Learning from bathhouses

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Interiors
• architecture
• bathhouse
• pedagogy
• design studio

Notes

1 Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2013), 170.

2 Mark Pimlott, The Public Interior as Idea and Project (Netherlands: Jap Sam Books, 2016), 17–8.

3 Michael Foucault, “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias,” in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984): 46–9. Original publication: Conférence au Cercle d'études architecturales, March 14th, 1967. https://foucault.info/doc/documents/heterotopia/foucault-heterotopia-en-html

4 Ibid.

5 Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 628.

6 Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change your Life, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014).

7 Mark Pimlott, The Public Interior as Idea and Project (Netherlands: Jap Sam Books, 2016), 190–1.

8 Grosz, Elizabeth “Bodies-Cities” in “Sexuality and Space.” Ed Beatriz Colomina. Princeton Architectural Press. New York, 1992. P.241–2. This last sentence references the notions of reciprocity between built environment and body image expressed by Elizabeth Grosz in Bodies-Cities.

9 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Vol. Book VII, (New York: Norton & Company, 1997)

10 Rem Koolhaas, Madelon Vriesendorp, Elia Zenghelis, & Zoe Zenghelis, “Exodus, or the voluntary prisoners of architecture” (1972).

11 Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 628.

12 Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 170.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nerea Feliz

Nerea Feliz is an Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin where she teaches both in the architecture and the interior design programs. Nerea Feliz holds a Masters and Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the Politecnica University of Madrid, Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura (ETSAM). Before joining UT, she taught at the University at Buffalo’s School of Architecture and Planning. As a licensed architect in Spain and the UK, Nerea worked for Foster and Partners and Zaha Hadid Architects, among others. She developed projects in a number of ranging scales and programs: from mixed-use office buildings to a new terminal in Heathrow Airport.

In 2010, she founded Nerea Feliz Studio, an office of design practice and research that centers on the potential for an expanded role of interior elements and environments. Her scholarship of creative practice ranges in scale and medium, from unbuilt design competition entries to full-scale prototypes and mock-ups. Her work has been published and exhibited nationally and internationally. Email: [email protected]