Bath

Stuttgart (2004), Rotterdam (2006), Germany

Photo © SMAQ

Photo © Wini Sulzbach

Photo © Björn Reismann

Architects: SMAQ

Location: Park Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart | Folly Dock, Rotterdam, Stuttgart (2004), Rotterdam (2006), Germany
Year: 2004

Bath is a temporary architecture situated in the Solitude palace gardens near Stuttgart. It is a public bath based on the everyday experience of water heating up in a garden hose, and uses 1,000 meters of hose to heat the water necessary to fill a tub.

The required hose length acts as the construction material for the installation and it is built up along a series of usages, from changing behind a screen to bathing. The water is supplied through the existing hidden water system, made visible in the infrastructure of the bath, and then released from the tub to irrigate the garden. Bath expands the principle of a flat-bed solar collector into a spatial structure to be used and explored. At the same time, it is an investigation into how infrastructure and processes usually thought of separately can be joined, spatialized, made public, and turned into something more than functional, in this case a folly in the park.

Design Team
Sabine Müller, Andreas Quednau

Aufbauteam
Ulrike Kube, Sarah Centgraf, Herman Fellinger, Dieter Müller, Katrin Henke

Statik
Florian Foerster, Steffen Stich

Unterstützt durch
Akademie Schloss Solitude and Architekturgalerie am Weissenhof

Auszeichnungen
Architectural Review Award for Emerging Architecture 2008 (commended)
Environmental Tectonics Competition, Architectural Association, London, 2. Preis