Taking the plunge: Nicholas Grimshaw's new spa at bath is a fine building, but its clinical austerity is surely at odds with its purpose

Apollo, Oct, 2006 by Gavin Stamp

I suppose I can take a little credit because I was a member of English Heritage's Historic Areas & Buildings Advisory Committee when the proposal came up to fit a new spa building designed by Sir Nicholas Grimshaw into the delicate, historic Georgian fabric of Bath. What won us over was, I think, the thrilling concept of an open-air rooftop pool in which swimmers in spa water could gaze over the roofs and chimneypots towards the great central tower of Bath Abbey. And so it has come to pass (Fig. 1). The new Royal Bath building may be way over budget, three years late and still dogged by litigation, but the result is a triumphant success. The visitor can now be steamed, pummelled, coated in Bath mud and enjoy all sorts of (expensive) treatments in what is now called Thermae Bath Spa, but, above all, can splash about in the warm, mineral-rich water high up under the open sky in the centre of England's oldest and most celebrated spa.

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Bath is back in business, and Grimshaw's building already looks set to revive its fortunes. Conspicuously modern it may be, with its relentless glass walls, but it also represents a welcome return to tradition. 'One would think the English were ducks; they are for ever waddling to the waters', complained Horace Walpole in 1790. But, as the late E.S. Turner continued in his Taking the Cure, published in 1967, 'the English are much less spa-minded than they used to be. They are tourists, not curistes. They tend to look askance at those dank, if not dubious, wells capped by flanking pavilions, those dingles haunted by arthritic semi-ambulants'. This is reflected in the wretched recent history of Bath. The National Health Service withdrew support for water treatments in 1976. Two years later, a suspected fatal bug in the water resulted in the closure of all the baths. Scandalously, access was denied to the sacred hot waters bubbling up from the ground that had been enjoyed since Roman times.

All that now remains to redeem Bath is for the Roman Bath and King's Bath by the Pump Room to be reopened for swimmers and not just to be treated as archaeology to be gazed at by tourists. But, for the moment, we have Thomas Baldwin's late-Georgian enclosure of the Cross Bath, restored and rebuilt by Donald Insall Associates (unfortunately in a manner that makes nonsense of the historic fabric); John Wood's Hot Bath, now roofed over with glass; and Grimshaw's New Royal Bath tucked behind. This is a multi-storey structure: a stone-faced cube within glass walls that follow the street lines on two sides. At the bottom is the Minerva Bath (the Romans dedicated their spa here to that fierce goddess), surprisingly curvaceous in plan (for a minimalist, high-tec architect, that is), in which swimmers can negotiate around four reinforced-concrete 'dendriform' columns. These spreading supports rise up through the building--through the changing and treatment rooms, and through the circular glass enclosures in the science-fiction steam rooms--to support the immense weight of the rooftop pool.

All this is a triumph of engineering, but is it great architecture, worthy to be compared with the creations of John Wood and others that make Bath so distinguished as a Classical city? The problem is that architects of Grimshaw's generation and outlook cannot engage with other architectural styles and have a Puritanical horror of colour and decoration. The size and confinement of the site required that the new building be properly urban, following the street lines, but why does the exterior have to be almost all of a pale green glass? When in doubt, a modern architect will always reach for the glazing catalogue. As for the interiors, all surfaces are relentlessly, tediously white. The underwater lighting around the columns in the Minerva Pool creates interesting effects (especially at night), but the possibilities of colour and pattern are ignored. The aesthetic is clinical rather than enjoyable--but that was always true of the Modern Movement.

I am not proposing that the new building should have been Classical (although why not?), but that spa architecture could be richer and more decorative. This is suggested by examples in continental Europe, where the medicinal and social value of spas is taken far more seriously. Above all, there is the most enjoyable swimming pool I know, that at the centre of the Gellert Medicinal Baths in Budapest, a city with a bathing culture that, as in Somerset, goes back to the Romans but was here sustained by the Ottomans. These baths are on the site of thermal springs at the foot of a hill on the west side of the Danube. The present buildings, a complex of baths both enclosed and open air (Fig. 3), treatment rooms and a hotel, were built by the municipality and begun in 1911 to the designs of Artur Sebestyen, Armin Hegedus and Izidor Sterk. The style is a late jugendstil classical, heavy and richly decorative. The main swimming pool (Fig. 5) is a double-height space where the pool is surrounded by columns faced in textured ceramic. Warm spa water gushes not from stainless steel pipes (as in Bath) but from grotesque ceramic heads (Fig. 4). Most enjoyable are the vaulted hot baths, where the wails are lined with deep-turquoise-blue tiles and decorative mosaic, enhanced with ceramic sculpture.