The early days of this research studio challenged students to critique the scheme and program of a luxury hotel proposal in the small Swiss town of Vals. Though originally framed as a studio investigating more scale-appropriate hotel proposals to contrast the disproportionate monolith devised by Morphosis in 2016, many students found that any additional amount of hotel programming in the village was unnecessary.
The studio then pivoted to a more open-ended opportunity - a "micro-thesis," as Professor Wendy Redfield dubbed it - for students to investigate the need for other program within Vals. This proposal for a community health center capitalizes on a tangential relationship between the town's existing need for accessible medical care and its existing hub of social and physical healing, Peter Zumthor's Therme Vals.
Though opening in the 90s as a free, public destination, the famed thermal baths complex has since been consumed by the surrounding hotel campus, depriving it of its original intent. The proposed community health center boldly reverses this narrative by carving an uninterrupted public void between the Postrasse (Vals' "Main Street") and the Therme Vals. It aims to breach the hotel complex's "barrier of privatization" by bridging over one of its existing buildings and slotting into an existing void along the Therme's primary façade.
The project is derived from six site-driven moves that inform the massing. It first sits along the south side of the Postrasse, addressing local and visiting traffic as it enters or leaves the town. The compact footprint is extruded vertically, and then punctured roughly halfway up by a bridge that connects it to the baths. The faces of the volume are scalloped for lighting and views, and the ground level recesses on all sides to invite the public. The volume is then cloaked in a screen that texturally beckons back to the baths themselves.
