WELLNESS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Public bathing architecture is back, only this time it’s less about the hygienic mandates of earlier generations and more about the “experience.” From the myopic viewpoint of the United States — where domestic plumbing, Puritanism, the AIDS crisis, and a general culture of haste quashed the art of collective bathing — the recent trend of high-end bathhouses heralds the architectural homecoming of an ancient practice that’s existed long before so-called wellness ever did.

Of course, if you ask the regulars at my favorite Slavic sweat pit, Wall Street Bath & Spa 88 in Manhattan, shvitzing together at around 200 degrees Fahrenheit is pretty standard, culturally speaking. Opened in 2008, the pelmeni-and-vodka-fueled banya looks many times its age (although not nearly as rank as the 134-year-old Russian & Turkish Baths in the East Village). Design cues are nostalgic rather than elevated: carved wood, framed grainy photographs, Sowietische mosaics. Admittedly, the Wall Street Bath is on the scummier end of global bathing culture — from Japanese sentō to Moroccan hammams — that has recently awakened urbane American appetites for shared spaces to get naked, relax, and sweat. At the newly opened Pocketbook Hudson in upstate New York, a Charlap Hyman & Herrero-designed spa features saltwater thermal pools alongside “somatic coaching” and consultations in “herbal modalities” for guests. Back downstate, wellness advocacy group Culture of Bathe-ing hosted the city’s first-ever “sauna culture festival” at Domino Park in Williamsburg for two weeks this past February. While municipal planners and architects a century ago dotted European and American cities alike with neighborhood bathing facilities for the benefit of public health, designers today approach these facilities as amenities for the wellness-concerned and the disposably incomed.

Take, for example, the swanky new location of the BATHHOUSE chain in Flatiron designed by the Rockwell Group. The firm places their three-level subterranean oasis “at the intersection of a no-frills banya and a luxury spa.” An inverted gold pyramid hangs futuristically above a blue-lit pool. Striated travertine and patinated metal panels line the walls. The sleek minimalism underpins a more neutral, tech-y approach to wellness architecture. The location even boasts six “Bitcoin-heated pools,” recycling the heat from hidden, reengineered crypto-mining computers. Sadly, your stress détente at BATHHOUSE occurs in a windowless former parking garage with none of the mountain views you’d experience at its spiritual forebearer, Peter Zumthor’s 7132 Thermal Baths (formerly Therme Vals). Opened in 1996, the hotel/spa complex in the Swiss canton Grisons helped Zumthor secure a Pritzker and has become an architectural pilgrimage for the well-heeled. High up in the Alps, where money flows and hydrotherapy is still taken seriously, Zumthor gave new life to a Germanic public bathing culture that — unlike across the Atlantic — never died. From Vienna’s Modernist, postwar bathing complex on the Danube by Max Fellerer and Eugen Wörle, to Herzog & de Meuron’s exquisite Naturbad Riehen, opened in 2014 outside Basel, bathing together in public, for health, is an enduring art form. And now, in a new century, Freikörperkultur is thriving thanks to renewed architectural attention and public investment.

While public bathing cultures in the Alps or Scandinavia predate the commodified wellness experiences trending in America today, all share design cues and exclusivity antics. The waiting lists to join the members-only vinterbad clubs in Helsinki, Oslo, and Stockholm are often years-long. One of the most immersive public bathing experiences in Northern Europe comes from the German chain Vabali — less for its bold architecture and more for its experience-oriented design and cultural appropriation. The first outpost opened in Berlin in 2014, and while coeds getting naked together is nothing special in Germany, Vabali is not your uncle’s East German swimming hole. The “Balinese wellness resort” features over a dozen sumptuous saunas and steam rooms, five pools, a floor for napping, “authentic” Buddha statues, and plenty of gongs.

Despite the transportive Southeast Asian design — a legitimate feat of architectural world building by Theune Spa Management GmbH — perhaps the most memorable moments of a trip to Vabali are the 12-minute Aufguss rituals. In these communal sweat sessions, a cheery Aufgussmeister drops scented snowballs on the sauna furnace, whips out a Balinese fan, and pumps hot air across guests’ naked bodies while they rub themselves with coffee grounds. This pastiche of rites is an exemplar of 2010s German ingenuity and free association between cultures; and the guests — myself included — eat it up.

Vabali, along with BATHHOUSE and thousands of other new-build spas around the world, cater to a budding culture of self-care and what I’d call embodied architecture — design concerned as much with sensory engagement as with functionality. Its beneficiaries are mainly those with means to pay for it, much like the cornucopia of wellness products and services that flood bourgeois lives in the 21st century. While entry to the domed Modernist Zhirgal Banya in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, cost me 250 som, or approximately $3, a similar afternoon experience at the Wall Street Bath costs about the same as a plane ticket to Florida. One hundred years ago in America, hygiene was a public concern that demanded public architecture. That impetus is gone, yet, as millennia of human culture tells us, individuals and society benefit from the great social leveling of communal swimming and relaxing. It’s more than just an amenity, it’s for the public good.

The culture of Lava Hot Springs, Idaho, embodies this civic ideal. Nestled along the old Oregon Trail, life in this town — population 383 — revolves around free inner tube rides down the Portneuf River and an impressive century-old spa facility deeded to the State of Idaho in 1902. Instead of a no-clothes policy, like you’d find at many of its European counterparts, here signs tell you: “No firearms in bathing area.” I stumbled upon this outpost of communal bathing culture during a road trip in the heat of election season in 2024. A man in a MAGA hat told me that the hottest of the natural springs helped his arthritis. Nearby, a Mexican family celebrated a birthday. Everyone seemed to know one another, or at least they were chitchatting. While the red synthetic awnings and French-fry snack bar lacked the spa-as-set-design aura, here on the rolling plains of Idaho, far from Instagram influencers and Dezeen render-porn, was an inspired third space for a true wellness, based in social connection. And thankfully, it’s nearly free.