Franco Chen
203
Spring 2014

The Mt. Baldy Bath House calls for a Bath House that operates year round and is situated on a slightly sloped site facing an expansive view of the valley below.

The intention in approaching the design was to draw from the abuse of the non-orthogonal grid lines, a rather arbitrary system of constraints which were whimsically created. This resulting grid resulted in various sizes of containment, from the minutely small, to the relatively large. A focused area of the grid was subsequently cropped to amplify the scale of the grid, small remnants, either resultants of the crop, or simply carryovers from the original grid, remained. Rather than merging and performing boolean operations with these remnants with adjacent parcels, they were scaled up, and as a result became the container for the various program. Fragments of the grid were either moved up, down, or stayed put, so the diagram can finally begin to take the shape of a three tiered bathhouse.

Inspiration was drawn from the drawings of Piranesi, more specifically, Le Carceri. This guiding factor led the project to take on a convoluted form as pieces of the building were being adjusted, and was another main factor of resizing rather than discarding the minute parts. There are plenty of foreground, midground, and background elements within the bath house to ground the viewer and draw him in, very much in likes of Piranesi’s detailed drawings.

Both of these factors, the whimsical grid, and the condition of three planes of view allowed for the building to take on a ruinous look, unsure of whether it is ending its stages of construction or rounding out its finishing stages of destruction. Program is set off to the side in the “minute,” and circulation is granted the atrium and the central mass of the building. Grounded and dug into the ground, the sky becomes the new reference plane, with slight visual hints of the mountainous surroundings depending on which tier of the building the visitor is traversing.