The Architecture of Bathing

(Hardback)

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Description

A celebration of communal bathing--swimming pools, saunas, beaches, ritual baths, sweat lodges, and more--viewed through the lens of architecture and landscape. We enter the public pool, the sauna, or the beach with a heightened awareness of our bodies and the bodies of others. The phenomenology of bathing opens all of our senses toward the physical world entwined with the social, while the history of bathing is one of shared space, in both natural and built environments. In The Architecture of Bathing, Christie Pearson offers a unique examination of communal bathing and its history from the perspective of architecture and landscape. Engagingly written and richly illustrated, with more than 260 illustrations, many in color, The Architecture of Bathing offers a celebration of spaces in which public and private, sacred and profane, ritual and habitual, pure and impure, nature and culture commingle.

Reviews

"Practically everywhere that bodies of water are accessible for public soaking, the architect and writerChristie Pearsonhas tried them out while taking glorious notes. Her book, The Architecture of Bathing: Body, Landscape, Art,careens around in time and place and ponders 'the baths utopian and dystopian aspects.'"
New York Times Book Review

The award-winning Canadian architect and urban interventionist takes a thematic view of form and landscape in this wide-ranging survey of communal bathings natural and built environments.
The Globe and Mail

"The Architecture of Bathing, by the architect and University of Waterloo professor Christie Pearson, surveys famous, beautiful, and idiosyncratic balneal buildings, along with such objects as tubs and pools that are the props for ablution. Pearsons bathing summary is comprehensive, both historically and geographically."
Literary Review of Canada

"Pearsons book moves from aquatic centre to sent, waterfall to thermae bath, hammam to mud bath in a stimulating, inclusive study of a social activity"
RIBA Journal

"The Architecture of Bathingis inherently about sense and censure: an excellent study into the artistic, medicinal and spiritual qualities of public bathing."
Aesthetica Magazine

Author Bio

Christie Pearson is an award-winning architect, writer, and urban interventionist. An Adjunct Professor at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, she is coeditor of the architectural journal Scapegoat.