Therme Vals, the spa complex built in the Swiss Alps by celebrated architect Peter Zumthor, became an icon of contemporary architecture soon after its opening in 1996. Inspired by the spa's majestic surroundings, Zumthor built the structure on the sharp grade of an Alpine mountain slope with grass-topped roofs to mimic Swiss meadows, captured here in a series of sumptuous images. This is the only book-length study of this singular building. It features the architects own original sketches and plans for its design as well as striking photographs of the structure. Architectural scholar Sigrid Hauser contributes an essay drawing out the connections between the elemental nature of the spa and mythology, bathing, and purity. Annotations by Peter Zumthor on his design concept and the building process elucidate the structure's symbiotic relationship to its natural surroundings, revealing, for example, why he insisted on using locally quarried stone.

A thrilling graphic novel about a young man who is drawn to the thermal springs found in the Swiss Alps that hold many mysteries. Pierre is a young man at a crossroads. He drops out of architecture school and decides to travel to Vals in the Swiss Alps, home to a thermal springs complex located deep inside a mountain. The complex, designed by architect Paul Zumthor, had been the subject of Pierre’s thesis. The mountain holds many mysteries; it was said to have a mouth that periodically swallowed people up. Pierre, sketchbook in hand, is drawn to the enigmatic powers of the mountain and its springs, and attempts to uncover the truth behind them in the secret rooms he discovers deep within the complex. But he finds his match in a man named Valeret who is similarly obsessed, and who’d like nothing more than to eliminate his competitor. Gorgeously illustrated, Swimming in Darkness is an intriguing, noirish graphic novel about uncovering the powerful secrets of the natural world.

A celebration of communal bathing—swimming pools, saunas, beaches, ritual baths, sweat lodges, and more—viewed through the lens of architecture and landscape. We enter the public pool, the sauna, or the beach with a heightened awareness of our bodies and the bodies of others. The phenomenology of bathing opens all of our senses toward the physical world entwined with the social, while the history of bathing is one of shared space, in both natural and built environments. In The Architecture of Bathing, Christie Pearson offers a unique examination of communal bathing and its history from the perspective of architecture and landscape. Engagingly written and richly illustrated, with more than 260 illustrations, many in color, The Architecture of Bathing offers a celebration of spaces in which public and private, sacred and profane, ritual and habitual, pure and impure, nature and culture commingle. Pearson takes a wide-ranging view of her subject, drawing on architecture, art, and literary works. Each chapter is structured around an architectural typology and explores an accompanying theme—for example, tub, sensuality; river, flow; waterfall, rejuvenation; and banya, immersion. Offering examples, introducing relevant theory, and recounting personal experiences, Pearson effortlessly combines a practitioner's zest with astonishing erudition. As she examines these forms, we see that they are inextricable from landscapes, bodily practices, and cultural production. Looking more closely, we experience architecture itself as an immersive material and social space, embedded inthe interdependent environmental and cultural fabric of our world.

Peter Zumthor was selected to construct the Swiss Pavilion at the EXPO2000 in Hanover, and to this end, he created an unusual wood structure, the "Soundbodies" of Switzerland. Swiss architecture, music, the written word, fashion design and gastronomy are all drawn together to create a place to discover, to enjoy and to relax in.

Peter Zumthor is possibly the most innovative European architect working today. His projects inspire enthusiasm with their exactitude, their poetry, and their radically independent aesthetics and vocabulary of form.

While he was working to complete the Allmannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum in southern Norway in 2016, Swiss architect Peter Zumthor asked Norwegian architectural historian Mari Lending to engage in a dialogue about the project. In meandering, impressionistic style, and drawing on their favorite writers, such as Johann Peter Hebel, Stendhal, Nabokov, and T. S. Eliot, their exchanges explore how history, time, and temporalities reverberate across Zumthor's oeuvre. Looking back, Zumthor ponders on how a feeling of history has informed his attempts at emotional reconstruction by means of building, from architectural interventions in dramatic landscapes to his design for the redevelopment of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which conceived the building on a suitably grand urban scale. This small, beautifully designed book records the conversation between Zumthor and Lending, accompanied by photographs taken by the renowned Swiss architectural photographer H l ne Binet. The resulting book is a surprisingly revelatory view of one of the most interesting and restlessly creative architects of our era.