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Defining An Architecture of Routine And Ritual - A Bath House For Kreuzberg, Berlin

Part 2 Project 2003
Bethan Rayner
 University of Edinburgh Edinburgh | UK
A strategy for intervention into the once no-man's land between east and west Berlin is born out of the nature of the site and its exploration as autonomous realities. The architecture alludes to the diversity of these imagined realities to establish relationships with the fragments that remain. In this way, the site is able to evolve without wiping the slate clean, in order that the layering of urban histiry be made manifest rather than supressed. The bath house complex, situated in and around a disused canal basin, creates a place for ritual and everyday activities that draw people and water across the site, enabling them to to engage with their environment creating their own place within the space they inhabit. This establishes a landscape that acknowledges history and intertwines it in the everyday and ritualistic lives of the surrounding communities. The troubled history is not separated into a detatched memorial, but a part of life. The void becomes a positive space that is used and preserved as a different yet connecting element within the city.


Bethan’s project for a bath house and swimming pool establishes a subtle but compelling relationship with the desolate urban topography of an area to the north of the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. Formed within a ‘turning pool’ that was part of the former canal network of the city, the architecture cuts across the grain of the derelict urban morphology, forming an enigmatic series of spaces linked by ‘minor’, everyday, architectural elements - the wall, the stepladder, the gutter, etc. - which are made disconcertingly monumental by their careful placing and aura of ritual. Her work, framed around the question of architecture in the ‘Age of Anxieties’, was consistently and characteristically sensitive, nuanced and carefully poised throughout the year. Neither forgetful of nor absorbed into the traumatic history of this site, her project draws upon the contingency of the ruin and the strange futurity it projects.
2003
Weltstadt Atlas. Historical Maps - Simultaneous Realities Part I. The maps are evidence of the passage of time, evoving the imagination with a sense of change, gain and loss, progress and memory.
Inter-historical projections - Simultaneous Realities Part II. As an amalgamation of correspondances, the coexistence of fragments within the series is heterogeneous through memory, imagination and repetition.
Spatial Compositions - Simultaneous Realities Part III. An exploration of the spatial experiences and limits of the site and how they have evolced through time and event.
Programatic Characters. The myths and histories interpreted and expanded upon in the Weltstadt Atlas are developed into a strategy for the production of programmatic characters to intervene on the defined terretory.
Ritual Section I. The investigation takes place mainly through the medium of the section. In this way the bodies of water, which always seek their own level, can be explored and presented in a way that can be easily identified.
Ritual Section II. The section is also expressive of the ritual routes through the building. Gradually it begins to operate on a larger scale in order to address the boader aspects of the site and the more intimate details simultaneously.
Short Section I. The sectional drawings display the careful distribution of spaces by function, by the ritual relations between the different activities a sequence is cemented and a sectional route is derived.
Short section II. The sections place an emphasis on human interaction, the changing relationships with the water and how the use of water influences the material qualities of the building.
Long elevation. The bath House sits within a canal basin along the visual axis from a footbridge to a ruined church.
Long section. The Bath House hides behind the brick wall of the canal basin and lurks beneath the water until a row of crane like structures standing to attention stare back at the appartment facades looking down.
Site plan - arial view of the Bath House complex, which includes and open air pool, diving board,cafe and formal gardens.
Exploded axonometric projection. The intervention works with the site to transform it, not by monument or spectacle, but rather in a way that challenges occupation and inhabitation, promoting engagement with itself and its surroundings.
Plan layers. The layered plans are suggestive of sedimentation and stratification, showing the shifting of solid and void through the building and the landscape that contains it.
Exploded isometric plans. The seperation of the planes exposes the functions hidden within and so reveals the descent and ascent through the building along the ritual routes.
Sectional Model. The model exlores further the ritual route through the building and the landscape that contains it.
Macquette of the Bath House and Basin.
Study for the staff room that straddles the inhabited containing wall between the steam bath and the canal basin.
View of the sectional model including the steam bath, lifeguard platform and retractable roof.
Model view of the lifegaurd platform in the steam bath.
Model view of the cranes and buckets that form the water activated counter-weights for the changing room entrance to the Bath House.
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