The market goes on and on, on the shiny weekend of Hollywood, tinted bright yellow. Within the solid infrastructure along the street the tents like white clouds floating along the void, vibrant life of the street and alleys blurs the boundary of urban fabric. Lucid inhabitation of light-weight structure frames spread across the bones, rendering its rigidness more like flesh, the flesh that carries with it the encountering of relation in life.
The old bathhouse sits quietly along the sidewalk. Bathhouse as a place is also about relation. The aesthetic of a place where people come to together, in this urban setting a foggy island of connection, of ambiguity, of contradiction, and of encounter and confrontation. The physics is the action, the orientation is clear yet soft and amorphous, the archipelagos of differences are lines, a bathhouse has no map.
To stack relation upon relation is to confront multiplicities, to confront single streamed ways of linguistic relation, and engages translation that seems to be hopping across local variations. The Hollywood Markethal &Spa embrace the spontaneous situation of the site, continuing the Hollywood farmer’s market with expanded programs. An urban beach emerges along the sidewalk, juxtaposed with street dining pods and open-air stands on the ground level. A mezzanine dining area above the pods with connected catwalks overlook the double height Markethal and street events.
The Bathhouse hovers above. The two main pavilions are supported through a visually bent yet physically rigid concrete-slab structure. The stairs like folded-up ground continues from the rear half of the Markethal, up and wrap around and touches up on the first concrete structure. The reception house sits upon the bending slab, with six boxes, three on each side squeezed among the bent columns. The shifting boxes that seem to be rotating, deforming, and displacing while trying to squeeze among the columns creates visual perception of shifting perspective and multiple spatial segments. Each spatial segment defines a progression towards bathing, with check-in counter, changing room and showering arranged along in sequence down the hallway. The boxes in a row, with varying heights of ceiling, skylights and protruding walls forms sectional “ma”, as one moves through the rituals to get ready for a bathing experience. The “ma” defines fragmented circulation along which space of various gradients of privacies emerges, unexpected yet of programmatic clarity. Punctuation leads out to balconies between room, a shuffling of inside-outside, shifting walls and undulating scale fragmentize compact space into experience of body through space, squeezed into encountering of spatial relation.
A sento sits upon the second concrete structure. Also, six boxes squeezed between bent columns, with a tall wall runs through the middle, three boxes on each side. A box is a bay of bathing pool, the wall inbuilt with showering. The sento is composed of more low-lying boxes, subtle waves in the ceiling forms a vapor-filled intimate bathing experience.
Straddling between two concrete structures are shaky pools surrounding a corner bar. The shaky pools are inflatable pools placed upon a grid of pieces of connected tensile net. The net is then hanged along the edge of concrete slabs, and also from five major tensile members that brings force up to the huge cantilevering truss resting upon concrete columns. The physics behavior behaves more like a puppet, that at first glance seems to be floating freely, jiggling in the air, while in reality is supported with an almost crane-like super structure. The shaky pool is a semi outdoor, casual bathing and mingling area that reinvents the playfulness of inflatable pool. When one jumps down into one of the pools, the other pools shake randomly in physical chain-effect as well. Another truss walkway cantilevers out from the end of the sento, catch by a load-bearing wall at the site edge. Six sauna chambers of different sizes are also places upon tensile net hanged from truss atop and will also lean and shake accordingly to changing weight distribution and people action. The rigid concrete structure and the flexible hanging tensile structure alternate along the spatial sequence of the bathhouse, mediating playfulness of weekend pool and interactive relation among tranquil meditative bathing experience. Gradients of relation happens in different spatial settings, atmospheres, and dispositions. The multiple dichotomies are superimposed and mixed with each other, the map of relation and confrontation plays out in constant shifting perspectives.
All the visitors will be acting out the architecture, and acting out the relation that the architecture seeks to be the backdrop of. The markethal and the bathhouse will form new public space for Hollywood, a publicity that is not typical of both typologies, yet vibrates through refreshing encounters. A market, and a bathhouse, will always be about relation, which is something permanent…, yet temporary.
