Bathroom*

The project distinguishes between bathing and washing, two practices that modern architecture has collapsed into the contemporary bathroom. Bathing developed through collective institutions such as Roman thermae and later hammams, where sequences of heat, steam, sound, and water produced spaces of sociability and sensory experience.

Washing, by contrast, gradually became associated with the everyday labor of cleanliness. The introduction of modern plumbing and vertical service cores in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries relocated both practices into the apartment, replacing shared bathing infrastructures with vertically repeated bathroom cells and transforming bodily care into an individualized domestic routine.

Rather than rejecting this vertical organisation, the project appropriates it. At the Hardturm parking garage, washing is relocated into the circulation itself, transforming the stair into a collective bathing infrastructure.

Gradients of temperature, humidity, sound, light, and material tactility reconnect bodily care with shared sensory experience while preserving different degrees of privacy.

The projects brings the atmospheres of bathing back into an infrastructure of everyday washing.

Hence, it questions the reduction of the bathroom to a sealed technical space and proposes care as a collective urban practice.

Spring 2026

Project by: Joshua Hofer, Aaryan Soni, Oliver Zurfluh, Keshav Agarwal

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

Images 2, 3, 6: Luís Úrculo

Images: 1, 4, 5, 7 Pierre Marmy