Jenni Smith
Urban Building: The New Glasgow Steamie
thesis
My proposal is a response to the growing diversification of cities and their cultural frameworks due to immigration and travel. As cities begin to diversify, a sense of community is becoming increasingly important in new urban culture and creating places to facilitate social interaction between people from all walks of life is needed more than ever.
Across the world and history there are various different typologies of the bath house and they often appealed to one religion, culture, gender or social class: they were used as a means of segregation. Glasgow has a rich history of Bath house culture where public baths were once seen as a place of community interaction and socialisation. One of the first 19th century baths in Glasgow was located on London road which sparked a surge in new public baths across the city centre. Overtime as it became common practice for every home to have its own bathroom and toilet the need for bath houses became less and less and many of them closed .
My project attempts to create an inclusive cultural exchange hub that is welcoming to encourage people from different religious, cultural, social and generational backgrounds to reinstate the bath house culture that once existed in Glasgow. The cultural exchange hub consists of the bath house with a main central pool space, that will accommodate 250-300 people and a learning centre equipped with reading rooms and collaboration space.
Urban Housing
My thesis is a response to the mental health issue in the West of Scotland and aims to create a co-housing, co-working development within the Barras that accommodates for both the mental health sufferer and the carers themselves. There is a growing number of mental health illnesses across the UK however research indicates that this doesn’t necessarily mean there are more people developing mental health illnesses but rather there are more people accessing help and facilities as a result of the reducing stigma surrounding mental health.
I think this is an interesting crossover between domesticity and labour with the carers working and living on the same site creating a live-adjacent type of set up and then the patients trying to gain independence in domesticity and reintegrate into labour in one way or another whether it’s voluntary work education etc.
Domestic:
A series of supported accommodation to facilitate care across a spectrum of severity in mental health illnesses, from co-living units to ‘care home’ style living and creating environments for education, socialisation and development skills.
Labour:
Creating a live-adjacent scheme for carers. A series of accommodation and environments that equip mental health sufferers with the tools they need to reintegrate into society.
