The Architecture of Bathing

Body, Landscape, Art

“A celebration of communal bathing—swimming pools, saunas, beaches, ritual baths, sweat lodges, and more—viewed through the lens of architecture and landscape.”

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MIT press

“This engaging volume has no peer. I know of no other work of its scope or mission. If your architectural interest is communal bathing, this is your book.”

Leonard Koren
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Author of Making WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing and Undesigning the Bath

Summary

This is the first book to examine traditional and contemporary communal bathing cultures globally from the perspective of art, architecture and landscape. It is the culmination of years of studying, traveling, sketching, photographing, listening and sweating in hundreds of public bathing places around the world. Fifteen formal typologies pair with ways of experiencing architecture to frame bathing’s spatial experiences, social relationships, and cultural mythologies. Images articulate relationships that baths can support, embed architecture into relational and material networks, and highlight how we meet the world both literally and symbolically. Bathing practices articulate social attitudes towards race, class, gender, and sexuality, at times amplifying tensions between public and private, sacred and profane, ritual and habitual, nature and culture. Architectures of public bathing emerge as dynamic civic spaces, where outdated collective agreements fade and new ideas of being together are continually being tested.

Press

“Practically everywhere that bodies of water are accessible for public soaking, the architect and writer Christie Pearson has tried them out while taking glorious notes. Her book … careens around in time and place and ponders ‘the bath’s utopian and dystopian aspects.’ ”

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Eve M. Kahn, from the New York Times

“Christie Pearson’s The Architecture of Bathing is an enthusiastic, engaged, and adventurous journey through the hydraulic world. With gusto and refined physical knowledge she guides the reader through the architecture of the senses, a field neglected for ages and badly needed today.”

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Thomas A. P. Van Leeuwen, author of The Springboard in the Pond

“This unique and impressive publication explores a dizzying array of bathing architectures, traversing buildings, landscapes, people, practices, theories and art. At once detailed, beguiling and thought-provoking, Pearson’s polyamorous engagement with bathing lets the reader both learn and take delight.”

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Iain Borden, Vice-Dean Education and Professor of Architecture & Urban Culture, The Bartlett, University College London

“Why does it seem strange to consider bathing architecturally? Pearson argues this is because the structures supporting bodily maintenance have been privatized and hidden away, thus circumscribing what we imagine a bathing space to be. I was misguided to think that bathing was simply cleaning oneself in a tub.”

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Nolan Boomer, Pin-Up Magazine Book Club Review

SELECTED RECORDINGS

Het Nieuwe Instituut The Architecture of the Mineral Spa

ABC National Radio Blueprint for Living

Book Launch

Bathing Place as Public Space Roundtable

with Mikkel Aaland, Katie Bracher, Pia Lindman, Aziza Chaouni, Yuma Shinohara, Marcos Zotes

Bathing Place as Public Space Roundtable with Astrida Neimanis, Ekin Bacioglu, Josee-Ann Cloutier, Stephanie Crohin-Kishigami, Isabel Toland

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Publications