Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Nerea Feliz
This paper looks at the Sutro Baths (1894-96) in San Francisco as an early example of the interiorization of public space, as a pioneer “Fun Palace” and a stage of consumption. The Sutro Baths were an encapsulated microcosms, the delirious dream of an ambitious millionaire, engineer, and later major of San Francisco. Sutro, a German immigrant and entrepreneur managed to encapsulate the ocean inside a spectacular glass palace. The history of these baths is also a reflection of the problems of social inclusion and exclusion derived from the privatization of public space. Besides being the largest interior space for bathers in the world at the time, the Sutro Baths are considered to be the first water park: a strange amalgam of pools, burgers, a taxidermy collection, a wax museum and a winter garden aspiring to the hanging gardens of Babylon. The climatized atmosphere and the ocean were sheltered, altered, domesticated and commodified: “Always as balmy and summery as mid-June…Here’s is the spot to loaf in tropic comfort like a Fiji Islander. No nudist and practically no missionaries, but everything else is Number One Triple A Tropical Style!”1 Sutro inaugurated a new typology, the lineage of which portrays a history of attempts to construct autonomous spaces for immersion within altered physics that are internalized and that offer a new type of socio-natural form. Inside these hedonistic bubbles, public life is reduced to a collective leisure experience.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Intl.2018.18
Volume Editors
Ángela García de Paredes, Iñaqui Carnicero & Julio Salcedo-Fernandez
ISBN
978-1-944214-18-0
