Peter Zumthor's Val Thermal Baths

Peter Zumthor, a recent Pritzker Prize winner Swiss Architect was introduced to me by a close friend. I did a little research on him and is very very impress with his master work of Val thermal bath. A Val spa building that was designed with sensory qualities in mind in term of architectural experiences. As described in one of his writing for "Thinking Architecture", Zumthor's approach seeks connection between human and architecture. He uses experience and emotion as part of his underlying criteria in selecting materials and designing spaces. The inside and outside of the buildings is choreographed so perfectly like a stage performance to enhance the bathers 5 senses of see, hear, touch, smell and taste. From the steaming bath waters to the natural lights coming through the stoned walls, the building is designed poetically to lead bathers into rediscovering the ancient bathing tradition. Zumthor using natural surrounding stones as its main inspiration for its building blocks for integrity, purity, and peace.
Here is an excepts from Mr. Zumthor for "Thinking Architecture"
“To me, buildings can have a beautiful silence that I associate with attributes such as composure, self-evidence, durability, presence, and integrity, and with warmth and sensuousness as well; a building that is being itself, being a building, not representing anything, just being. The sense that I try to instil into materials is beyond all rules of composition, and their tangibility, smell, and acoustic qualities are merely elements of the language we are obliged to use. Sense emerges when I succeed in bringing out the specific meanings of certain materials in my buildings, meanings that can only be perceived in just this way in this one building. When I concentrate on a specific site or place for which I am going to design a building, when I try to plumb its depths, its form, its history, and its sensuous qualities, images of other places start to invade this process of precise observation: images of places I know and that once impressed me, images of ordinary or special places places that I carry with me as inner visions of specific moods and qualities; images of architectural situations, which emanate from the world of art, or films, theater or literature.”