A Bigger Splash: New Wellness Architecture

For architectural grandee Richard Meier, light itself is one of the fundamental materials that lends form to space. “Architecture which enters into a symbiosis with light,” he writes, “allows light to become form.” For architects of wellness projects, the same could be said of water. Water gives pools and spas their raison d’etre. Their spatial organisation and material expression shapes our sensory experience of this most essential of elements.

A number of recently completed projects, through a particular consideration of their relation not only with water but also light, show how wellness as a typology stands centre-stage when it comes to a more mindful kind of architecture – one that invites its users to be present, in the here and now.

Richard Bell’s subterranean spa for a private London residence, housed in a new extension, draws natural light down and into the space, animating the textural, handmade brick walls and lending the pools’ surfaces a black-gloss-like effect. Water here is presented as a positive volume.

Meanwhile, up high, Italian office NOA’s dramatically cantilevered, outdoor pool at the Hubertus Hotel in Valdaora, offers guests a quasi-complete elemental union. The 17-metre-long structure, supported 12 metres above the ground by larch-tree-trunk pilotis, features a glass front, affording views of the South Tyrolean landscape, and a small glass bottom for those fearless swimmers who seek the feeling of weightlessness.

At Mikou Studio’s indoor swimming pool in the Paris suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux, the fluidity of water informs the formal language of the project, with the natural-light-filled, double-height space featuring numerous round-edged windows, skylights and doorway apertures.

While in the Swedish coastal town of Karlshamn, local fundraising resulted in commissioning White Arkitekter being commissioned to create the Kallbadhus (cold bathhouse) – a contemporary revisiting of a traditional Scandinavian typology, where the timber-clad structure, positioned directly over the water, allows for unhindered sea-bathing or post-sauna plunging.

Last one in is a rotten egg!

© Architonic