Cody Schueller
Public House #18
From the first-year graduate studio The Baths, Spring 2020
Faculty: Francesco Marullo
About the studio:
The baths are places where people get together to cleanse, relax, and take care of themselves. Their inherent architectural beauty converges in the void they contain: a climatically controlled concave space to be accessed, occupied, and experienced collectively, which has stimulated the imagination of architects for centuries. The studio explored the spatial and programmatic complexity of the baths through the construction of the void. Locally, the studio looked to the Chicago Bathhouses, simple facilities built between 1894 and 1918, as material for rediscovery and reinvention as active public institutions.
About the project:
This is the Public House. Specifically, Public House no. 18.
This project introduces itself as a bath that is a house with many rooms.
The bath is a public place—a public house, to be exact.
“The body is made up of many parts, as the house is made up of many rooms.” Which is to say, the rooms themselves are separate entities, or characters, as they are called. They can be reconstructed in a variety of ways. This particular project is a careful arrangement of characters into a collective—a collective house for the public.