Hammam Spa / Ressano Garcia

Curated by Matheus Pereira
SPA, SAUNA, WELLNESS INTERIORS • CASTRO MARIM, PORTUGAL
Architects : Ressano Garcia
Area : 70 m²
Year : 2017
Photographs : Francisco Nogueira, Vasco Célio
Manufacturers : Amorim, CIN, Jular, Legrand, 4UDecor, Adobe, Alfredo Antunres Flor, Archiexpo, Avilsa, Cimpor, Dimensão, Efectoled, Extrual, Isotherm, Luso, McNeel, Miguel Batista, PRELIS, Roca, Secil, +5
Arquiteto Responsável : Pedro Ressano Garcia
Design Team : João Magala
Clients : Eglantina Monteiro, Francisco Palma Dias
Structural Engineering : Gonçalo Meirelles
Termical Engineering : Rafael Ribas
Landscape : Earth&Water + Flor Georges Picot
Consultants : Miguel Manta
Collaborators : Dorata Korolczyk, Sofia Leitão, Auranne Leray, Nicos Washeim, Paulo Tinoco, Stephane Herpin
Contractor : RVI, lda – Eng Paulo Gonçalves
City : Castro Marim
Country : Portugal

Textual content description offered by the architects. Architecture hosts each the thoughts and the physique. Every individual perceives the bodily world by means of enigmatic intimate reactions. The physique is aware of human beings’ widespread wants and learns concerning the constructed surroundings. The thoughts is ready to interpret architecture utilizing different instruments. The central query is how does it work? Do senses affect the architect or the senses are enhanced by architecture design? There’s not a direct reply thought within the Hammam we tried to tell the thoughts concerning the senses of the physique. Inside areas are organized by their temperatures (sizzling, heat and chilly). Inside the new room, the steam improves the sense of the physique. Sweat will increase the odor of the physique and softens the pores and skin, providing a profound bodily expertise, carefully associated to the intimacy of lovers.

Within the subsequent room, the nice and cozy room has beneficiant benches inbuilt marble with comfy angles and spherical edges, they softly contact the pores and skin. It’s a area for sensual pleasures the place every element issues. In plan, the geometry of the room presents an oval form and the cross part exhibits a parabolic form. It’s deliberately designed with curves and the mixture of the spherical plan and part enhances a selected spatial expertise. An area that’s clean, with out corners or angles; that’s steady and spherical suggests similarities to the womb. The sensuality of the expertise is amplified by the form of the building’s design. The sunshine inside presents a religious expertise, enriched by the sound of normal dripping of water that smoothes the ambiance to finish rest. The mission was designed in shut collaboration with purchasers Eglantina Monteiro and Francisco Palma Dias. Eglantina is an anthropologist and artwork curator who holds a deeper notion of native context and their cultural relations. Francisco is a poet and a surreal farmer who claimed the need to remake the normal public baths, that’s to say, the Hammam.

To him, public baths, extensively disseminated throughout the Roman Empire and continued by Muslims throughout the Mediterranean, had been constantly banned by the Catholic Kings throughout the Center Ages. We share the notion that Hammams had been condemned by the Catholic Kings on this Southern area of the Iberian Peninsula although the locals had been utilizing them for hundreds of years. The design of a brand new Hammam on this specific area and on this particular time period, the 21st century, is an announcement at two ranges; historic and geographic. The brand new building establishes a relation to a protracted misplaced apply. It opens a brand new notion the place native tradition is seen not simply inside its current context but in addition associated to historical traditions.

Robinson Adey