Integrated Design Studio | Fall 2023
Professor Jesse Reiser
Princeton University
Project Site: Inujima, Japan
In the traditional Finnish Ritual of Sauna, families and communities will gather in 190 degree heat and 5% - 20% humidity for day long celebrations of holidays and historically in some cases, to give birth and to prepare one’s body for death. This project looks to deliberate discomfort as an enabler for a dynamic understanding of art, architecture, and landscape. The sauna ritual is synthesized with an industrial centrifugal fan to engage the user in a participatory experience of a larger geothermal infrastructural system.
This ritual has a physical intensity, it is about extremes of fire and ice, illuminating discomfort in parallel with the act of sauna itself, this messes with our senses and perception by situating the user in a state of psychotropic alleviation.
