How can baths help Thessaloniki re-invent its multicultural identity since the remnants of its past are still so evident in the city’s landscape? The answer is simple: it won’t. The proposal does not aim to reinvent anything in the existing topography; this is why it is placed in the water – an open space awaiting for a new identity to be drawn.
How can a public space enclose such a private experience as bathing? The project aims to explore how different stages of social interaction function as a key element that embraces two contradicted territories into one united entity rather than separates them. Users of the proposal share in the equality of solitude and inner reflection whilst enjoying communal spaces; this very experience re-connects to the bathhouse’s ancient purpose of offering a platform for the most informal social encounters with private, public and buffer zones.
A new autonomous reality; Concept of baths is re-imagined to recount the city’s historic center and its physiognomy through its urban heritage; the islands will be made into a bathing, soothing and purifying hub for body and mind. In addition, the purifying nature of water can work as a metaphor for a pause in everyday life.
These heterotopic islands, merging the city’s different architectural elements deriving from Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman times, are a nucleus of silence and dialogue, a heterotopus social Pax Romana, a palace of intrigue, an enormous mat for prayers.
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| Student: | Georgia Vegirtzi, Katia Petsali |
| Supervisor: | Dimitris Gourdoukis |
| Diploma module | Dimitris Gourdoukis, Dimitris Kontaxakis, Spiros Papadimitriou, Anastasios Tellios |
| Institution: | Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, School of Architecture, Advanced Design |
| Date: | February 2023 |