Baths

 

Thermal Baths in Vals (Peter Zumthor, architect). Photos by jpmm on Flickr.

Herman Hertzberger, in Space and the Architect: Lessons in Architecture 2

Perhaps the most evident examples in the history of built social space are public baths [...] Indeed, the succession of baths with various degrees of warmth and the concomitant massage treatment are intended to incite an element of activity , making personal contact so much easier (141).

Compare Zumthor’s plan for the baths at Vals (below) with SANAA’s 21st Century Museum of Contempory Art, Kanazawa (bottom):

 

  

Both demonstrate a choreographed chaos, designed to inspire movement, activity, and social collisions.

 

Image from El Croquis #99, page 192.
An excerpt from “Relations”, an essay by Florian Idenburg in The SANAA Studios 2006-2008 (79-80):

SANAA’s work is not Superflat. It achieves social cohesion through open-ended, continuous spatial containers that allow for accidental moments of exchange, gently held within a permeable membrane. The political aspect of SANAA’s participatory project lies not in a move away from the spectacle to an “unmonumental” staging of community or in the claim that mere physical activity would correspond to emancipation, but in a faith in human’s individual ability to invent their own stories.
[...]
SANAA’s intentional “scripting of activities shows us how our architectural intelligence can be employed to reinvigorate our sensibilities in the phyiscal world. Rather than an architecture of the virtual—the graphic, the explicit, the temporary, the sterile, the mechanic—we should explore an architecture of the “new” real. An architecture that is spatial, sensory, and multivalent.