Matter Design produced an intimate and contradictory set of experiences in Microtherme. Upon approach, the occupant is confronted by a hovering wooden mass punctured by a singular and limited port enticing curiosity about the interior. Once under the wooden mass, a concrete world is revealed and rendered elastically. From this vantage point, other people occupying the space appear to be draped in a concrete fabric, producing the experience that the people themselves are supporting this engulfing mass. Once standing, this rhetoric inverts as if the occupants are pulling the concrete down. This voluptuous concrete performs beyond this optical illusion. It is also radiating a variety of temperatures producing a variety of thermal experiences for the occupants. While the lower experience is similar to one of sun bathing, the upper level experience is one of swimming in a concrete bath.
Description of project by Matter Design
Architecture exists at the confluence of form, material, environment, and structure. While this odd set of bedfellows informs architecture, this overlay produces an experience for the occupant. Microtherme is a condensation of thermal and sensorial experiences that produces contradictions of conventional notions of comfort. Sitting adjacent to a burning fire on a cold night is a known comfortable experience, yet it does not fall within the ASHRAE standards of the ‘Thermal Comfort Zone’—a rather narrow definition that assumes continuity over difference. The human body is capable of, if not excited by, thermal extremities. In the conception of the Roman bath complex, occupants move from extremity (caldarium) to extremity (frigidarium), managing their own thermal delight. As opposed to a liquid bath, Microtherme is a radiant one that co-mingles extremities into singular thermal contradictions. It frames the occupant's experiences from the act of rolling under a monolithic object to standing up inside the bath, the occupant is confronted with another world inside, producing the illusion and thermal experience of wading in a bath of voluptuous concrete.
On Process
Microtherme is constructed from a machined mold of expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam that is coated in a water based surfacing compound. This mold is cast by spraying Glass Fiber Reinforced Concrete (GFRC) with a lining of copper tubing to allow warm and cool water to pass through in order to control the temperature of the concrete.
