What do you think?
Rate this book
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.We enter the public pool, the sauna, or the beach with a heightened awareness of our bodies and the bodies of others. The phenomenology of bathing opens all of our senses toward the physical world entwined with the social, while the history of bathing is one of shared space, in both natural and built environments. In The Architecture of Bathing, Christie Pearson offers a unique examination of communal bathing and its history from the perspective of architecture and landscape. Engagingly written and richly illustrated, with more than 260 illustrations, many in color, The Architecture of Bathing offers a celebration of spaces in which public and private, sacred and profane, ritual and habitual, pure and impure, nature and culture commingle.
Pearson takes a wide-ranging view of her subject, drawing on architecture, art, and literary works. Each chapter is structured around an architectural typology and explores an accompanying theme--for example, tub, sensuality; river, flow; waterfall, rejuvenation; and banya, immersion. Offering examples, introducing relevant theory, and recounting personal experiences, Pearson effortlessly combines a practitioner's zest with astonishing erudition. As she examines these forms, we see that they are inextricable from landscapes, bodily practices, and cultural production. Looking more closely, we experience architecture itself as an immersive material and social space, embedded inthe interdependent environmental and cultural fabric of our world.
Pearson takes a wide-ranging view of her subject, drawing on architecture, art, and literary works. Each chapter is structured around an architectural typology and explores an accompanying theme--for example, tub, sensuality; river, flow; waterfall, rejuvenation; and banya, immersion. Offering examples, introducing relevant theory, and recounting personal experiences, Pearson effortlessly combines a practitioner's zest with astonishing erudition. As she examines these forms, we see that they are inextricable from landscapes, bodily practices, and cultural production. Looking more closely, we experience architecture itself as an immersive material and social space, embedded inthe interdependent environmental and cultural fabric of our world.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published October 6, 2020
3 people are currently reading
88 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 27, 2024
Notes-
Intro:
Architectures relevance falls into question when it ignores the care of life at the most basic levels
Cultural rituals of bathing stem from ancestory of living with rivers, pools, waterfalls, springs & the sea
The baths we make are our creation, dreams of life we could live
The reverie we slip into when warmth & water seep into us is no slumber, but waking to our independance.
The goal of secular or sacred bathing environments around the world is regeneration in community.
History of bathing offers reflection on who we are and who we would like to be.
Simple bathing can be sensual and socially rich but can turn silent & cold.
Cultivating sensual space comes from valuing the material world, in sickness & health, in growth & in age.
The role that bathing plays within a culture reveals the cultures attitude toward human relaxation - how far individual wellbeing is regarded as an indispensable part of community life
Previous eras acknowledged the whole person: imagination, intellect, sensuality, feelings, relationship & connection to rythyms of life on a communal scale.
2. As more people work more hours, the promise of a future society built upon freedom & pleasure seems to recede. Architecture of pleasure that seizes us and then permits us to seize life.
Bathing must cultivate a respect and affection to both utilitarian & pleasurable aims.
While we are exposed to plenty of imagery involving sexuality in the public, there appears to be little interest in cultivating spaces of public sensuality like baths.
Each form of inclusion generates other exclusions.
Dave Buckley- Saturday night at the baths
When functioning on the edges or outside of dominant modes of communal bathing, queer space can be countercultural, nonconforming and refuse easy definitions
Queer space is subject to ongoing revision with a deep and critical understanding of our histories, contexts and practises.
Life is something to enjoy, the focus is not on how to win, but how to flourish.
One of the risks of the pursuit of pleasure is felt to be a turning away from life.
3.
Community is a quality of relations, a principle of cooperation and of responsibility to each other and to the earth, forests, seas and animals.
A democratic public bath would be a space of conflict and disagreement, a lively space of challenge through difference of opinion.
Creates a sense of community and social interaction for all
The communal bath integrates the neighbourhood spirit, mind & body.
