It’s definitely not everyone’s cup of tea, but many find the heat of a sauna actually relaxing. Most of these establishments are now found inside modern buildings, but a few try to offer a more rustic and nature-inspired experience with an outdoor sauna. Unsurprisingly, most of these are designed like small wooden cabins to blend with their surroundings and evoke that sense of a nature escape.
What better way to connect with nature, however, than to build such a freestanding room in a way that doesn’t hurt Mother Nature? At least not as much as a regular building would. Although a “green” sauna might not have been the original motivation for this “Upcycled sauna,” it still has the same effect of giving you peace of mind and body as you relieve your stress inside a box made from people’s trash or leftovers.
Designer: Tomáš Dvořák, Lenka Bažík (ika architects)
Plenty of materials don’t make the cut in the process of making new products. Some materials are also simply discarded when they’ve reached the end of their use. While it might be impossible to reuse them in the exact same product, unless they undergo some form of recycling, they could serve a new purpose in some other product that’s completely unrelated to their original design.
Wooden sleepers and pallets, for example, would become the foundation and structure of a cubical room that would eventually become this sustainable outdoor sauna. Sheep wool that would simply be thrown away is transformed into insulation that would keep the heat from escaping through the walls. Corrugate fiberglass laid out on a grid and layered like scales become the distinctive exterior of this sauna. Admittedly, it doesn’t look like a work of art, but its true value lies not in what it has become but in what it has been.
The materials were sourced from construction sites, locals, friends, and other people, giving what would become trash a new lease on life. Even more interesting is that, once you know how the sauna was made, you begin to wonder what story each piece has to tell. It gives the room an almost spiritual or at least social vibe, connecting you not just to the Earth but to people and places as well.
To top it all off, there’s a cooling pool outside, though it looks more like a tub for a single person. It’s made from an old discarded mining cart that’s painted gold, perhaps giving emphasis to the saying that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.