Design intentions
BAD {BATH} is a temporal architecture in the highly frequented leisure landscape of Solitude palace gardens nearby Stuttgart. BAD {BATH} plugs into the hidden existing infrastructure network via a hydrant. It is based on a 1,000-meter garden hose, which, connected to a hydrant, can carry enough water to fill a bathtub. Arranged in countless loops, the elastic hose forms the surface of a screen that catches the sun, thus heating the water in the hose. It fills a tub for up to two persons to take a bath. Afterwards the water is released to irrigate the surroundings. BAD {BATH} interprets ways of inhabiting and interpreting the urbanized landscape, based on infrastructural realities and leisure conventions. It proposes an alternative, self-empowered form of leisure. It draws on the anarchic expertise of everyday knowledge {the warming up of water in a garden hose} instead of investing in capital-intensive technology {like teflon-wear and carbon fiber bikes}. It opportunistically joins for a brief spatial moment the circuits that have become antipodes of the contemporary environment: infrastructure and nature. Without dogmatism it makes use of both of them, releasing their multiplied potentials and extracting pleasure from the appropriation of already existing systems. Pushed to an extreme, beyond the criteria of efficiency, the subversive gesture is architecturalized and explored further on the tectonic level. The rigid and elastic material qualities of wooden slats and the garden hose respectively are played out against each other and reintegrated, so that ornament authentically sneaks back into architectural expression.