Charlotte de Limburg Stirum

Charlotte is from Brussels where she completed her Part 1 at UCL. In January 2020, she worked as an intern at Gluckman Tang in New York City, a practice specialised in the construction of galleries and museums.

Last year, with ADS5 she designed a self-sustaining communal building where inhabitants could grow food and fish in aquaponic farms.

She is really passionate about environmentally responsive architecture and model making. The RCA has allowed her to investigate previously untapped areas; exploring personal interests such as Net zero Carbon buildings and design for disassembly to ensure circularity.

Bathhouses, today, could be understood as a form of gathering, expressing, sharing and getting to know different cultures. The project begins with re-imagining the historical social functions of public baths, starting from the popular bathing ponds of Hampstead Heath in London. Alongside the ritual of bathing, the thesis borrows from the archetype of the Trenton bath house by Louis Kahn and by bringing both examples together, tries to combine them into a more socially engaged design project.

One of the crucial aspect of the archetype of the pavilion is its temporal condition. The pavilion is an architecture capable of reacting to the passage of time and its consequent alteration, whether this happens in the span of day/night, week/weekend, seasons/years. An architecture that can create but also respond to the everchanging physical and social condition of the surrounding environment.

In this perspectival drawing, the study of the Louis Kahn Bath House can be very fruitful as its purposes and architecture are very simple and precise, but also open to multiple reinterpretations in terms of use and relationship with the landscape. This reading of the Trenton Bath House as a pavilion in conversation with its infrastructure generates the initial key strategy for the project.

During the first term, I conducted an investigation of the Hampstead Heath Ladies’ ponds in London, an example that allowed me to experience in person and deepen my understanding of the potential of the bathing culture in public space. Hampstead Heath is a 320 hectares forest and parkland in the heart of London. Eighteen ponds were created as reservoirs to supply water to London in the 18th century.

People bathe all year round in the segregated Ladies' and Men's ponds (and the mixed pond which opens to the public during summer): such healthy addiction has become today, more a spiritual than a physical practice.

The Hampstead Heath ponds inspire the architectural proposition in the way this initially enclosed community of swimmers found resonance in the enlarged city of London.

The Maximilian Park is in the Northern quarter of Brussels. While until the 60’s the district was a very lively neighbourhood with cafés and a social life, later the area was transformed into an office district lacking any sense of belonging. The World Trade Center towers are emblematic of the “Manhattan Plan” designed in the 1960s to transform the area into an utopian international business center that meets the emerging challenges of a globalized economy. This picture captures the existing cultural, social and political condition of Maximilian Park, where its complex community is in need of a new type of public place.

The Maximilian Park brings together employees, with residents whose origins and nationalities vary. Moreover, since 2015, the park has become a landmark and an important step in the flow of international migration. The North district is a point of arrival for many foreigners and refuge for homeless people, considered as a 'transit' district where newcomers settle temporarily. This due to the proximity of the foreigners' service but has been amplified by the presence of the train station and by rents being among the lowest in the Brussels.

In other words, the social and occupational contrasts are strong. However, this kaleidoscopic community does not only describe fragmentation and isolation. They are at the origin of numerous initiatives of solidarity and collective rituals which are, without question, one of the major assets of the district.

The project is thought in collaboration with Lab North, a non-profit organisation launched by “a coalition of actors to revitalise the district”, bringing together architects, designers, artists, and other young creative people. The goal of Lab North is to activate this monofunctional district into a lively and inclusive part of Brussels. Small and big participatory workshops are taken that reveal the potential for a more diverse urban environment such as lectures, exhibitions, events, debates and workshops.

The project is conceived at the intersection of three different scales, the infrastructure, the architecture and the furniture, with the ambition to provide an organization of the public space that can allow the interaction between the different communities that use the park.

The permanent infrastructure is a system funded and maintained by the City of Brussels, that provides fundamental elements and utilities such as water, electricity, ponds, main pathways and the overall configuration of the landscape. This infrastructural system allows to open a field of possibilities for the construction of architectural elements that provide specific spaces according to necessities.

The pavilions, being more or less permanent, provide basic facilities such as changing rooms, lockers, showers and bathrooms, but also more flexible spaces for events, workshops, sport, educational and leisure activities.

This flexibility is further increased by the scale of the furniture which allows to quickly transform the nature and the use of the space according to the passing of time. This allows a wide range of events to happen in the same places in different moments of the day, of the week or of the year. Furniture can be built or carried by the inhabitants or stored within the spaces of the project. In the same way as in Hampstead Heath, the whole life of the project is centered around the three ponds.

If one imagines a day at the park, it could start in the morning with a market, at midday host the lunch of a team working in a nearby office and later become the perfect venue for a concert. Similarly, the lockers could be used by a refugee in need to store his belongings but also by a traveler who has to kill time between two trains, or even by a student willing to have a swim while waiting for his next class.

Responding to the continuously changing population of the area, the architecture is designed as a DIY system that can be collectively built and dismounted by small groups of inhabitants according to necessity, following simple construction methods.

The promenade through the park is punctuated by different water-fountains, benches, and streetlamps that lead the wanderers to the central public space. Once one walks inside the circle, the surrounding life ends, leaving space to an architecture of care. The nature is part of this architecture as well: trees and vegetation are creating more intimate and private spaces. It is a savage nature in opposition to a legible geometry.

Charlotte de Limburg Stirum

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Royal College of Art