The Shower Atlas
by Christina Battikha
The Shower Atlas tells an urban story of the body, the shower, and the city. It is the beginning of a contemporary city shower that argues for the increased accessibility and integration of showers in public zones, shared spaces, and urban schedules leading to a surge of creative, social, efficient, and productive spaces within the city. Shall we then regard the shower as a catalyst in the 24/7 city? Does it propose a 24/7 schedule of relaxation, solitude, and zero distraction? Or is it a generator of productive and efficient labour force within a city? The Shower Atlas is a social experiment that stretches the capabilities of the shower space beyond its contemporary, habitual, and almost surpassed implications. It calls for the integration of the shower as a celebratory urban event that is not only witnessed by the four walls of a shower but also by the greater walls of a city.
Work by: Christina Battikha
Work for: Contemporary Urbanism Proseminar FA 2022 taught by: Mohamad Nahleh
Christina Battikha / SMArchS 24’ / Christina enjoys the design process. She values architecture as a product of both thought and practice as she believes in a design that fosters both thinking and making. Christina seeks a design process of satisfaction, excitement, fear, anxiety, and pleasure; a journey into the unknown and a leap she always choses to take.
Sick waters were not only the result of grey and black water produced, drained after the shower, collected in the sewage system, and then used by the citizens.
Zurich is a city where the body is celebrated as a means for social bathing activities. The perseverance of the bathing culture despite the privatization of the shower, has prevented the body from becoming a taboo within society. The boundary between what is public and what is private is pushed in a way that allows citizens to freely express their social and hygienic basic needs.
Showering in the contemporary city is a habitual and almost scheduled event. It has become so integrated within our daily routines that it has become an essential portion of the day or even night without our direct awareness or consciousness
Seebad Enge is the latest public shower to be constructed on the Lake Zurich. It is the public bath to witness the transformation of the shower space into a more private space. It was the end of a shower boom era; a time when Zurich has put a stop to an increasing density of city showers and has shifted towards a greater use of private showers.
Zurich, the shower city, has strived to maintain the shower space as a public activity and social event as public bathing functionally served the bodies and the minds of its people. Bathing in a 21st century river that runs through the infrastructure of a contemporary city is quite rare to find. The Zurich city shower is a space that contributes to the city as much as it is shaped and designed by its urban parameters
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.
The shower is a practice. The shower is also a space. A space occupied by the citizen through time. The shower is a site specific activity that involves the practice of cleansing within a distinctively designed and dedicated space. The verb to shower has preceded the shower as a noun along the times of human existence and urban development.