Zumthor the shaman - Peter Zumthor, winner of the 1998 Carlsberg Prize for Architecture

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1998 by Peter Davey

Water and stone are mainly revealed in light which, from the gallery, seems largely to be introduced through slots in the smoothly cast concrete roof (hence the glass strips in the meadow on top). They offer the sense of drama and amazement that you get in a natural cavern where part of the shell has fallen and light streams in. A long slot pours a sheet of luminance over the balustrade at which you are standing: the result only becomes clear when you see Edward Hopper-like figures leaning on the bronze handrail. Other slots echo the plan of the big pool, sometimes meeting a stone mass at right angles, when they cast a thin bright slash down the wall. Elsewhere, slots are parallel to the stone, when its stratified nature is emphasized as light washes over the surface and brightly streaks the edges of slightly projecting courses. Though the slabs are cut perfectly, and laid on the thinnest of beds with great precision, like a work of nature, a hand-built wall cannot be absolutely perfect - nor would the architect wish it to be so.

The generous, sociable promenade round the central pool becomes a sort of loggia on the valley side. Parts of the wall are replaced by glass in openings positioned with great dexterity to avoid seeing the '60s tat, and to frame(10) views of the green or white meadows on the other side of the valley, meticulously maintained with traditional farming methods. The loggia continues outside to contain the big open-air pool over which the water, heated by subterranean forces, generates a cloud of steam in all but the hottest weather. You swim in a mist looking up at the jagged outline of the high Alps.

The promenade round the inner pool allows you to visit smaller spaces carved into the perimeter walls and into the mighty supports that define the pool's corners. Here are offered all the sensations enjoyed by the Romans and, I suspect, rather more. Modern equivalents of the tepidarium, caldarium and frigidarium are there, but so is a place in which water full of little bubbles fizzes upwards around you. In the steam baths, a hot cloud is carefully controlled at breast height, so that when you stand you are in a searing mist, and when you sit, it hovers above you, lit dramatically from above. In another space, specially commissioned music sometimes quietly tintinnabulates. Another has water scented by jasmine petals. Each is treated in a different way: smooth concrete, grey or coloured, rough or polished stone; reverberant(11) or still; light or sometimes frighteningly dark; light up, sideways, down, or not at all. You feel the place through your feet and limbs as well as your eyes, ears and nose. Zumthor believes that 'all design work starts from this physical, objective sensuousness of architecture, of its materials. To experience architecture in a concrete way means to touch, see, hear and smell it'.(12) No architect can expect to get his users in a more receptive sensory state, for they are all as near naked as contemporary indoor decorum allows. And it is curious that, though few of the bathers are likely to get starring parts in the pornographic media, almost all, even the most wizened, obese or adolescently challenged, seem to have dignity and a degree of beauty - properties surely conveyed by the building.