Inner Travelers

FINALIST of London Urban Retreat: Haggerston Public Baths

+ FINALIST

London Urban Retreat: Haggerston Public Baths

[20443]

Inner Travelers

Team

Name: Yu-Ting Chung

Instagram: @tingchzy

Nationality: Taiwanese

Institution / Company: Studio Tingchzy Murals

Name: Philippe Malaussene

Instagram: @philippe_malaussene

Nationality: French, British and Nigerian

Institution / Company: Tom Stuart-Smith Studio

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In London, the sound of running water and rustling leaves, the transparent warmth shared between bodies and the quiet chemistry of endorphins, has been outsourced to elsewhere. Restoration is often imagined as escape. Inner Travelers resists this logic, proposing a journey not outward but inward: a withdrawal from the fuzzy city that draws attention back to the body, allowing us to recognise ourselves again and, through this recognition, reorient our relationship with the environment.

Inspired by the geothermal landscapes shared by New Zealand and Taiwan, the hot spring becomes both origin and medium. Steam and heat transform the former bath house into a living greenhouse, cultivating dense vegetation and dissolving the boundary between human and non-human life. The architecture studies eroded rock faces, mountain strata, and the behaviours of small creatures dwelling beneath roots and waterlines, forming biometric spaces that gently guide the nervous system and allow cognition to step aside.

Atop the cupola of the Haggerston Bath House sits a weathervane. It does not dictate direction, but reveals it. Inner Travelers follows this sensibility, shifting orientation from destination to attunement, shaped by temperature, moisture, sound, and stillness. Reclaiming the building’s civic legacy, non-gendered bathing spaces and shared water encourage honest exposure and relaxed presence, allowing community to emerge through equality, vulnerability, and time.

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Jury Comments

– David Aldana

Conceptually the project is very strong taking from the former function of the building but reinterpreting the bath itself to turn it into a an experience that trully takes you away from London into a tropical land. The addition of the rock, vegetation and steam to creat a microclimate is ingenious. Regarding the design the graphics of plans and diagrams can be improved where as the illustrations are very beautiful and original.

– Josefine Fokdal

Pay little to no tribute to the existing building and the surroundings.