Catalan grotto

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1997 by Raymund Ryan

To reach the new Sant Sebastia Baths, take the Transpordador cable car from Montjuic across Barcelona Harbour to the built-up spit of Barceloneta. The cars swing across the sky, above ferries and restaurants and trawlers, to dock into a stocky cast-iron tower, an appropriately robust symbol of commerce and invention for the Catalan metropolis. At the foot of this lift tower, installed for the Great Exhibition of 1888, lies the recently completed pool complex by Jose Lapena and Elias Torres.

The Sant Sebastia Baths replace a historic bathing facility and amalgamate numerous local swimming clubs into one structure. Old photographs depict an open-air hive of physical activity, a social condenser which later became derelict and was eventually demolished. The site faces away from the harbour directly onto the Mediterranean and the city's public beach. This is where the thin dense grid of Barceloneta (traditionally housing fishermen and their families) breaks into a linear strip of warehouses and docks. The architects see their building as another piece of portside infrastructure, a pragmatic container which raises swimmers above the level of the ocean and uses its roof for sundry pleasure.

The building is a plain concrete box. In fact, Torres thinks the concrete may be too finely textured, unlike the mottled, archaic character of the neighbouring structures. Exploiting the plastic potential of in-situ concrete are the shunted entrance porch (closest to the city), small idiosyncratic openings in the beach palisade, a delicate pavilion to announce and shade an external bar, and the tilted visor shielding the horizontal vitrine of the oceanside elevation.

The immediate site is a rectangle built up in subsidiary walls and terraces about a primary volume for the principal pool. You enter through the skewed corner projection into a transverse linear strip housing reception, a cafeteria and a generous staircase leading to a similar slot of communal space above. Swimmers enter the pool through another linear and layered zone at right angles to the staircase. They go through their own filtration process; first a corridor with a low zip of windows towards the Transpordador tower, then a deep bank of changing cubicles and lavatories before a final thin strip of compulsory showers. This brings you to the competition area (the clubs include some serious swimmers), with a 25m x 32m pool flanked on one side by a longitudinal tribune of raked spectator seating. The water is level with the surrounding deck so that you are conscious of a kind of visual trick. With windows necessarily clear of condensation, the horizontal plane of liquid seems to extend infinitely outwards, to the sea beyond.

The building is more a shell than a box. The roof above the pool is of timber with laminated trusses billowing downwards - 'a virtual awning', according to Torres; small rooflights are sprinkled across its soffit. By internalising the spanning members, the entire project is legible from the outside as a homogeneous sculptural form. Inside, the upwards curve of the trusses directs the eye towards the panoramic window and the massive walls of blue block. (The concrete walls have an inner skin of blocks dipped in blue glaze and laid with perforations exposed to help absorb the stark noise of the pool in use. The blue suggests a watery coolness, an industrial grotto perhaps.)

Pragmatic and bunker-like, the Sant Sebastia Baths do not have the intricacy of other work by Lapena and Torres. However, the architects cannot resist a splendidly strange gutter that slips downwards across the side elevation to hang above the public beach. With their original idea of rainwater shooting outwards denied in favour of a municipal path, Lapena and Torres have had to redirect the chute inwards via a CorTen gully to disappear within the building fabric. It's a memorable talisman on a structure which recalls both the heroic massing of industrial plant and the deck of a transatlantic liner.