07/01/2026
Sixteen years ago I wrote a thesis about disconnection.
About how modern life — with all its speed and convenience — was quietly eroding the kind of human contact that actually sustains us. I proposed a solution: the Bath-Salon. A public gathering place inspired by Roman baths, Russian banyas, Turkish hamams, and French salons — places where people historically came not just to wash, but to talk. About art, music, poetry, ideas. About life.
My professors struggled to understand what I was trying to build. I nearly didn't pass.
The site I chose was the abandoned McMillan Sand Filtration Plant on North Capitol Street in Washington, D.C. Underground catacombs filled with sand — like sand in an hourglass. From past to present, from one purpose to another, one container emptied and waiting to be filled again. Even the openings in the ground, once used to pour sand into the filters, were to become skylights. Light flowing in where water once flowed through.
At the center was a circular path lined with digital water walls — sheets of falling water that could sense an approaching person and open to let them through, then close again behind them. Passing through the water like crossing from one time to another — cleansing, releasing, arriving. The space itself responded to you. Around this path: experiential rooms, a winter garden, and several intimate spaces to gather — including a tea gazebo where you could sit, slow down, and simply be with another person. I never had time to render it. I find that very fitting.
The floor plan shows it all laid out underground — banyas, hamams, Finnish saunas, resting rooms, pools. Washington D.C. is one of the most multicultural cities in the world, and the Bath-Salon reflected that quietly — every culture represented has its own tradition of gathering around water and steam. Not as a theme, but as a truth. We have always known how to come together this way. We just forgot.
Sixteen years later, I think about that thesis often — usually while rushing to cover the next bill, answer the next email, get to the next thing. The irony is not lost on me. I designed a space meant to make people stop. And I rarely stop.
We are more connected than ever and more alone than ever. We have more tools for communication and less time for conversation. The culture of the banya, the hammam, the salon — where you sit with someone for two hours and talk about something that has nothing to do with productivity — that culture never really took root here.
The images below are from that thesis — the concept, the words, the space I imagined.
Maybe it still could be built.
I still wish someone would.
