BATHPOD, 2008
Located in San Francisco, this 850 s.f. addition to a 2,700 s.f. mid-century modern house was originally designed by Henry Hill in 1955. The addition is comprised of a master bedroom suite, library, and child’s room. The existing house’s character is the product of a unique lot with a steep switch-back twisting around the end, where a turret anchors the house, with a strong modernist composition of four intersecting volumes. The primary views are to the Golden Gate and the Headlands, framed by the broadest expanse of windows of the addition. The same window detailing and mullion cadence for the existing living room is extruded up through the addition, knitting together and reestablishing the primary volume of the house to include the addition. The new bathroom, or Bathpod, hovering above the wooden exoskeleton of the existing turret, is a fiberglass composite monocoque shell structure, oriented upward with a private skylight view into the canopy of trees. The toroidal form of the bathroom is informed by bathing activities, a continuous molded interior landscape and a void for the existing chimney passing through from below. The highly technical aspects of this project included receiving the first Building Department approval for use of load bearing fiberglass composites in San Francisco. I worked closely with an engineer from Lockheed on the Finite Element Analysis, addressing issues of producibility through the creation of test samples, cross referencing the US Coast Guard, racing, aeronautical standards and practice with building code standards, and consulted with a boat builder. The iterative design loop that this project entailed is representative of my interdisciplinary practice. Photos: © Bruce Tomb; All Rights Reserved