Thermal Blue: A Hot Springs Complex Where Five Buildings Turn Inward Toward the Steam

Most bathhouses wrap the water inside a building. Thermal Blue does the opposite: the water claims the centre of the site, and the architecture steps back to its edges. The buildings form a ring of low, faceted volumes around a basin of terraced pools. They act as spectators as much as shelters, and steam drifts between them like the real subject of the project.

Thermal Blue is a project for hot spring pools by Justyna Kozera, Karolina Turek, Paulina Mazur and Joanna Idec. It received the People's Choice Award at Thermal Blue, a result that reflects how directly its imagery speaks to anyone who has imagined sinking into warm water under a cold sky.

Five Volumes Arranged Around a Single Basin

The axonometric breaks the programme into five colour-coded pieces: restaurant, shops, entrance, administration and wellness. Each piece is its own body with angled walls and an irregular outline. None of them sits in the pools. They hold the perimeter of the sloping ground, while the bathing terraces drop between them in irregular, interlocking shapes. This keeps the pools continuous and lets each building claim a different edge of the same view.

The ground floor plan shows how deliberate that ring is. The wellness block, with its massage room, steam baths and locker rooms, sits on the western flank and opens directly onto pool terraces. The shopping centre and restaurant run in a jagged chain along the eastern edge. The entrance building, with an administration floor above it, faces the parking area and acts as the threshold between the car and the water. A single pathway cuts through the cluster and ties the arrival sequence to the bathing landscape without crossing the pools themselves.

Boardwalks That Thread Between the Pools

Between the buildings, movement happens on timber decks laid directly across the water. In the renderings, a boardwalk splits the pools into separate basins. Bathers can choose their temperature or their company by stepping from one pool to the next, and boulders left in the water break up the surfaces so they read less like engineered tanks and more like a riverbed that has been edged. The pool rims are dark and low, sitting just above the waterline so the eye stays on the steam.

The channel view pushes this further. A stream of thermal water runs between glazed, timber-clad volumes, and sun decks cantilever out over rock on either side. The buildings never touch the channel directly. Terraces and steps mediate between architecture and water, and those in-between zones give the project its most convincing moments.

Glass Walls That Frame the Steam From Inside

Inside, the project makes one clear decision: every warm interior faces the pools through full-height glass. In the sauna, slatted timber benches line the solid walls and turn toward a glazed wall. Through it, steam rises over the outdoor terraces and a lone bather stands on a stepped platform. The treatment pavilion follows the same logic: massage tables sit under a thin roof, patterned screens give partial privacy, and the hills and steaming water fill everything behind them. The section drawn above that pavilion shows how low these volumes stay against the terrain, with the pools set just beneath the building line.

From the water, the view reverses. A bather in a stepped pool looks back at dark glazed pavilions and a planted wall across a field of mist. The architecture is restrained enough to read as background. This reciprocity suits a bathing programme, where sitting and looking is the entire point. The sauna becomes a viewing room, and the pool becomes the seat from which the buildings are seen.

Green Roofs and a Field of Photovoltaics

The green solutions scheme recasts the cluster from above. Every roof is planted, so from the higher ground the faceted volumes read as patches of vegetation rather than objects. Thermal water is labelled as the heat source for the buildings, closing a loop between the springs that fill the pools and the rooms that overlook them. Rows of photovoltaic panels sit on open ground west of the wellness block, and the parking area and roads are also marked as photovoltaic surfaces. The diagram also calls out natural materials on the facades. Together, these moves treat sustainability as part of the site plan rather than an add-on to individual buildings.

Readers interested in how other projects on uni.xyz handle architecture at the edge of water and harsh climate can compare this approach with the Project of the Marine Institute in Norway, where transparency is likewise used to keep the surrounding landscape in view.

Why This Project Matters

Thermal Blue shows that a bathing complex does not need a monumental roof to feel complete. By keeping the buildings low, splitting the programme into separate volumes and handing the centre of the site to the water, the team lets the hot springs remain the protagonist. The boardwalks, glazed walls and terraced edges are modest tools, but together they build a coherent sequence of looking out and looking back.

The People's Choice Award fits the project's strengths: its images are immediately legible and full of atmosphere. Its lasting lesson lies in the plan, though, where the arrangement of buildings around one shared basin turns a collection of amenities into a single landscape of warmth. For anyone designing in fragile, scenic terrain, that discipline of stepping back is worth studying.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designers: Justyna Kozera, Karolina Turek, Paulina Mazur, Joanna Idec

Competition and award

People's Choice Award, Thermal Blue

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