Bathing is both intimate and technical: its infrastructural fixity locks a whole building in time and packs privacy into ever-smaller footprints. This residential project studied the bathroom’s historical genesis and unpacked this tiniest apartment room. The resulting apartments hold a public bathhouse and long, reconfigurable floors so that homes can be combined according to their residents’ intentions. Structural plumbing stacks hold up the building, circulate heat, and bracket the configuration of units. Glazed park-side stairs string laundry to dry and condense the community. Continuous balconies link residences. The bathhouse and its elliptical pool are embedded in the Boston waterfront, fully tiled and drained so that rising flood waters may wash cleanly through without destruction. All work completed in full partnership with Julia Spackman at Harvard GSD.
