A Bathhouse Habitat

What is beautiful about the way a sheet sits, crumpled on a surface, is that there are absolutely no hard edges, only variations of soft. It is an interesting form to investigate when thinking about masculinity and femininity, Many assumptions can be made about what constitutes a gender related form and often this is reduced to un-thoughtful polarities like hard=man and soft=woman. So what could we do to have the form address the politics of this type of thinking...? Perhaps it’s finding a hybrid of hard geometry and the types of soft depicted in the drape of a sheet.

Mythic experience is often lost in contemporary architecture and I want to imbue the new site with that kind of feeling, while also acknowledging and creating connections to past configurations of Portland’s history.

The Bathhouse is specifically designed for anyone that identifies as a woman and children. It adapts the rules of entry from a sister bathhouse in Coogee NSW, McIver’s Baths, which has been a women’s bathhouse since 1876. This type of facility is an endangered typology that I would like to reengage for future histories.