Public baths can offer physical hygiene, spiritual cleansing, relaxation, socialising, sensual pleasure, ritual, connection to nature & group belonging
Baths usually have a stated interest for charity, in the wellbeing of the public
Communal bath has one foot in ritual & another in theatre.
4: moving water is alive, and we can bring life back to water when we get it in motion
An entire field of bathing inquiry exists around the chemical composition of water
Different kinds of transformation happens in public bathing spaces, where the scale and intensity of experience can reach beyond that of bathrooms ; space, volume of water, intensity of heat & cold, generosity. The feeling of plentitude is powerful.
Bathing is coming home, to a place of acceptance, at ease, relaxed, be yourself.
5.
Chlorine is considered an impurity whilst the most wretched smelling sulfurous baths attacts people with a symbolic and scientific benefit.
Bathing benefits from learning the science of water in order to make delightful and delicious water, sparkling or mysterious water, a whole sensory universe opens, connecting geology & chemistry.
Its as if the bath itself is the foundation ritual and the complexities of religion evolve around it.
A much more expansive understanding of the body is embraced in the sauna than in a typical church
6. The secual symbolism in sea bathing is an eroticism of dissolving fusion.
9: the communal bath is a site that can at times simplify the complexity of how we might live intimately in our bodies, communities and relationships
By dissolving boundaries through immersion, water can allow us to occupy the fullness of space more tangibly than air
10: bathing needs to be recognised as an immersive collective ritual set into an ever changing cultural context which is open ended and whose meaniny is created within a network of relations and conversations in which it is embedded.
11 : bathing traditions allow people to take a cultural time out and reconfigure the possible
The west needs a reclamation of institutions by the people, tranforming them back to sites of learning, sharing & being together.
Communal baths are non productive spaces that support collective forms of caring
We may seek from the bath house a reinchantment of our cultures constructs around the body, physically being with others, water in its symbolic aspects, cleanliness & dirt, purity & impurity.
12 : whole categories of bathing environments could be established in accordance with type of water.
The ideal water for drinking and ideal water for bathing seem to be different. Bathing water symbolises inpurity which appears to be regenerative.
Bringing together bathing and fermenting, we enter into the term culture more deeply
13: intensity at the very extremes of the tolerable are the pleasure of the place.
A sauna is a poor mans pharmacy
River rocks
14: bathing environments contain formal, cultural & ecological aspects working independently.
Landscape & social interaction work together to create public bathing architecture
To be accepted in the communal baths, we musy be born or become insiders, bathing with, as opposed to looking in from the outside.
15.
Many global bathing cultures intend to inducy trance and extrasensory experiences within a spacial & ritual framework, allowing a journey to ve reabsorbed into the culture, facilitating healing & growth.
The public baths social function is dynamic, facilitating collective transformation and rejuvination as we continue to reimagine what we want to be and do, what kind of society is present.
What kind of public space do we really want.
One is to proudly set aside marks of status in favour of collectivity.
Intro:
Architectures relevance falls into question when it ignores the care of life at the most basic levels
Cultural rituals of bathing stem from ancestory of living with rivers, pools, waterfalls, springs & the sea
The baths we make are our creation, dreams of life we could live
The reverie we slip into when warmth & water seep into us is no slumber, but waking to our independance.
The goal of secular or sacred bathing environments around the world is regeneration in community.
History of bathing offers reflection on who we are and who we would like to be.
Simple bathing can be sensual and socially rich but can turn silent & cold.
Cultivating sensual space comes from valuing the material world, in sickness & health, in growth & in age.
The role that bathing plays within a culture reveals the cultures attitude toward human relaxation - how far individual wellbeing is regarded as an indispensable part of community life
Previous eras acknowledged the whole person: imagination, intellect, sensuality, feelings, relationship & connection to rythyms of life on a communal scale.
2. As more people work more hours, the promise of a future society built upon freedom & pleasure seems to recede. Architecture of pleasure that seizes us and then permits us to seize life.
