museum format The Bath Museum Coexistence Seraina De Martin
The city of Nikosia
the ritual of bathing The ritual of traditional bathing is a specific culture in the Greek and Turkish world reflecting the Hammam. It has an archeological past, where the bath house was not just a building for purity but it was as well a public centre for socializing, meetings, leisure and recreation. The building is a social condenser. This tradition is an active culture declining but still strong to the present day. On the map of Nikosia three small Hammams can be found, one on the Greek side called Omeriya and two on the Turkish side, called BĂźyĂźk and Korkut.
The Ritual of Bathing
Exodus - the baths The function of the Baths is to create and recycle private and public fantasies, to invent, test and possibly introduce new forms of behavior. The building is a social condenser. It brings hidden motivations, desires and impulses to the surface, to be refined for recognition, provocation, and development. The ground floor is an area of public action and display, a continuous parade of personalities and bodies, a stage for a cyclical dialectic between exhibitionism and spectatorship. It is an area for the observation and possible seduction of partners who will be invited to participate actively in private fantasies and the pursuit of desires.
Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, The Baths, project Axonometric projection, 1972, MoMA Collection Š 2013 Rem Koolhaas
Reference - Exodus, The Baths
Who am I as a Visitor? The moment of coexistence, where the museum and the ritual path reflecting the Hammam generate a hybrid territory, the visitor experiences an antropological self reflection in terms of participative observation. Sensitivity, feeling the moist air, heat, evaporation, water. Decisions taken out of the moment are triggering the visitor, leading him through the confusing path, led by light and darkness, observing the others, going his own way, in the end becoming the exhibit himself.
Who am I as a Visitor
Siteplan, locating the existing Hammams
Botticelli, Annunciation, 1485 - the row of pillars
Entrance, Exit - Transition
Forest of Columns
Turkish and Greek Checkpoints - Border Crossing
Floor Plan embeded into the neighboughood
Checkpoint Forest of columns Appendix GĂśbektasi - Nabelstein
BingĂźl - hot steam area Exhibition area Lif/Kese - body peeling Sicaklik - water pond Cinema
Sogukluk - warm steam area
Entrance hall Wardrobe and closet arrangement
Space declaration
Zoom in to the Appendix, Entrance, Baths
Curatorial Grid and the Roof as the mail Actor of Light
Detail for the moving closet, located on the grid
Axonometric for the moving closet, located on the grid
Section through the entire structure