and its site.įrom above, the new building is almost invisible. However, as a result of financial failure in the 1980s, the small municipality of Vals took over the business and initiated an architectural competition to reestablish thermal bathing as an attraction for a wider clientele. A century ago, hot natural springs were first diverted for therapeutic bathing and in the early '60s a vaguely glamorous hotel was erected to profit more intensely from the spa. It's a peripheral spot, dependent upon agriculture and tourism. Above the village, a tributary cascades down to meet the upper Rhine. ![]() Vals lies an hour away from Chur by car, deep in a valley dotted with shepherd huts and enlivened by the sound of cowbells. #Where to find primal blue blocks full#Resonant with an elemental materiality and full of myriad therapeutic delights, Peter Zumthor's thermal baths at Vals are conceived as a cavernous, labyrinthine haven devoted to sensual pleasure. #Where to find primal blue blocks free#MLA style: "Primal therapy." The Free Library. ![]()
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