Bathhouse: Gathering Between Work and Leisure

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BATHHOUSE: Gathering between work and leisure

(Graduation Design at Royal College of Art)

My thesis project explores the blurring boundaries between work and leisure in the contemporary city, through the proposal of a communal bathhouse in Bethnal Green in London.

The design proposal focused on redefining the relationship between working and bathing in order to understand its potential in the contemporary condition. Albeit today we tend to consider bathing a private and intimate behaviour, this used to be a shared ritual, very firmly rooted in religion and civilisation for thousand years. Especially for Romans, bathing was a social event. The public bathhouse, like a social institution, provided citizens with a gathering place to share together, where to trade and exchange.

Working, instead, is a constantly evolving activity; London now became a centre for some of the world’s leading start-ups, where the demand for creative and modern office space has skyrocketed. Unlike the conventional way of working in a modular office, co-working spaces offer people a shared place where freelancers can work without boundaries. The dominant working mode is no longer the usual nine-to-six o’clock every day, thus, it gets hard to distinguish the edges between working and leisure time. Moreover, nowadays people who lived in cities tend to have their own bathrooms at home, removing the public bathhouse from its initial role as a social institution, which is reduced to a mere attraction for tourists.

The first illustration above demonstrate how people enjoyed the central bathing pool.

This project proposes a communal bathhouse with a vast outdoor bathing pool located in the centre of the site surrounded by other facilities such as an indoor pool, a spa, a sauna, a fitness studio, a learning centre and a theatre. The leisure elements are here limited within each architectural form, while the working area infiltrates in the voids between the objects. People who come to this bathhouse will experience the sense of a forced leisureliness as well as the pervasive presence of space for working. The side facing the Regent’s Canal remains open to the public opening the bath to the residents of the neighbourhood and to the intense flow of cyclist and pedestrian along the water. People can choose to showcase their work in the theatre, organise meetings and events or attend conferences and lectures in the communal facilities, which are intended as an extension of the leisure and the workspace. Education, event and self-learning facilities play a prominent role in offering to the producers a place to share their knowledge and information about their work. The project does not simply provide the neighbourhood with a communal bath to clean our bodies, but also with a multi-functional social hub for citizens to work and enjoy their productive soul.

This illustration showed the self-learning centre on the upper floor. People have their choice to share information and exchange knowledges in here.

Void space between two solid objects are exactly the working area. Tables are everywhere that people can grab a coffee and join the discussion with others. or, working alone. The working mode is free & flexible.