B19_#178 // Wet Rooms // Marco Catena
Lavatoi Pubblici (or Public Wash-Houses) across Italy are usually located in communal settings, in small piazzas or cul-de-sacs of most towns and cities. Architecturally simple, with just a shelter above a large basin filled with running water, lavatoihave always been considered the epicentre of community life.
…. Continued Text in Lavatoio Metropolitano 3
Marco Catena is a Part II Architectural Assistant who graduated from University of Westminster
B19_#178 // Wet Rooms // Marco Catena
Lavatoi Pubblici (or Public Wash-Houses) across Italy are usually located in communal settings, in small piazzas or cul-de-sacs of most towns and cities. Architecturally simple, with just a shelter above a large basin filled with running water, lavatoihave always been considered the epicentre of community life.
…. Continued Text in Lavatoio Metropolitano 3
Marco Catena is a Part II Architectural Assistant who graduated from University of Westminster
B19_#177 // Wet Rooms // Sabrina Syed
The 4x4x4 is designed to be the most humid room in the dwelling. Through its humidification it breathes, seeps, precipitates and holds wetness. Adapted from a habit the author found in many bathrooms – of placing wrinkled clothes near the shower to steam them – the space holds on to humidity rather than dissipates it. Here, a moat drains the timber tub of its hot water, which is cooled, filtered and used to water the tropical vegetation that sprouts a level below. A clothes rack is suspended to allow clothing to gently de-crease in the clouds of humid air, created by the constant state of saturated wetness.
Sabrina Syed is an M.Arch Graduate from Edinburgh University (ESALA)
B19_#176 // Wet Rooms // Luke Reveley
‘wet room’ responds to the inclusion of a laundry room within community-led housing schemes while acknowledging the absence of water within this space, in contrast to the traditional Indian “water room” where water is celebrated.
The community share the flow of water which occurs twice a day, creating a washing ritual where residents in London must come together and share space and water.
Luke Reveley is a Part II Graduate from the RCA
B19_#175 // Wet Rooms // Samuel Jaccard and Kimberley Berney
All my senses are engaged as I wander about this curious museum. There’s still an apparent lavender scent clinging to the eroded walls. The sun glistens in the water below. Perfectly still. Amidst the blue and gold, dashes of the brightest orange. Such a sight might only be replicable by squinting at a Monet painting. Koi fish lazily swim around the shallow pool. I take a first cautious step into the water, not wanting to disrupt the beauty taking place. The water is pleasantly warm, and I find myself taking another step, less careful than the first. The splash echoes through the walls that surround me and disrupt the koi’s peaceful routine. They scurry away, causing the water to undulate here and there. As I move around the corner, I discover a still-life hanging effortlessly on the wall in front of me. The play of light emitting from the ripples below make the brush strokes come to life, sprinkling the painting with golden freckles. With every step, the room gets filled with more splashing of light and sound. The painting vibrates to my every move. And as I step out of the water at last, my mind peacefully floats away.
Samuel Jaccard and Kimberley Berney are architecture graduates of EPFL
The Wet room
“Wet Rooms” exist as vernacular spaces in Indian homes found in both communal and family dwellings. Tucked away near the entrances, these semi-private, semi-outdoor spaces have a small but critical task: they allow water to enter and leave the house without eroding it. They achieve this through their architecture – that of moat, drain and enclosure, of polished surfaces and open roofs. Here, washing, drying and cooking form the program of this micro-typology. The tasks done here are perhaps considered menial – boring even – yet essential to the movements of a home. Without any ceremony, they quietly make up the fabric of daily life.
Do these spaces exist in cities? The laundry room, buanderie or utility room contains a bevvy of appliances scattered around the home; a washing machine tucked under a kitchen counter, a dryer shoved in an arbitrary nook. With them, a property is seen as accommodating, “contains white goods” yet without them the inhabitant is forced to seek outside facilities, fundamentally changing their everyday. However, the architectural spaces around them are inert. Water passes and leaves, reduced to a background noise.
Comparing the wet rooms with our modern-day laundry spaces we notice an architectural shift. The wet rooms do what their westernized counterparts do not: they embrace wetness rather than operate in ignorance of it. Through their architecture they foster an intimate engagement with landscape.
Can we re-engage with these spaces again? Spaces that drip, flood, evaporate, osmote, perspire – places caught in constant wetness? The land-water binary is a man-made one, often ignored in the western architectures of everyday. As a result, we often look at spaces in a house as “wet” or “dry” rather than through a gradient of wetness, which exists everywhere. The brief questions whether the wet room can re-engage with the architecture of contemporaneity again. You may argue in your entry that perhaps the wet room is a typology that is defunct, made redundant through appliances of modernity. Yet perhaps this is a question of east-west perspective and privilege rather than past vs. present. The 4x4x4 can challenge the notion of such a space, re-engage with it or discuss it through is architectural and tectonic qualities.
Brief Written by Sabrina Syed
B18_#174 // The Salon // Lloyd Lee
There had been a salon, once heavily used by intellectuals and the ‘right’ people who frequently discussed essential ideas and thinkings of the modern world. Present day, internet ‘forums’ have replaced the salon. The Salon was forgotten…
Less befitting to the purpose of noble ideas, internet forums had to be replaced by physical salons. Hence the new Conversation Room had to be born. The beginning of it was rather banal. A group of intellectuals in Paris, most of them students, took over a living room. The living room could have been a salon in the good old days. A beautiful moulding with chequered floor, the room seemed to advocate for some kind of formal grandeur. When it is hard to trace back the idea of a micro-typology, one must presume.
The room was soon filled with two facing sofas. A TV was installed into one of the walls that flashes a different news channel every 5 minutes. Coffee tables had turned into drawers filled with different magazines and newspapers. Was this space good enough to hold decent conversations? Initially not, the room was on booking basis. People were much inclined to book a conference room to exchange ideas, right up until a radical change happened. The room was enclosed with EMI shielding bronze panels. People could not use their phones in the room anymore. More and more flocked into the room to experience a place where media prevailed, but nothing could be verified.
A new salon was born.
Can the Neo-salon win a fight against internet forums?
Lloyd Lee is a part II architectural assistant who graduated the Architectural Association School of Architecture
B18_#173 // The Salon // Oscar Maguire
In the salons of old, people would converse using only the knowledge of the world outside that they had brought into room with them at that time. Today almost all discussion or debate in any room can be performed with knowledge of the world ‘outside’ made accessible via the internet.
If somebody were to make a bold claim on some topic in the salon of old, everyone present would have to wait for the next session to confirm or refute the claim. Today we can check someone’s claim or settle a matter of collective ignorance instantly.
But perhaps in a time where any claim can be confirmed or denied via the internet (depending on where you look), the salon’s walls must soak up these claims and allow them to be tested in public at the slower rate of the salons of old. In writing facts and claims on the wall and sanding back them back if they are refuted, a map of contentious (and non contentious) topics will merge slowly over time. Charting the topography of the salon a room for debate.
Oscar is a part I architectural assistant who finished his undergraduate studies at the Bartlett School of Architecture.
