Round About Baths | Leopold Banchini Architects

Cars dancing endlessly round and around, drawing inaccessible circular spaces punctuating our cities, looking for meaning. What about roundabout what?

Round About Baths is a temporary public building 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 the 19th century’s social movements promoting public hygiene for the working class, urban public baths have slowly closed their doors to be unsurprisingly replaced by private and commercial “wellness centers”, mirrors of our times.

Combining changing rooms, steam rooms, and cold-water fountain basins, Round About Baths offers privacy while occupying a central point in the city. Revealing hidden potentials in a car-dominated urban environment, the temporary public program hacks the street equipment and transforms our perception of this forgotten space.

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 find a second life after the festival, the fountain itself will go back to its uselessness, leaving behind only memories and a new vision of what public space could be.