Architect Polina Stepanova
ArchitectBoredom Palace
HM of London Urban Retreat: Haggerston Public Baths
+ HONOURABLE MENTION
London Urban Retreat: Haggerston Public Baths
[20003]
Boredom Palace: Embrace Idleness – Enjoy missing out
Team
Name: Polina Stepanova
Instagram: _theattickeeper_
Nationality: Russian
Institution / Company: ENSA Versailles
Name: Elizaveta Buiakova
Instagram: @_limonchela_
Nationality: Russian
Institution / Company: ENSA PVS
When was the last time you did nothing without guilt? Contemporary culture enforces permanent productivity. Even rest is instrumentalised: bodies are optimised, leisure is monetised, idleness is framed as failure. Cities intensify this logic through speed and fear of missing out. The ability to withdraw has disappeared.
The Boredom Palace responds by proposing architecture as a tool for non-productivity. Rather than fixed programs, it offers spatial devices that allow to disengage, hesitate, wander. Like a bored child staring at a rug until imagination takes over and the ornaments begin to dance, idleness becomes a trigger for creative processes.
The largest volume—the former pool—is intentionally inefficient. It is transformed into an open, outdoor main street, exposed to light and air, functioning as a porous public ground. Open to everyone, it connects London streets with London skies. The former baths are contemplated as an self-sufficient art piece, while a water-filtration installation reinforces the relationship with the climate and supports the building’s autonomy.
Retreat facilities develop around this main “street”, offering spaces for physical rest, mental and creative withdrawal, solitude. Circulation and light slow perception and dissolve goals.
Here are the tools. The choice of how to be unproductive remains yours.
Jury Comments
– David Aldana
Strong concept and graphics. The idea of allowing your self to stop without fear is powerful and much needed in a city life. The program is a bit disconnected and could fall more into this concept of spaces where the form of doing nothing is pushed to the limit.
– Josefine Fokdal
Strong conecept: “architecture as a tool for non-productivity.” But the design does not draw context into the picture. There is a beauty in the way they offer an interior analog to the exterior of the city.
Responses