The Great Utopia

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The Great Utopia
of Sutro Baths

The Great Utopia at Sutro Baths is an infusion of the five senses which was combined with a place to sleep: consisting of ten individual rooms, a restaurant, body works spa: including sauna, jacuzzi, massage, manicure & pedicure, a movie theater, ocean viewing stations, and an outdoor olympic size pools divided into two parts consisting of five swimming lanes.

The design suggests that one element is floating independently of another, with the implication that all the parts are hovering in a tangible continuous space. It’s conceived as a three-dimensional equivalent to the space of Mondrian’s or Lissitzky’s paintings with their lines extending to infinity.

The pivotal plan reads like an abstract picture with lines of varying weight generating a rhythm of space and of planes. The plan is formed from the intersection of Lines expanding from the main five points of contact in the site gradually towards an implied infinity. These lines indicated the main two wall planes which stopped in places to admit openings. There’s no dominant axis, and the field of energies would have varied as one moved about.

I also liberated each wall plan from the box. One finds the fruitful translation of painting abstraction into architecture, in a way the building volumes are free from earth bound allowing the minimum contact with the ground and volumes are made to float. The idea expressed was of the independence of wall planes from traditional supporting rules. A counter point is set in motion by shifting the two center axes of the two pools off that of their surroundings.

This building exists between natural and rational between logic and chaos. I created a series of spaces it’s not just a box. It’s as if it were constructed of planes which constantly move and change orientation. It’s new spaces to create an adventure, the same sense of adventure one feels when first entering the Sutro baths site.