The movie I am working with is SPIRIT AWAY (Hayao Miyazaki 2001). It is about a family that got lost in an “enchanted” place where is located a HOTEL which main guests are Gods that travel there in order to relax and take herbal and aromatic baths. So, while the human lose materiality, gods win it while they get closer to this world, having and individual meaning of renewing yourself. The luxury aspect in this hotel for Gods overturned toward the idea of bathing where the spaces more than static spaces are processes, to convert this in a real bath you need the playfulness, the inventiveness, the intuition, the logic, the strategy; it is a fantasy system.
So, focus in the world of bathing I went back in time to review the bath, the bathroom and the bareness.
Along the history, the ritual of the bath meant much more than few minutes dedicated to the personal care. Among Indies and Muslims there is the Sacred bath where people gather before death (the most important event in life); for Greece the bath had prestigious connotations and used to be a place where men gather and chat; Romans used impressive public baths, as real palaces where could bath up to 2.500 persons, having a luxury and social connotations; then Japanese culture (which Miyazaki was inspired) has the Sentos where they believe that without the “skinship” of mutual nakedness is used as a way of brake any taboo among the society; Turkish where the baths are places of social meeting, where vanishes any inequality of social nature. After a forbidden period of this topic in the obscurantism the bathroom was not incorporated to the architecture plan until lately XIX Century, until nowadays where the bath is a crucial space BUT STILL standard, fixed to the ground, isolated, private and sometimes understood as an object more than a space.
For this reason, I propose the “unfolding time” of the box, to break the boundaries of this secluded space using the NUDITY in the architecture. The idea is not to generate a nudist hotel, is to make the architecture to become nude; it is about openings, not transparencies; about sensations, not images; it is a sequence of feelings and happenings. Baths that dialog with the users and the city, baths that raise from the ground but gradually abandon it while undressing.
How do I do it? The main idea is the deformation of the surfaces in order to generate, contain, and stretch spaces (which is understood as the tectonics of the water) is directly linked with the setting of the program in the building.
In order to approach this narrative two main components are proposed:
Stream net. As a surface, a collector, which deforms in order to contain spaces and also has the quality of hold this DROPS, which are the capsules. Is the public space, the STRUCTURE and also the “aisle”, the main nudity in the proposal, is where the bath takes place.
Capsules. Those random drops that are being hold in the mesh and transform the topography of it. Is the room, the “inner”.
The floor plan shows how the main program is developed as a unique space with no walls, no limits, so the narrative of the surface is constantly related with the interior- exterior and vice versa. In this way, this OPEN PLAN become a general bath (social areas) where the rooms get dissolved.
The experience of the bathROOMS. As unique spaces, and object “enveloped” with no boundaries, make –nude- the privacy, with no attachments. This spaces have the DECK that connect the interior of the building with the exterior. The space deforms to generate the bathtub, etc, where the bed is floating as the interior flows.
In this view we can appreciate how this drops change the lecture of the building at night, while during the day its appearance is blurry at night shows the happenings and experiences.