Bathing must cultivate a respect and affection to both utilitarian & pleasurable aims.
While we are exposed to plenty of imagery involving sexuality in the public, there appears to be little interest in cultivating spaces of public sensuality like baths.
Each form of inclusion generates other exclusions.
Dave Buckley- Saturday night at the baths
When functioning on the edges or outside of dominant modes of communal bathing, queer space can be countercultural, nonconforming and refuse easy definitions
Queer space is subject to ongoing revision with a deep and critical understanding of our histories, contexts and practises.
Life is something to enjoy, the focus is not on how to win, but how to flourish.
One of the risks of the pursuit of pleasure is felt to be a turning away from life.
3.
Community is a quality of relations, a principle of cooperation and of responsibility to each other and to the earth, forests, seas and animals.
A democratic public bath would be a space of conflict and disagreement, a lively space of challenge through difference of opinion.
Creates a sense of community and social interaction for all
The communal bath integrates the neighbourhood spirit, mind & body.
Public baths can offer physical hygiene, spiritual cleansing, relaxation, socialising, sensual pleasure, ritual, connection to nature & group belonging
Baths usually have a stated interest for charity, in the wellbeing of the public
Communal bath has one foot in ritual & another in theatre.
4: moving water is alive, and we can bring life back to water when we get it in motion
An entire field of bathing inquiry exists around the chemical composition of water
Different kinds of transformation happens in public bathing spaces, where the scale and intensity of experience can reach beyond that of bathrooms ; space, volume of water, intensity of heat & cold, generosity. The feeling of plentitude is powerful.
Bathing is coming home, to a place of acceptance, at ease, relaxed, be yourself.
5.
Chlorine is considered an impurity whilst the most wretched smelling sulfurous baths attacts people with a symbolic and scientific benefit.
Bathing benefits from learning the science of water in order to make delightful and delicious water, sparkling or mysterious water, a whole sensory universe opens, connecting geology & chemistry.
Its as if the bath itself is the foundation ritual and the complexities of religion evolve around it.
A much more expansive understanding of the body is embraced in the sauna than in a typical church
6. The secual symbolism in sea bathing is an eroticism of dissolving fusion.
9: the communal bath is a site that can at times simplify the complexity of how we might live intimately in our bodies, communities and relationships
By dissolving boundaries through immersion, water can allow us to occupy the fullness of space more tangibly than air
10: bathing needs to be recognised as an immersive collective ritual set into an ever changing cultural context which is open ended and whose meaniny is created within a network of relations and conversations in which it is embedded.
11 : bathing traditions allow people to take a cultural time out and reconfigure the possible
The west needs a reclamation of institutions by the people, tranforming them back to sites of learning, sharing & being together.
Communal baths are non productive spaces that support collective forms of caring
We may seek from the bath house a reinchantment of our cultures constructs around the body, physically being with others, water in its symbolic aspects, cleanliness & dirt, purity & impurity.
12 : whole categories of bathing environments could be established in accordance with type of water.
The ideal water for drinking and ideal water for bathing seem to be different. Bathing water symbolises inpurity which appears to be regenerative.
Bringing together bathing and fermenting, we enter into the term culture more deeply
13: intensity at the very extremes of the tolerable are the pleasure of the place.
A sauna is a poor mans pharmacy
River rocks
14: bathing environments contain formal, cultural & ecological aspects working independently.
Landscape & social interaction work together to create public bathing architecture
To be accepted in the communal baths, we musy be born or become insiders, bathing with, as opposed to looking in from the outside.
15.
Many global bathing cultures intend to inducy trance and extrasensory experiences within a spacial & ritual framework, allowing a journey to ve reabsorbed into the culture, facilitating healing & growth.
The public baths social function is dynamic, facilitating collective transformation and rejuvination as we continue to reimagine what we want to be and do, what kind of society is present.
What kind of public space do we really want.
One is to proudly set aside marks of status in favour of collectivity.
Displaying 1 of 1 review