Bathing in Bath: a new spa for the 21st century

Hugh Pearman writes about what seems (my opinion from a tiny screen image) to be a terrific piece of urban building in Bath, England designed by Nicholas Grimshaw.

I've been to Bath, once, and besides loving the place, and learning a lot about what a city could be like, my most vivid memory is that we couldn't take a bath there, even in our shabby and expensive little B&B. Looks like things will change.

Grimshaw is keenly aware that his firm is still seen by some as an edge-of-town, supershed kind of outfit. The new 20m Bath spa, supported by the Millennium Commision and bang in the middle of an official World Heritage Site, is his riposte to that. "If you're any good as an architect," he remarks in his diffident way, "you should be able to do a modern building in any situation. It would have been very easy to do a sham Georgian building. It would have walked through the planners."

I like this design out of pure personal whimsy but Bingo! and more importantly, because so far as urbanism is concerned the design appears to illustrate the idea that style doesn't matter so long as you follow the Three Rules which Grimshaw did in spades, if I read the photo in Pearman's article correctly.

I'd post the picture here but I don't have permission (yet?) so go follow the link above and see a bit of slinky traditionalism -- selfeffacing starchictecture, if you'll allow such a thing.

One quibble: The sidewalk is awfully stingy and its unfortunate that its strewn with bollards but of course I don't know all the site constraints.

One other mild complaint: I wish architectural/urban design journalists would include very simple site plans, elevations etc in their articles so that one can truly understand the dynamics of the building and how it works with the surroundsings. I feel uneasy assessing things based on, since all I see is a screen image, precious eye candy.

Comments

[Gideon Strauss]

Our family visited Bath early in July, and my daughters have proclaimed it their favourite city. They like it because "it feels as if it was built to walk around in," as my elder daughter said to a friend this morning. I particularly liked the hue of the stone in which many of the buildings are built in the old downtown.