For the needs of Concéntrico – an International Festival of Architecture and Design of Logroño which annually proposes to reflect on the urban environment and the city – Leopold Banchini architects tranform a city fountain into public baths.
Cars dancing endlessly round and around, drawing inaccessible circular spaces punctuating the city, looking for meaning. What about roundabout what?
Roundabout Bath is a temporary public bath transforming an impersonal and inaccessible fountain trapped at the centre of relentless traffic into an intimate and communal experience where undressed bodies meet in water.
Pride of 19th century’s social movements promoting public hygiene for the working class, urban public baths have slowly closed their doors to be unsurprisingly replaces by private and commercial “wellness centres” , mirrors of our times.
Combining changing rooms, steam rooms and cold-water fountain basins, the Roundabout Bath offers privacy while occupying a central point in the city.
Revealing hidden potentials of car dominated urban environment, the temporary public program hacks the street equipment and transforms our perception of this forgotten spaces.
The high walls of the bathing facility are made of a regular timber structure cladded with uncut wooden panels temporarily used for the installation. If the panels will find a second life after the festival, the fountain itself will go back to its uselessness, leaving behind only memories and new visions of what public space could be.
The heart of the restless circle of motion, shaped by absence, will go back to oblivion; fountain pouring silver into the dark.
Check another project by Leopold Banchini Architects here!
Facts & Credits
Project title Round About Bath
Typology Urban interventions
Location Concéntrico 2025, Logroño, Spain
Architecture Leopold Banchini architects
Architect Leopold Banchini
Photography Sara Cuerdo
Text provided by the architects
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