The industrial harbour of Swedish city Gothenburg is the setting for this sauna by Raumlabor, which attributes a rusty steel exterior and a warm timber-lined interior (+ slideshow).
Berlin-primarily based Raumlabor worked with a staff of local residents to build the Gothenburg Public Sauna, which is raised up in excess of the water in the city’s Frihamnen port, and accessed by way of a wooden bridge.
It functions a rough-and-prepared exterior of corrugated steel, an interior lined with thin larch strips, and a shower space surrounded by walls produced up of glass bottles.
The developing types element of a wider regeneration of Frihamnen, which is being transformed into a public park ahead of the city’s 400th anniversary in 2021.
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Raumlabor’s aim was to generate a spot that can bring with each other all of the area’s recent occupants, from gardeners and rollerskaters, to joggers, dogwalkers, racing drivers, and couples that come to watch the sunset.
“Frihamnen is slowly losing its industrial character and is steadily becoming a new, central element of Gothenburg, open to be found and adopted by the citizens,” said Francesco Apuzzo and Jan Liesegang, two of the 10 architects that comprise Raumlabor.
“Public baths had been when an intense location for social gatherings in our cities,” they explained. “They have been locations not only for rest and sport but also for politics, discussion, enterprise bargains, eroticism, hedonism and crime. This has been lost in our cities and substituted with the far more bleak and leisure-based public swimming pools and spas.”
“Because water pollution does not permit, for the minute, direct bathing actions in the docks, the establishment of bathing culture routines will create a type of prediction for the future of this certain setting,” they added.
The studio worked with a staff of 24 city residents to construct the construction on best of concrete piles. Weathered steel was picked for the exterior to give the constructing an industrial aesthetic, assisting it to match in with its surroundings.
Inside, larch shingles create texture across the curved and angular surfaces of the ceiling and walls.
“The route of the shingles’ pattern on the walls and ceiling generates at the same time an embracing space and a emphasis on the view out of the massive window towards the silhouette of the cranes and the city centre,” stated the architects.
The shower area stands on the opposite end of the bridge. The wine bottles embedded in the walls create similar lighting results as glass blocks.
There is also little entrance pavilion created from recycled windows, and a granite plaza foremost down to a swimming pool submerged in the water.
Raumlabor has a history of doing work on structures aimed at the public. Other examples incorporate a public pavilion with green walls in Montreal and a mobile inflatable pavilion in New York.
Other not too long ago completed saunas include a cavernous wooden grotto in Canada and a concrete tower in Germany.
Photography is by Raumlabor.
Undertaking credits:
Consumer: Älvstranden Utveckling
Architect: Raumlabor
Undertaking architects: Francesco Apuzzo, Jan Liesegang
Task staff: Bruno Gonçalves, Christian Göthner, Eduardo Conceição, Florian Stirnemann, Jordane Coquart, Katharina Spagl, Maria Garcia Perez, Mariana Marques da Silva, Martina Blom, Sam Dias Carvalho
Harbour overview – click for more substantial picture 
Internet site program – click for larger picture 
Elevation – click for larger image 
