A Thermal Bath for Eggleston, Virginia: The Making of Water, Stone, and Light

Through the study of architecture, and the thermal bath, one must ask, — How can the experience of springwater, heavy, stone walls, and light contribute to the ritual of bathing? — The making of stone walls is the nature of the bath.

The wall is the primordial state of architecture, and is given autonomy through its passion. The beginning of architecture is mass, and the articulation of it is in the carving, and shaping of the mass to form a place. The passion of the wall is in the power of its nature for placemaking. Not just ordinary place but place for one to sit, and a place that you, or I can inhabit, a near forgotten element of the pre-industrial era of architecture. This is the power of the ruin. The ruin allows for the notion of placemaking (which for the ruin is place-made). The ruin is stripped of all necessity, it is there as the object of architecture, and as the beginning for potential life. The ruined building's infill is gone, and what is left are the bones of the building, the permanent, the solid, and the everlasting.

But why so much importance upon permanence and lasting in an impermanent world? Because for the very reason that one from another life, or civilization stumbles across a meadow, and upon it rests a thermal bath, in ruin. The ruin, lit only by the sun, reveals itself. In shadow and light, one can then understand the poesis of architecture, and the whisper of architecture will be heard. The public will be moved, and will say, "architecture has moved me, and has touched my soul." This is permanence amidst the impermanent.