Communal bathing is an ancient and venerable tradition in Japan. So too is building in wood. Which all makes building a new timber bath-house in Japan a somewhat tricky prospect, especially if you are not Japanese. How to do something that feels right for the ritual, without imitating the usual treatment? How to create something fresh in such well-worked territory?

“Bathing together, in a wooden barrel, under the trees, in the snow!” This was our original image. In this image, we found the answer to the architectural dilemmas – use circles! The resulting bathhouse is a cluster of intersecting circular enclosures, immediately inviting aqueous associations with droplets of water or soap bubbles. More significantly, the interpenetration of spaces serves to blur the usual divisions between inside and outside, and between male and female. Bathers separate by sex at the entrance for undressing and washing, but are able to rejoin again in the outdoor communal bath (konyoku rotenburo). The arcs of interior walls sweep out into the forest as timber screens. On the exterior, vertical strips of stained lath dissolve the outline of the building amidst the vertical trunks of the surrounding pines.

There is something both comforting and tantalizing about these intersecting round rooms. The hierarchy, axis, and orientation of linear plans are replaced by local centres, embracing curves, and a subtle sense of motion. This connects to the meaning of the bathing ritual in Japan. Rather than responding to the linear functionalist thinking of “take bath = get clean”, this bathhouse aims for a series of linked states of being (“undress : wash : soak : relax”).

It is a space of togetherness built from circles of being, rather than along lines of flight.