Spa in Town: A Rotated Square and Four Arcs Turn an Icelandic Hot Spring Into a Civic Plaza

Most thermal spas hide behind a wall and sell you a ticket. This one turns its back on that model: it takes a square, tilts it off the site boundary, and lets four curved pools bite into its edges until the whole thing reads less like a resort and more like a town square that happens to steam.

Spa in Town is a hot spring proposal for Iceland by Cheryl Han. It received Editor's Choice at Thermal Blue. The design rests on a simple geometric argument: combine the arc with the square, use the pairing to divide the site into spaces of many sizes, and make a small plot work harder while giving it the visual weight of a landmark that stands for the culture and daily life of its town.

A Tilted Square That Organises Everything Around It

The site plan is where the idea is clearest. A large paved square sits rotated within the property line, and at each of its corners a public hot spring pool is carved out by a circle or a curved wedge. The central activity area becomes the hinge of the scheme, with the entrance, changing area, accommodation, private springs, restaurant and activity zone tucked into the leftover triangles between square and boundary. Nothing is wasted: the rotation produces corner pockets that are naturally sized for smaller programmes, which is exactly the higher utilisation the project claims.

A winding stream threads diagonally across the plan, passing through the pools rather than around them. That choice matters. It stops the geometry from becoming a sterile diagram and ties the hard square back to the landscape it sits in, so each pool feels connected to the same body of water.

Curved Walls That Make Rooms Without Roofs

In the accommodation area, the arc moves from plan to section. A circular timber deck is enclosed by broken maroon walls, concentric and staggered, so the space feels sheltered while gaps keep it open to the steaming pool beside it. It is a compact lesson in how a single curved element can define a room, frame a view and still let people drift in and out. The strong colour against grey water and pale paving gives the deck a presence that a rectilinear pavilion would struggle to match at this scale.

Private Pools Set Low Behind Stone Planters

The private spa shifts the register. Bathers sit low in a curved pool, and the view outward is layered: stone-clad planters at the rim, trees beyond, and the edge of the entrance plaza in the distance. The heterogeneity the project aims for shows up here as a change in intimacy rather than a change in style. The same arcs and paving family carry through, but the enclosure tightens and the eye level drops, which is how the scheme separates quieter bathing from the busy centre without building a separate compound.

Showers on the Plaza Turn Bathing Into Street Life

The most persuasive image is also the least spa-like. On a circular paved plaza, oversized overhead showers stand in the open while a child plays under the spray and a dog walker passes by. This is where the title earns itself: the spa is literally in town, its water features doubling as public furniture. Planted paving and low hedges soften the edges, and the circle sits inside the larger grid of the plaza, repeating the arc-in-square logic at the scale of a single gathering point.

A Landmark Built From Local Memory, Not Height

The collages explain what kind of landmark is intended. Snowy mountains, town rooftops, greenhouses, sheep, a steam train and workers raking salt beside a steaming lagoon are stacked into one dense image, while a second set of panels gathers bathers by a reedy pond, a birch-lined path, a lava flow, a market stall and hikers. Rather than reaching for a tower or a sculptural object, the project positions itself as an epitome of the culture and life of its surroundings, a place assembled from what people already do there.

That reading changes how the plan should be judged. The tilted square is not a gesture for its own sake; it is a stage sized to hold markets, walks and bathing at once, with the stream and the pools as the shared thread.

Why This Project Matters

Spa in Town shows how far a disciplined pairing of two shapes can go. By rotating a square and letting arcs cut into it, Cheryl Han generates a hierarchy of large public spaces and small private ones on a limited site, without resorting to separate buildings for every function. The geometry does the planning, and the stream keeps it grounded in landscape.

The broader takeaway is about who a thermal spa is for. Here the hot spring is treated as civic infrastructure: showers on a plaza, decks beside the water, a central square open to passers-by. For anyone designing wellness typologies, it is a reminder that a landmark can be measured by how much everyday life it absorbs rather than how high it rises.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designer: Cheryl Han

Competition and award

Editor's Choice, Thermal Blue

Location

Iceland

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