How can design become a caretaker, not a conqueror? Tide House proposes a civic bathing complex at Library at the Docks, Melbourne — not as luxury amenity but as public infrastructure of care. The building is a water machine: it takes the Yarra River, cleans it through living systems, and returns it as a commons.
The water system moves through five stages: Yarra River intake feeds a floating Water Hyacinth wetland, which absorbs heavy metals, nitrates, and organic pollutants through phytoremediation while producing biochar as byproduct. Water passes through six gravel filtration tanks, then solar-heated storage before reaching the baths. The building's energy source and its cleaning system are inseparable.
Three communal baths, a sauna, swimming pool, hyacinth filtration reserve, changing rooms and showers. A wave roof in three layers at varying heights — columns with vine design growing into structure. The building breathes with the river it tends.
The Water System
The building makes its infrastructure visible. The filtration sequence is the architecture — tanks, wetlands, and solar collectors are not hidden in basements but organised as the primary spatial experience.
Water Hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) is one of the world's most effective phytoremediators: it absorbs lead, cadmium, mercury, nitrates, and phosphates at rates conventional filtration cannot match. The floating wetland is also the building's most visible element from the Yarra. The byproduct — biochar — is returned to the city as soil amendment.
"This is architecture not of control, but of coexistence. A shift from extraction to reciprocity. A call to reimagine buildings as beings — alive, adaptive, and sacred."— Portfolio closing statement, Continuums studio, 2025
Precedents
