Arts Thread

This project proposes the insertion of a new bathhouse into Aberdeen’s active wastewater treatment plant, re imagining industrial infrastructure as a regenerative system that gives back to the city. It utilizes the treated effluent water and recovers the waste heat from the plant, both typically discharged unused into the North Sea, and repurposes them as resources to power a civic leisure space and irrigate surrounding landscape and green roofs. Elevated above the working plant, the linear bathhouse bridges across the different wastewater treatment stages. The spatial sequence of pools from hot baths, steam rooms, warm pools, and cold plunges, corresponds to the temperature zones of the treatment process below, from the neutral primary treatment to the heat-intensive sludge digestion areas. Waste becomes wellness—The bathhouse becomes a public interface with hidden infrastructure: revealing, softening, and celebrating the unseen systems that sustain us. It is not merely an object inserted into the site, but an architectural bridge that links infrastructure with public life. A space that transforms taboo into resource and process into public life.