“Nakedness may seem the sign of a people entirely at home in the city: the city was the place in which one could live happily exposed, unlike the barbarians who aimlessly wandered the earth without the protection of stone.” Richard Sennett (1994)

A project inspired by its context within a busy urban environment, but driven by materiality. This marble bath house, located at the entrance of the Lisbon Botanical Gardens, embraces the country’s history whilst tackling the very modern issue of desensitisation. The project was inspired by the book Flesh and Stone by Sennett which illustrates a modern history through the changing relationship between the city and our bodies. As large cities such as Lisbon continue to develop and urban populations rise, our civilisation is becoming increasingly disconnected from the cities we inhabit. Thus the aim of the bath house is to explore how marble carving could be modernised in order to carve modern, fluid forms; how the monolithic identity of stone could be dematerialised to allow for a dialogue between the visitors and the architecture, creating a sensory oasis in the heart of the busy city.

Quote: Sennett, R. (1994) Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, London: W. W. Norton & Co