“Visitors,” said the architect in an interview given in Italy, “sense the meaning of the building, and experience and perceive many sensations, moving through spaces which enclose a design. The main element of the project - in which areas, floors and even some furniture is covered entirely in locally-sourced gneiss - is however the sensation that the water, stone and light (which enters mainly from above, through skylights which provide an almost scenographic feeling) provoke in visitors. The same result was obtained in Vals, an intricate labyrinth of baths dug into the rock, which, in the monographic book he curated himself, Zumthor defined “a love story between stone and water” (1997). Made entirely out of wood, with an almost maniacal attention to detail (throughout the project he experimented with models which reached a scale of 1:1), the chapel is one of the first examples of those forms of architecture with an atmosphere which was mystical and monastic, yet also emotional, linked to the physical experimentation of the architecture which characterised its form. Of these last three works, the small religious building was to mark Zumthor’s international success, thanks to the balanced juxtaposition of archetypical elements from rural tradition – represented by the exterior of the chapel – and the extremely rigorous spatial solutions.
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