Bathhouse in Munich

Our Bathhouse expresses the celebration of bathing - it creates areas that allow and stimulate public interaction as well as private places of retreat to relax in a graceful vault. We create an innovative form of bathing in the garage court of a classic Munich post-war building by using a quotation of the munich residence antiquarium.

Our first step in creating a proposal was to analyze the given site. The existing building can be characterized as classic munich post-war architecture. Because the substance of the garages court beyond the residential building was run-down, we decided to pull them down in order to gain space for a new building.\nInspired by an analysis of historic and modern bath typology we have centered our architectural design approach around the celebration of bathing.\nIn search for an architectural language we discovered the richly decorated vault of the bavarian antiquarium. Using this light-flooded renaissance architecture as a reference for developing our own design we came up with a vault that creates a heaven and houses a thermal pool. The deep and dark pool ist designed in a semicircle as antagonist to the vault. The existing building contains an entreé that allows to rest and shelters the ticket sales desk as well as function rooms such as shower, toilet and locker room. A threshold increases the awareness to leave everyday live behind. With the step out of the changing room all the beauty of the bath vault reveals itself as the guest enters the space from above. To increase every personals desire of rest and retreat from stress, every guest or group of guests gets allotted to his or their very own rest-vault. Those relaxation rooms are attached orthogonally to the central vault. Also every individual relaxation room is attached to a central pool by bays, that invite to sit down in the warm water or enter the main pool for a little swim. Considering the architectural language, we have abstracted the Antiquarium. We used all the small platforms, that were meant to exhibit antiques, cleaned them and refilled them with a new purpose. Providing the fundamental objects of bathing.\nDoing so allowed us to design a new modern typology of bathing and regeneration. Our bathhouse serves the purpose of a descreet celebration of bathing architecture as well as providing a private place of retreat and space for public interaction while regenerating body and soul in the water.