Bryggen BathhouseBryggen BathhouseBryggen Bathhouse

We surveyed the ledges at 200 mm intervals and found that a deck at +0.000 would need 340 m³ of blasting. Instead the building sits on nine pad foundations drilled into the rock, and the deck steps twice — 180 mm at the entrance, 180 mm again at the pool. Nothing was blasted.

The bath is used all year. In January the water in the fjord is 4 °C and the pool is 33 °C, and people go from one to the other in six seconds. The steps had to be wide enough for that, so they are 1 500 mm and made of the same concrete as the tank.

The sea side is a colonnade: ten 220 × 220 glulam posts at 2 280 mm centres, carrying a flat roof with a 400 mm upstand. Between the posts is glass, and behind the glass is a bench 22 metres long, which is the actual building.

The spruce was charred by hand — three faces, brushed once, oiled once. It is a maintenance decision, not a stylistic one: the salt here takes ordinary cladding in eleven years.

The roof is flat, and it drains inward to two outlets in the plant room, so nothing runs down the posts and stains them. The clerestory above the changing rooms is the only source of daylight on the landward side, and it is enough because everything inside is pale.

The pool hall is lined in aspen above the water line and oiled oak below the bench. In the steam it is the only warm thing you can see, which is the point.