The Climate Spa

The Climate Spa began its life as a pop-up installation at The Holburne Museum in Bath, as part of the 2024 Forest of Imagination Festival. The scheme was designed and built by a group of young architects at Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, in collaboration with The Necessary Space, Platô Cultural, Grant Associates and students from the University of Bath and the University of the West of England. 

The concept was to create a 'Space for Playful Awakenings', or a SPA. This magical liminal place invited children to act as ‘Sparchitects’, helping to devise therapies and treatments to help adults overcome their apathy towards the climate and natural world. These therapies included: awakening wonder, seeing the invisible, measuring what matters with what matters, and togetherness. Visitors could build their own bug boxes, write letters to nature, or simply enjoy being in the shade of the surrounding trees. 

The theme of the 2024 festival was ‘A Million Small Acts’, celebrating the collective power of small individual contributions. The physical structure conceptualises this idea by utilising hundreds of small, standard lengths of timber. The timbers are fixed together to create a seemingly delicate embrace, however through triangulation and the overall circular shape, the collective strength is far greater than the sum of the individual parts.