DREAMPOOL is a spatial experience of virtual architecture based on the public bathhouses of northern China during the 00s - 10s. It focuses on the significance of nostalgia and the connection between architectural space and the spiritual world.
The Dreampool began with my own experience and interest in Bathhouse and Dreamcore* videos that were popularized on the Chinese internet during the pandemic. Like every nostalgia trend emerging, such as steampunk, some young Chinese youth are starting to miss their childhood life at a time when they are losing their public space and socialization during and after the pandemic. Public bathhouses, as a collective memory of the Chinese Genz generation, have become part of their dreamcore. People miss their childhood time with families, the sauna and the sound of showers, the element of water and the vanishing public bathhouses.
To create a space and atmosphere that have a shared memory and culture of one generation, I started with researching the commonalities of bathhouses through different times, interviewing friends who had similar experiences, and extracting the typological matrix of different elements of Chinese Bathhouse. As a result of the analysis, the bathhouse was abstracted into five elements. Next is a virtual " recreation " of the lobby, the stairwell, the locker room, the shower room, the bathing pool, the warm spring, the cinema room, the sauna, the hallway and the waterpark, etc. The rooms in the film do not represent any particular bathhouse, but rather a highly abstracted typological realization.
Based on the aesthetics of Dreamcore and liminal space, Dreampool criticizes the "uneasiness" of liminal space caused by the highly convergent interiors of modern architecture, creating a refuge from reality, a virtual infinity in the fragmented reality of the modern public space. Dreampool presents the randomized journey in which deja vu rooms, warm unsafeness, and nostalgia for a particular experience consist of
the process of self-finding. It ultimately answers the question, "Who am I and where am I from. "