AXEL OLSON
The existing structure is a carwash operating under the Zippy Carwash franchise name. The sitework guides drivers around and through the space where employees hose down vehicles as they are loaded onto a mechanized track. As the vehicles are pulled through the narrow tunnel a linear sequence of water, soaps, lights, and sounds bombards drivers who have surrendered control of their vehicle into the “hands” of machines.
The interior is organized on a single floor along an extended corridor - a long garage wrapped in vaguely domestic architectural elements - that breaks off into smaller rooms adjacent to the main space. These rooms serve as offices, mechanical/service, and storage, and are not accessible to the public. The space is capped by a pitched blue roof that gives the building its distinct, almost anonymous, suburban identity and hints at its use.
A knolled diagram flatly conveys the materials and elements of the existing space, which include structural trusses and steel framework, standing seam roof panels, CMU blocks, metal panels, windows, doors, drop ceiling tiles and more. While many materials are submitted to constant soaking, they are not entirely water proof, and show slight signs of wear from the inside and out.
An ANT Diagram traces three types of spaces and the objects, interactions, and bodies that construct them. Each space results from a simulated experience that exists outside of itself, and is recreated through the interaction of bodies and objects as they reshape one another - a Carwash concentrates bathing into a compressed period of time, a Pool recreates a purified body of water to resist the body, and a Gym condenses objects that resist the body in order to reshape it.
The new program restructures the silhouette of the existing building into several linear strips. An exterior pool for leisure, interior lane pool for exercise, row of treadmills, circulation corridor, and enclosed rooms are filled with objects that fall somewhere within the pool and exercise stuff categories, and often interlope between.
As the roof is lifted from the structure, the sounds and visuals of recreational work echo from the spaces inside of the pool house. The animation exposes the objects and their attributes that comingle to create each space from left to right along the linear axis - a room for lifting and rehydrating, a room for changing and refreshing, a room for punching and kicking, a room for storing difficult-to-store things, and so on - create an atmosphere thick with the perspiration of bodies and materials. The pool, itself a body of water, spills out beyond the extents of the original footprint.
The main facade of the pool house displays the building’s contents as a shifting field of layers. The shallow depth of the structure makes the separation between each receding layer feel cramped when they are not experienced from the interior. The roof profile unravels the notion of “getting into shape” as the building leans away from its original figure.
A sequence of one point perspectives explores the pool house, aligning parallel or perpendicularly to the main linear space. Claustrophobic vignettes compose dense collections of things leaned within the rooms that run along the corridor. The ceiling tiles have been removed to let light in, but their gridded system remains as an armature for new situations. Roof panels slip and misalign, creating openings to the sky above the pool. The water is divided not only by a lane rope, but by the facade of the pool house which suggests a space for exercise and a space for leisure. Bodies of water seep, spill, absorb, and evaporate together, condensating on the skin of things throughout the space.