155: Reserved Bathhouse

This public competition provided the office with an opportunity to explore the potential for reunification of people along a fabricated line. The text from the entry reads: Korea is a land of a single people, currently divided by an artificial separation. Architecture has the capacity to bring alternate meaning to what is currently a site rife with contention. By using this moment to reconnect people and families, RESERVED presents a resolutely optimistic outlook, one intended to quietly mold a progressive future. Presuming forthcoming unification, RESERVED proposes to establish a communal bathhouse within an ad hoc natural reserve, where both urban and emotional growth may germinate. Situated on the current border between North and South Korea, access to the RESERVED Bathhouse begins with a switchback descent, crossing from North to South and South to North multiple times, eroding the meaning of the line as bodies and light descend into the earth. On disrobing in the passage through the Change Rooms, visitors arrive in a singular Jjimjilbang space where individualities and national identities have faded away. Delineated by the scattering of columns supporting the belly of the earth above, the space is the first area of reminder of the people’s unity. Crossing beneath the mass of the entry ramp, one is met with sleeping rooms tucked into the same volume. Separating at this point by gender, but not by nationality, the visitors move into a sequence of spaces, beginning with the Rain Room, cleansing them prior to their moving from pool to pool. Along the procession, the exterior of the RESERVED landscape drops into the timeless ruin of the underground building, providing a connection to both the light and the land. Each of these moments occurs along the current border, again bringing to the fore the land the people share, rather than the border which keeps them apart.