CITYSPACE: LES BAINS VIEUX-MONTRÉAL: A 19TH-CENTURY WAREHOUSE BECOMES A PLACE OF CONTEMPLATION

Full steam ahead for an ancient cleansing ritual

LISA ROCHON Saturday, March 7, 2009

The desire to clean and heal the body with water inspired the art of the spa. Throughout the ages, temples have been built with grandeur and solemnity to celebrate what is an ancient ritual. In Budapest, beneath the art-nouveau Hotel Gellert, I remember a long corridor, clad in tiny blue mosaics, that led to the hot-spring pools. There were portholes in that corridor, and I could see figures floating by that looked as if they'd been drawn by Betty Goodwin. Entering the pool, I noticed an old man with his elbow raised to a cascade of water. His eyes were closed. His jaw was set. It was as if the arthritis in his arm was being willed away.

In Canada, the architecture of the water spa is typically expressed either as a rustic, back-to-the-woods adventure or, in our cities, through a highly scrubbed, sanitized aesthetic. Until now.

Les Bains Vieux-Montréal by Saucier + Perrotte architectes drowns conventional spa design, leading us instead into an interior that pushes us back into our minds. It's operated by the Gestion Rivière du Diable (GRD), a Montreal-based group - intent on building healing spas in prime locations across Canada - that sometimes gives in to tiresome clichés of spa design.

Its wood encampment at Mont Tremblant plays on traditional, wood-lined expectations of what a spa retreat should be. Another of its spas, drawn as a miniature, overly cheesy Swiss village, is planned for Whistler, B.C., in time for the 2010 Olympics. At GRD's Scandinave Spa in Collingwood, Ont., near the Blue Mountain ski resort, a rustic retreat has been built in a thin forest. Rather than being sensitively tied to the site, though, the hot and cold pools feel exposed, even though they're surrounded by wooden spa buildings. The best part is daring each other to roll in the snow; but shrieks of delight are not appreciated. You could risk a dressing down by spa staff.

Yet, what if a spa's design - rather than the behavioural police - provokes a deep tranquillity all its own? Les Bains Vieux-Montréal invites you to succumb to an interior landscape - a seductive topography of subtle changes in the floor and ceiling levels. Architect Gilles Saucier has produced a brilliant reinvention of the ground floor of a 19th-century warehouse overlooking the St. Lawrence River in Old Montreal. What was once the loading dock has been transformed into a large hot pool. Throughout the 12,000-square-foot (just over 1,100-square-metre) space, there is no ambivalence about the purpose of the baths. The map is charted, the territory marked. Into an underworld of contemplation you will go.

With Les Bains Vieux, Saucier has proven himself once again to be a master at sculpting interiors as if they were darkly moving landscapes. In fact, the spa continues his portfolio of cinematic architecture - at the Communication, Culture and Technology Building at the University of Toronto's Mississauga campus; and, in Montreal, at the Cinémathèque québécoise, the Jardin botanique's first nations pavilion, and the Michel Brisson men's clothing boutiques. Saucier imagines architecture as theatre: Stairs and benches clad in black steel are thrust into space, windows are superframed to direct views, and wooden ceilings are sculpted to undulate like a path in a forest.

For Saucier, the landscape is a composition of muscles and bones. He sets one gesture off from another, making clean the divide between wood and stone. And light is treated as if its source is unknowable. "I like imprecision when it's against precision," says Saucier. "The falling water, smell, interior temperature. There are no pot lights in the ceiling. The light comes from the floor or from cracks in the wall. Light is always in play, or you can be more remote in the darker space."

Here is how you might imagine his spa space, if it were a series of cinematic freeze frames:

Frame 1: A cascade of water slips down a wall of glass. This is the only advertisement for the spa - the historic designation of the warehouse prevents any exterior advertising. A narrow slot in the wall discreetly flags the front entrance. The door is deeply recessed. Inside, visitors enter the lobby. Water slips down another monumental sheet of glass. The hot pool lies beyond, past the waterfall, although the specifics of that space remain invisible to the eye.

Frame 2: You're now inside the room of hot and cold waters. The white-and-grey marble mosaics that cover the floor and the walls are cold to the eye. The ceiling of ipe, a Brazilian hardwood, warms the visual field. A polished Italian-slate bench is a monolith. To the right is a wall of glass, and it's not tinted turquoise; Saucier says he detests the sterility conveyed by other spas through what he calls "the perfect colour of compromise." Instead, the glass is acid-etched to allow a white, smoky tone, like vapour. Looking out toward the street is a simple, horizontal graphic of mullions on the windows.

Frame 3: Here is the saltwater hot pool. Across the room, the cylindrical rain shower is seemingly suspended in the sky. In the pool itself, water gushes from a horizontal slot in the white marble wall. Light comes from the space revealed between the near-touch of the marble on the walls and the wood of the ceiling.

Frame 4: The relaxation lounge, where you wait for a rubdown in one of 14 massage rooms, reveals the original stone wall of the historic warehouse. Here, there is a hint of Peter Zumthor's iconic Therme Vals spa (1996) in Switzerland, which was built stone by stone and set into a mountain slope. Both Zumthor and Saucier are engaging in the silence that architecture can create, one in which the flash of style and technology are blocked. In Montreal, Saucier has set a wall of glass about a foot away from the stone wall, so as to hyper-reveal the building's history. The thick, original columns are wrapped in steel, and the floor shifts from marble to wood. Visitors can lounge on a long, Z-shaped, heated slate bench.

Frame 5: The sauna room: into the mind, into a womb of wood. Enlivened by strips of fluorescent light, it is above all not depressing. Saunas are always depressing, Saucier says. There is no contact between people. Here, the sauna is a place to meet, be animated. The ceiling is ipe; the walls are made of yellow poplar. Strips of light dance in between.

Frame 6: Exit - work, home - into those other worlds.
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