Public Bathhouse and Grounds
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2024
This project is an investigation into what decolonial architecture could mean, not just as product but as collaborative and restorative practice. Designed for a former industrial site near Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, this bathhouse was charged with remediating the surrounding area and providing enjoyable spaces for bathhouse visitors as well as the many species of migrating birds on the Atlantic Flyway.
In approaching the concept, I decided to turn to community to determine what the future of the site could look like. As Bartram’s Garden is making efforts to include the local Indigenous community in future site imagining and restorative justice, I found it appropriate to root the problem-solving of the site in storytelling.
I listened to five stories from a Piscataway uncle, listening to tales of fishing weirs, forests, mounds, sweat lodges, and longhouses. Reimagined as follies as well as site solutions, these ritual and significant places can serve a distinct purpose in remediating the land and healing the community. Suddenly, the mounds serve as a landscape cap to heavily polluted soil; the longhouses provide shade in a heating climate; the sweat lodge becomes a bathhouse; the forest is a habitat for the birds that migrate south, passing through Philadelphia; and the fishing weir creates shallow pools where plants can help to bioremediate the Schuylkill River.
From the sites, I developed five folly drawings.
Each of the drawings is surrounded by a story about how its role in the land helps the environment, told in the style of Indigenous oral tradition. Each story is told from the perspective of someone living in 2050 who has experienced the site as a living, healthy place in the heart of a diverse and multicultural Philadelphia.
This project asks: what is the future of reconciliation in the built environment? What does it actually mean to practice decolonial architecture? And how can community storytelling determine the future of our public works?