Bath
Studio Work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Fall 2004.
Professor: Ann Pendelton Jullian
The Border Bathhouse challenges the way that Americans perceive hybrid conditions that exist between San Diego and Tijuana. Situated in a national estuarine reserve just north of the US/Mexico border, the bathhouse creates a dynamic relationship to the unstable and fragile landscape and continually redefines the experience of its environment. The design manipulates the ground as if it were a thin skin --a threshold between ground and sky, dry and wet, hot and cool. Located in an annual flood plain, the threat of destruction looms and may initiate annual maintenance that restores the bath as well as the threatened landscape conditions in the fragile reserve. Continued maintenance of this memorial creates a ritual act that materializes and dematerializes the thickness of the national border, despite the reality of its social and economic porosity.
Professor: Ann Pendelton Jullian
The Border Bathhouse challenges the way that Americans perceive hybrid conditions that exist between San Diego and Tijuana. Situated in a national estuarine reserve just north of the US/Mexico border, the bathhouse creates a dynamic relationship to the unstable and fragile landscape and continually redefines the experience of its environment. The design manipulates the ground as if it were a thin skin --a threshold between ground and sky, dry and wet, hot and cool. Located in an annual flood plain, the threat of destruction looms and may initiate annual maintenance that restores the bath as well as the threatened landscape conditions in the fragile reserve. Continued maintenance of this memorial creates a ritual act that materializes and dematerializes the thickness of the national border, despite the reality of its social and economic porosity.