The Bath House

540 East 11th Street

The existing building is a ruin, a long abandoned public bath house built at the turn of the century as bathing facilities for immigrant families living in cold water flats. The client is a photographer re-homesteading a deteriorated area with a modern live-work (live above the store) program intended to bring income from a state-of-the-art photographic studio.

Paradoxically, the honorific civic facade served to conceal the original very private hygienic function. The resulting dark warehouse space ideally suits the black-box requirements of the artificially lit photographic studio, but not the public spaces and image of a facility for major corporate and celebrity clients, nor the basic light and air requirements of a private residence. According, the client’s detailed written program concluded "Light: want to make the greatest use of light."

The major architectural move, therefore, is the partial demolition of the front section of the building between the old masonry and new glass front facades, permeating the building with light. The Beaux Arts street facade is transformed into a triumphal arch reminiscent of Roman antecedents and their open notions of public bathing. The arches frame a view of the newly privatized former public realm, now devoted to corporate media image production. The dialectical opposition of fallen limestone civic grandeur to modern metal/glass studio/house juxtaposes the governmental abdication of the public domain with private sector art/media image-making reborn in the shadows of post-industrial inner city decay. This transformation may be summarized as Body: Temple = Image: Factory.

Exploring the metaphorical possibilities inherent in the way light enters a camera or is used as a compositional tool in the making of photographic images, the building is opened up on top with oculi that house the photographer. The articulation of the storefront facade and architectonic language of the long section, with its transverse picture-plane layering, are intended as a set piece for day photographic shooting before a sidewalk audience. Mezzanines, bridges, balconies, transparent and translucent walls are interposed to reinforced notion of (and opportunities for) voyeuristic viewpoints and the simultaneous viewing of that photographic process by a third-party client.

The client’s verbal program was limited to a very simple "I want a really great bathroom" to accompany the "Free Public Baths of the City of New York" carved into the facade and the name of the facility, The Bath House. The studio bathroom is conceived as a "Bath/House", with translucent walls and roof for the two-story washing/dressing structure and private sanitary functions set in the cathedral tower-like former ventilation shaft illuminated by a skylight 60 feet above.

Completion: 1999

Budget: $1,000,000