Bathroom

“The Bathroom is a small room connected to a big system.” Bathroom, Barbara Penner, Reaktion Books, 2014. To research the bathroom is a journey through scales: from the territory to the body and through history: from its publicity to its privacity. The historical evolution of the bathroom is linked to shifting relationships among technology, culture, and class.

Once a public and social space, bathing began shifting towards privacy in the 18th century as plumbing, regularized fixtures, and new ideas about morality and privacy brought it into the home. The 20th century completed this shift: mass production enabled the rapid standardization of the bathroom, making it affordable but also excluding non-normative users. Traveling between scales and history allows the project to understand the system on which the bathroom depends.

Tracing the path of water is to shift from geography to policy, from home to body, from infrastructure to intimacy. By drawing and exploring the sites’ water system, it is understood how it is related to the territory and revealed the invisibilised infrastructure that allows the bathroom to be.

The bathroom is a threshold between private and public realms, an interface where personal rituals of hygiene are sustained by invisible networks. It is a room in which the private, public, urban and geographical systems connect. The project is about revealing water’s presence thus counteracting the system’s plumbed-in invisibility and its taken for grantedness.

It depends on rainwater to function which is collected and stored in the fourth floor of the building, turning it into a wet landscape. The bathing buildings are surrounded by the water they need to function. The project celebrates water and imagines a plumbing that not only serves but shapes the bathroom space. Inside and outside the building, the water pipes guide, heat, leak and clean the users and the space. Water is always visible.

Three filtering ponds filter the rain water by phytofiltration before it is pumped to water heaters, finishing its filtration. In this heating core starts the path of the warm pipes, which after running to the different bathing facilities end in four tanks, in which the cold water is stored for drinking and showering. They mark the entrance of each building, linking water flow and community.

The bathroom is a public infrastructure providing spaces to clean, enjoy and care in collectivity. The buildings allow bathing in the company of others, accommodating all users. The steam room, warm pool and outside pool are shared between bodies. In the showering building a more intimate bathing part unfolds, allowing one to not to be seen. Bodies share the same building and can choose to bathe alone or in company, a series of showers can connect between each other to allow common, supportive showering or enclosing around one user. The project explores visibility and invisibility, turning the bathroom into a public fountain accessible to the city.

Autumn 2025

Project by: Adriana Balagué, Emily Bardenz, Ines Branet, Noa Gherbi

Teaching team: Anna Puigjaner, Dafni Retzepi, Ethel Baraona Pohl, Lisa Maillard, Luis Úrculo, Pol Esteve Castelló, He Shen, Valentina Noce

Images: Luís Úrculo