ABSTRACT
To conclude these essays on the environmental imagination in architecture I have chosen to examine Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vals. This building, completed in 1996, embraces all the elements of heat, light and sound in distributions and combinations that extend beyond most conventional circumstances. Above all, this is an environment of the senses. Unlike the conventions represented by Victor Olgyay’s besuited man, where contact with the environment is limited and decorous, at Vals we enter an altogether different and infinitely more sensuous condition.
