CB SAUNA
CB Sauna:
Two primary ideas influence CB Sauna.
#1 The Body
#2 CLT
Both push and pull one another culminating in a project.
First, The Body. The sauna is a machine for exercising the body through extreme exposures. This sweaty process provides health and wellbeing. For this reason the sauna maintains a tight relationship between form and the Body. Two conical forms cant, stretch, bulge and intersect with one another. Drawing similarities to our own body through curvature, and creasing, similar to a bent knee bulges and creases or a belly may fold over itself and crease. These qualities in the form welcome the body with familiarity and softness into the sauna to pursue health.
Second, CLT. Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) was a priority for three reasons: thermal mass, structural capabilities, construction affordances.
Thermal Mass: CLT’s high thermal mass provides great heat retention and thermal radiation. This minimizes the need for insulation and creates a consistent heat experience within the sauna both improving performance.
Structure Capability: CLT’s capacity to span long distances and support itself allows it to lean, fold, and cantilever without structural concern, forming the base for the conical forms.
Construction Affordances: As a Blank (5’x10’x3 cross laminations), CLT provides extensive formal possibilities. Utilizing digital fabrication, a CNC mill cut the complex miters and panels. This provides a high degree of accuracy and reliability, translating into a single day, rapid, erection process.
(CLT) Contrary to The Body. The flatness of a CLT blank is fundamentally non-bodily. This is the primary challenge of CB Sauna: how to balance two opposing ideas. This balancing act began with geometry; the panels fold around the perimeter of the conical exteriors, maintaining a constant relationship tangential to the cones surface and to the curvature associated with the body.
Further, this opposing relationship connections to The Body by comparing interior and exterior. The internal structures of our body do not have a one to one relationship to our external appearance, rather our bones have layers of muscles, tendons, fatty tissue before our skin wraps it up tight. Similarly the saunas structure has layers of hardware, weather barrier, secondary structure before the Shou Sugi Ban skin wraps it all up. Following this logic entering the sauna is like entering the interior of one’s body, warm and slightly foreign yet oddly familiar. Thus the CLT and The Body complement one another rather than oppose one another. The sauna harbors our body and becomes a body itself, a means for health and wellbeing.
EXTERIOR:
INTERIOR:
Entrance
Changing Room Entrance
Changing Room
CONSTRUCTION:
