shower boom
The City of Zurich is a shower in its purest natural form. It is a shower consisting of a series of existing natural water bodies; rivers, glaciers, and a lake. It is the product of geologically historical events that contributed to the formation of a natural shower. The City Shower. It is a territory that was later occupied by humans, or the early city settlers driving it away of what seemed to be natural as an environment. Inhabiting the lake and its rivers, humans design the waterbody. It is suddenly transformed into a human space. An engineered landscape that is altered and consumed. A natural entity appropriated by users of the territory. Is the urban lake natural after all? A shower that feeds from the clean mineral glaciers of the Alps characterizes the city of Zurich. It qualifies it into becoming the City for Bathing due to the density of public showers along the river Limmat and Lake Zurich (Chen et al. 42). A minimum of 10 showers still stand at the rims of the “natural” water body (Chen et al. 42). They still function and are still occupied while the waterbody not only provides the city users with bathing facilities, but also serves as a potable water reservoir for almost all of its inhabitants (Suter 421). Showering with potable water within the busy environment of a city has been the main concern of Zurich’s people and its city planners. Designs of public showers that are accessible by any city user who desires to cleanse the body and the mind through a social endeavour fill out the surrounding lands of the river. They form the heart of the city. They also lie at a walking distance from the city’s main train station, forming a shower infrastructure and a bathing activity hub at the epicentre of all other everyday urban activities. These bathing spaces set the perfect example of a shower in a city that has embraced bathing as a public, accessible, social, and environmental space that greatly affects the daily lives of its people.
Chen, Nina. et al. Vom Letten bis Rimini : Geschichte und Gegenwart der Zürcher See- und Flussbäder = From Letten to Rimini : a look into the enduring lake and river baths of Zurich city. Baden: Hier + Jetzt, Verlag für Kultur und Geschichte, 2004. Print.
Suter, Max. “The Sewage Treatment Works of Zurich, Switzerland.” Sewage Works Journal, vol. 2, no. 3, 1930, pp. 419–23. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25037111. Accessed 16 Nov. 2022.
