Liquidrom is a rare bathhouse; newly
arrived but singing with quality, totally modern with a great deal of
soul. It definitely caters to a contemporary crowd –
multigenerational but skewed towards the professional – the folks
you'd see at a swank club or an artsy cirques review. (That crown
topping the building in the photo? That's the Tempodrom on the other
side of the building, a swanky big venue.) Liquidrom is outfitted in
concrete walls and raw slate floors, but it doesn't ever feel cold or
Bloc. The stone lines are graceful, often curved, proportions
generous. Iron-caged mysig candles
and sculptural flora line the halls, on the walls hang the kind of
modern pop art inspired by the circles that inspired mandala-makers.
There's soft electronica piped through invisible speakers, vaguely
new-age-holiday. Liquidrom knows what it's doing. Liquidrom wants to
be cool, and it is cool.
The changing rooms are large and
gym-like, if your neighborhood gym goes in for mahogany paneling and
shiny black tile. Lockers are secured with a rather complicated
key-chip-bracelet, and because this is Germany (home of the Free Body
Culture dreaded by Scandinavians) the locker rooms are coed, the
bathhouse is coed and largely clothing-discouraged, except for at the
bar and in the big pool. Yeah, there's a bar, and a free glass of
prosecco the night I visited, and nightly live music, which ranges
from jazz to bossa nova to cinematic downbeat. In between sweating
and soaking, there are generous resting rooms (indoor and out –
where in December you can watch steam curl off your skin) filled with
comfortable lounge chairs to cool off and sip whatever.
Lining the minimalist half-wall
corridors are nearly a dozen different rooms in which to sweat or
soak. 4 different saunas, each a different temperature (from 65 to
90), some featuring aromatic steams or walls of pink Himalayan salt.
Each is labeled with bathing information and expectations (wash your
seat in the steam room, in the saunas you must have a towel under
your butt and feet, etc.) Besides the large pool, there are several
soaking pools, each filled with salty thermal water. None reach
jacuzzi-heat, but the outdoor pool is warm under the snowflakes, and
one pool is so salinated your body floats effortlessly. In between
these are cold plunges and huge-headed showers, and passing trays of
cold fruit juice and warmed honey for self-massage carried by
beautiful waitrons.
The largest pool in Liquidrom is a
centerpiece of atmospheric modulation. The ceilings are domed in
wide, loomingly post-deco arches; the kind of pool where city elite
might swim, deep under Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The salty warm water
glows with colored light, refraction patterns ripple over everything.
The electronica is piped here too, echoing weirdly off so many
curves, but is even more impressively heard Underwater, where the
music hollows and billows like whalesong from submarine speakers. So
after a hour perusing a plethora of little steams and sweats and
soaks, after your senses are relaxed by the wandering of sensorial
slowness in a realm of remarkably quiet architecture, imagine lying
just covered with warm water somehow holding you afloat, while
colored light wafts across your eyelids and shadowy rhythms nod in
your ears. When the night's visiting 12-string guitar began picking
its silvery way through the waves, my mind joined my muscles in
relaxation and I drifted, balanced in a luminous place.
LIQUIDROM: Urban Bathing-Culture
