In the first episode of Architecture Series we discuss in depth the concept of the bottom-up and top-down design approaches in Architecture in relation to Peter Zumthor’s Therme in Vals.

Bottom-Up vs. Top-Down Design in Architecture

Bottom-up design in architecture begins with detailed elements — such as materials, site conditions, user needs, and construction techniques — and builds upward toward a coherent whole. It is an emergent process: ideas grow from concrete observations, experiments, and iterative refinement. Designers adapting to constraints or responding to context often embody this approach.

Top-down design, by contrast, starts with a preconceived overarching concept, which then drives all decisions about form, program, and details. The big idea guides everything down to materials and finishes. This approach is common when an architect begins with a strong vision or conceptual framework that is imposed on a site or program.

Both approaches sit on a spectrum — many real-world architectural processes blend them, cycling between detail and concept as design unfolds.

Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vals – Design Approach

Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vals in Switzerland (completed in 1996) is widely regarded as a masterpiece of materiality, atmosphere, and site-specific design. For this spa complex, Zumthor worked with locally quarried Valser Quartzite, embedding the buildings partially into the hillside so that they appear almost as if carved from the mountain itself. The project responds to the terrain, geology, light, and sensory experience of bathing rather than beginning with a purely abstract architectural gesture.

Rather than imposing a visible predefined form onto the site, Zumthor’s design emerges from intimate engagement with material, landscape, and multi-sensory experience. He configured a sequence of bathing spaces, light conditions, and tactile surfaces that unfold as one moves through the complex. This careful negotiation of place, environment, and human experience is a hallmark of his phenomenological approach to architecture.

Zumthor himself described his interest not in making forms, but in making spaces alive — spaces that engage senses and memory. This approach reflects a design process that balances emergent qualities (the feel of stone, the interplay of light and shadow, circulation rhythms) with an overall concept of architecture rooted in place and experience.

Zumthor’s design process for Therme Vals leans more toward a bottom-up and contextual approach — grounded in materiality, environment, and experience — rather than a purely top-down imposition of form. Although he worked with a conceptual leitmotif (stone/landscape), the design emerged from responding to the qualities of place and ritual, not from a predetermined formal scheme alone. However, looking at early stage models and sketches it seems that Zumthor had a very clear idea about the shape/form of the overall building and the construction method as the building is constructed in fully independent and free standing segments.

In practice, his process blends elements of both, but the bottom-up, phenomenological emphasis is dominant in this project.

Constantine Cosmas