Cooling tower in Tangshan is an industrial icon and a repository of collective memories. Our project seeks to repurpose this tower, extending its life spatially and in communal recollections, and we wish to showcase sustainable approaches as a model to organically revitalize industrial remnants.
As a pivotal node in the landscape axis, the tower's verticality demands strategic use of space. Internally, an empty box is inserted to be the city's living room and extend public access. Externally, a new translucent and operable skin along with the vertical circulation enhance the cooling tower’s dynamic and lively urban image.
To evoke a 'wet memory,' we propose transforming the tower into a bathhouse. The intimate community relationships from the last century add a social attribute to bathing. The bathhouse, tied to the industrial context in urban scale, responds to the site's memory and actively engages in ecological microclimate cycles.
This reflective nostalgia infuses remaining city images from the industrial age with renewed vitality, weaving the memory of a generation back into the city narrative. It continues the past into future decades.
