World Building of the Week
Round About Baths
In late June, the Concéntrico festival took place in Logroño, Spain, featuring a number of temporary pavilions and events structured around four curatorial themes. One pavilion addressing the theme of water is the Round About Baths, designed by Leopold Banchini Architects. The Geneva-based studio sent us some text and images on the project.
Cars dancing endlessly round and around, drawing inaccessible circular spaces punctuating our cities, looking for meaning.
What about roundabout what?
Round About Baths is a temporary public building transforming an impersonal and inaccessible fountain trapped at the center of relentless traffic into an intimate and communal experience where undressed bodies meet in water. Pride of 19th century’s social movements promoting public hygiene for the working class, urban public baths have slowly closed their doors to be unsurprisingly replaced by private and commercial “wellness centers,” mirrors of our times.
Combining changing rooms, steam rooms and cold-water fountain basins, Round About Baths offers privacy while occupying a central point in the city. Revealing hidden potentials in a car dominated urban environment, the temporary public program hacks the street equipment and transforms our perception of this forgotten space.
The high walls of the bathing facility are made of a regular timber structure clad with uncut wooden panels temporarily used for the installation. If the panels will find a second life after the festival, the fountain itself will go back to its uselessness, leaving behind only memories and new vision of what public space could be.
The heart of the restless circle of moBon, shaped by absence, will go back to oblivion.
