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Communal Luxury: The Public Bathhouse

Throughout history, people have bathed in public rather than in private. Should we bring back the public bathhouse for the sake of sustainability?

At the same time, bathing was considered essential to prevent and cure diseases, following the Hippocratic ideas that people could maintain or restore the balance of bodily fluids by exposing the body to cold, hot, moist, or dry circumstances. However, in recent years, archeological research, thermal analysis, and heat transfer studies have made it increasingly clear that Ancient Roman bathhouses, in spite of their opulence, were remarkably energy-efficient buildings. For example, in a mountain village in China, a community bathhouse for 5,000 people is largely off-the-grid, pumping up its water from a well, heating it with solar collectors, and filtering the run-off wastewater from the showers and the toilets in basins filled with bamboo plants.

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