Yuting Wu

Intro Text Of The Bathhouse From The Urban Building Project

In many countries or civilizations in this world, public baths were once essential social places, such as Rome, Turkey, and Japan. However, as society and technology have evolved, the public baths that once played such an essential role in the lives of citizens have faded away, with citizens preferring to cleanse themselves in their own homes. As a result of my research, I have found that there are now two types of public bathhouses available to the public: small sauna-based bathhouses and healing centers with pools for the middle and upper classes.

In the project URBAN BUILDING, I have designed a public bathhouse with multiple programs. The bath can be described as a hybrid building to make the public aware and enjoy a healthy life. In addition to the pools and sauna, the public bathroom has massage rooms, communal lounges of different sizes, a teaching room (for teaching healthy lifestyles and physical and mental health), consultation rooms (for consulting on mental and physical health issues), a special canteen for healthy organic food, a teaching kitchen (for teaching how to cook healthy dishes for the family), an organic food supermarket, an atrium garden, and a garden. In addition to the two internal gardens, the public bathroom has a park outside the bathhouse that the public can use without entering the bathroom.

I designed a public bathroom in Barras for two main reasons. Firstly, I wanted to revitalize the Barras with a public bathhouse with a mixed function that would appeal to a different age group of people, targeting families. When I visited the site, I found that most people in Barras were older people and that young people were rarely seen. In this bathroom, the interaction of the people does take place not only indoors but also outside in the public garden, even if they do not enter the bathroom to consume. Secondly, the area where Barras is located, Glasgow in Scotland, has long winters with low temperatures, high winds, and short periods of sunshine; the warm summer climate only exists from late June to late August. A warm pool space that can accommodate at least 250 people would be an excellent place for the public to socialize. My site visit in October last year made me realize that the Barras needs a warm space to relax in addition to the café.

I hope that this mixed-use public bathroom will bring a new way of life to the public. It will be a significant cultural and leisure institution in its own right, but it will also reach out to the neighborhood and even lead to commercial development. For example, if business people find the success of the public baths in the Barras, they may invest in healthy lifestyle-related industries in the neighborhood, such as organic crop farms. At the same time, the boom in new businesses would undoubtedly provide more jobs, and the Calton district where Barras is located could be a chance to return to its former glory.