03/04/2026
San Francisco once had bathhouses across the city.
What would it mean to design for ritual again?
The Architecture of Ritual: Why Bathing Is Back
A conversation on bathing, architecture, and slowness — with Fjord, Studio Ahead, Studio Anand Sheth, and The Ofuro Company. Moderated by Flora Tsapovsky.
Last month, .space invited us to curate a panel exploring bathing culture. Why now, why it’s back, how it’s defined, who it’s for, where and when it started in San Francisco, and what’s ahead.
From site-specific questions and the nature of contrast therapy, to the history of bathing and designing for the optimal guest experience, we covered a lot of, shall we say, steam. More to unfold in the coming days.
In the meantime, we leave you with an interesting snippet from the conversation, shared by leading local architect Anand Sheth (.g.sheth): “Programming has allowed us to speak more eloquently and more directly about resetting the nervous system versus maybe what we used to call it. Zoning out, or getting out of dodge, or whatever else you used to do for isolation—this is like a way of saying you don’t actually have to isolate in order to reset. I feel like it’s interesting. I’m somebody who’s always on my phone and I used to self-regulate on my phone, but when you’re in a sauna, you literally cannot use your phone because it’s wet, it’s hot, it gets overheated, it’s fogged up, right? So it kind of brings you to another level—I would say—of relationship with your nervous system, which to me has been a discovery this past year and I absolutely love it.”
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