Round about baths
Leopold Banchini Architects
Gran vía
2025
Roundabout Baths transforms an impersonal and inaccessible fountain, trapped at the center of relentless traffic, into an intimate and communal experience where undressed bodies meet in water. Roundabouts — those circular, unreachable spaces where cars dance endlessly, looking for meaning — become here the setting for a temporary public bath.
Once the pride of 19th-century social movements promoting public hygiene for the working class, urban public baths have slowly closed their doors, unsurprisingly replaced by private and commercial wellness centers, mirrors of our times.
Combining changing rooms, steam rooms, and cold-water basins, Roundabout Baths offers privacy while occupying a central point in the city. The temporary public program reveals the hidden potential of a car-dominated urban environment, hacking street equipment and transforming our perception of these forgotten spaces.
The tall walls of the bathing facility are made from a regular timber structure clad with uncut wooden panels, temporarily used for the installation. While the panels will find a second life after the festival, the fountain itself will return to its uselessness, leaving behind only memories and new visions of what public space could be. The heart of the restless circle of motion, shaped by absence, will return to oblivion: a fountain pouring silver into the dark.
Leopold Banchini Architects
Leopold Banchini Architects desarrolla una arquitectura ecléctica y no dogmática centrada en la simplicidad, sostenibilidad y la poesía de la construcción. Valoran la creatividad, las culturas de reutilización y desafían los métodos convencionales de producción. Su trabajo abarca desde pequeñas instalaciones hasta grandes proyectos públicos en todo el mundo, con instituciones como el Musée du Quai Branly, el Centre Pompidou y el Ministerio de Cultura de Bahréin. Premiado con el León de Oro en la Bienal de Venecia, sus proyectos se han presentado globalmente.
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