Learning from bathhouses

Sloterdijk’s view of the world as a “grand interior” responds to the progressive interiorization of the environment “where both culture, and even nature, have increasingly become indoor affairs.”1 A junior design studio offered at the University of Texas at Austin (Fall 2016 and 2017) sought to examine interior space as an autonomous microcosm, both in meteorological and atmospheric terms. Students were asked to design an interior space for collective bathing. The bathhouse, as a design exercise, responds to the increasingly autonomous nature of the interior at a material, climatic, cultural, and social level. Bathhouses can be understood as manufactured microcosms, in other words, man-made environments that establish an analogous and dialectic relationship between its internal microsphere and the external natural world. In the context of a design studio, students were encouraged to design how both tangible and intangible conditions concurrently contribute to the perception of space. Modulating meteorological variables, light, temperature, and humidity were key compositional tools within the studio. Material surface treatments and meteorological conditions were designed in conjunction to enrich one another in the production of an enhanced atmosphere. A multisensory design approach sought to expand the student’s understanding of the body’s physiological engagement with space. The most intimate contact between the body and architecture takes place at the bath space. The body, as generator of interior space, in its physiological and cultural complexity, was at the heart of this design exercise.