ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the strangeness of a boldly modernist building arriving in the heart of a city renowned for its historic architectural image. In October 2004 and again in January 2005, vandals attacked the Thermae Bath Spa, a state-of-the-art facility then under construction in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bath, England. Smashing the image of the city as reected in the spa’s glass curtain wall, the attacks made visible the strange incursion of the spa into the purportedly public space of the city. Using this violence as a point of rhetorical departure concerning the fraught urban context of Bath, this chapter examines the ways in which architecture can bring hegemonic struggles to the surface of the urban realm, creating a strange space of convergences between past and present, civic ambition and local resistance, architecture as icon and architecture as communication.
