Saunas are, by nature, an experience of self-fulfilling minimalism: at sufficient temperatures, adornments become annoyances, and excesses become unbearable. Heat pairs well with silence, bare walls and floors, and subdued scents of steam and birchwood. As spaces built to effectively hold and distribute heat, saunas-as-architecture lend themselves to the straight lines and simple geometries of modernism, with any variants to the external shape necessarily deferential to the core functionality of the interior.
Ridiculously Good Looking Saunas collects 36 saunas from around the world, and while each entry certainly delivers the aesthetic pleasures promised by the title, they are further united by what could be called a sense of intent. The majority of the featured structures use local wood, stone, and other materials; many are public spaces, experimental structures, or both. The book features numerous floating saunas, which, while presenting a striking profile on the mirror-like surfaces of inlets and lakes, present their own challenges of heating, insulation, and space efficiency. Other structures break even further from the traditional, such as the portable MFG Mobile Sauna in Germany, which can be assembled in any location, and the Sabus (short for “sauna-bus”), which offers a fully mobile sauna experience throughout Japan’s Hyōgo Prefecture.
While the exteriors can be striking or even border on postmodern strangeness, as with the experimental-brutalist Gothenburg Public Sauna, the featured interiors nearly always favor minimalism and standard materials such as wood, stone, and glass. Even those with sculptural or curved walls make use of local woods and traditional joining methods. It is a credit to the book’s aesthetic discipline in its selections that even its most striking high-luxury entries do not cross over into baroque steam-room excesses of sculpture, drapery, or piped-in music, instead favoring simplicity and silence.
While Finland, one of the original steam bath cultures and progenitors of the word sauna itself, has only a single entry (the striking Löyly Helsinki), the book’s text interludes make up for this slight underrepresentation with a genuine reverence for the world’s original sauna cultures. This includes not only Finland, but the wider Nordic and Baltic cultures, as well as Native American sweat lodges and ancient bath cultures of Korea and Japan. These are presented in brief but wide-ranging sections on sauna basics, traditions, etiquette, and terminology.
Beyond serving as a uniquely sauna-focused architectural survey, the book emphasizes each structure’s specifically local or sustainable aspects of construction—the former usually referring to regional woods and stone used in the sauna exteriors, the latter to repurposed or reclaimed materials such as laminated plywood, recycled-bottle windows, and shipping-container shells, which several of the featured saunas use as their base structure. Many also use traditional building techniques such as nail-free joining and shō sugi ban, the Japanese practice of charring wood as a defense against wear and weather, as well as surprising additions such as wool-based insulation and turf roofs. Such techniques not only add to the aesthetic charm of the structures in which they are employed, they also serve as an additional connection to each sauna’s wider regional and natural settings.
Above all, the book delivers on its promise of eye candy with photography that goes well beyond simple documentation to lovingly show the beauty of each structure in situ. Particularly refreshing is the unusually broad seasonal palette on display, which is fittingly much grayer and more autumnal than that of the standard travel guide. Saunas pair with all climates, but are perhaps most closely associated with cold winters; fittingly, in a book of overall beautiful photos, the standouts are those that feature the snowdrifts, birches, and wide tundras of the far north.
Ridiculously Good Looking Saunas
Christopher Selman
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Hardcover, 256 pages, 45 €
