jparchitectus
20-08-2005, 23:30
When the swim club at the Jewish Community Center of the Delaware Valley in Ewing, N.J., near Trenton, opens for the summer, the main attraction will be the Olympic-sized pool. But the club's shower room and changing facility, a National Register-listed bathhouse designed by Louis Kahn in 1955, has been in the public eye since Nathaniel Kahn's Oscar-nominated documentary My Architect: A Son's Journey premiered late last year.
A longtime magnet for students of modern architecture, the Trenton Bathhouse's pyramidal roofs and cruciform layout were inspired by Kahn's sketches of ancient ruins. "If the world discovered me after I designed the Richards Medical Building," the architect once said, referring to a 1958 commission in Philadelphia, "I discovered myself after designing that little concrete block bathhouse in Trenton (http://www.nationaltrust.org/magazine/archives/arch_story/051404.htm)."
A longtime magnet for students of modern architecture, the Trenton Bathhouse's pyramidal roofs and cruciform layout were inspired by Kahn's sketches of ancient ruins. "If the world discovered me after I designed the Richards Medical Building," the architect once said, referring to a 1958 commission in Philadelphia, "I discovered myself after designing that little concrete block bathhouse in Trenton (http://www.nationaltrust.org/magazine/archives/arch_story/051404.htm)."