Hello everyone and welcome back to the Rural Studio Bathhouse Blog! February has been a super busy month for our team. We’ve had several incredible visitors and we are very excited to share where our project is now!

After winter break, the team took some time to consider the best path forward for the project and began to consider the possibility of reusing existing structures on campus. As a mass timber project, we were especially intrigued by the idea of reusing and directly connecting to the Breathing Wall Mass Timber Research Project pods. The pods were designed as the final scale experiment of a testing track on breathing wall technology and then were to be used as living pods.
The Breathing Wall team put in an exceptional amount of hard work and attention of detail into the structure, and we admire the level of craft that they exhibited. We see the reuse of these pods as a testament and celebration of the amazing work that they did before.
Reusing the Breathing Wall pods will allow the very well-constructed buildings to become a part of permanent infrastructure that all 3rd-year students will be able to inhabit and interact with. The texture and the warmth of the wood walls will be celebrated as natural light will be introduced. The orientation of the pods allows for them to have a different condition to the super shed than the other sleeping pods, creating layers of privacy in the bathhouse.

The reuse also sets the Studio up with a strategic plan for development in the future. With the Bathhouse now in the middle of the “Supershed street,” a kitchen/dining space can also be added to the middle of the street, helping strengthen the social aspect of this space. This leaves several other accessible bays of the Supershed open, that could be used for new sleeping pods if needed. This could help reconnect the Thermal mass and Buoyancy Ventilation Research Project pods into the streetscape. Re-grading the first four bays of the Supershed will allow for accessible entry into the Bathhouse and any further developments and will set the precedent for accessibility on campus for the future.
The visitors for this month challenged us to consider the best organization of spaces for the Bathhouse based on the reuse of the Breathing Wall pods. Cheryl Noel and Ravi Ricker of Wrap Architecture in Chicago, IL, came back to work in Hale County to help us think of the overall concepts and form of the spaces we are creating.
Joe Burns and Dan Wheeler, also from Chicago, IL, re-entered the mix and provided excellent help thinking through several different structural techniques and organizational layouts of the spaces.





Andrew Berman from New York, challenged us to think about the experience of using a Bathhouse facility within a community of people. This opened our eyes to layers of privacy and reimagining the Rural Studio ritual of using the bathhouse as a 3rd-year.

The existing Breathing Wall pods are reimagined as more public spaces and two new structures are added to provide toilet and bathing spaces, creating a privacy gradient as users move farther from the Supershed and closer to the forest, which begins to envelope the building. The team is still considering the exact mass timber construction method for the two new structures. A new shed roof will stretch over all of the structures and a series of clerestories will bring natural light into each of the spaces.



We are very excited to continue moving this scheme forward and working towards construction.
Thanks for following along and we look forward to updating our progress soon!

– Rural Studio Bathhouse Team
Carla, Ambar, Ashley, and Logan