DESERT HOT SPRINGS, CA
Desert Recharge
This project is an integrative ensemble of treatment buildings and a lively landscape sprinkled with episodic recreational elements rich with promenades and portals defining syncopated grains and cross grains. A near three-acre expansion of an iconic desert hotel's spa facilities, it is a combinatory playground of the constructed and natural worlds. Sensitively positioned in a robust and delicate context, the project extends a larger chain of symbiotic technological desert armatures and arrays that harness, farm, and channel wind, sun, and subsurface mineral water networks to charge and recharge life support systems in a scorching and arid environment.
STATUS: COMPLETED 2021
Sharif, Lynch: Architecture with Studio MAI and TERREMOTO Landscape
S,L:A Team
Todd Lynch (Principal in Charge)
with
Ben Gourley (Project Leader)
and
Casey Knudsen
Jena Meeks
Nicholas Miller
Sunay Rajbhandari
Chris Rancourt
Markus Russell
Mohamed Sharif
Peiwei Zhang
Civil: Feiro Engineering
MEP: Integral Group
Structural: Thang Le Engineering
Precast Concrete: StructureCast
General Contractor: DiVita Builders
Photography: Steve King Architectural Imaging
In this particular situation - a mere 50 feet from the San Andreas Fault - buildings, visitor paths, and sun bathing and soaking elements are carefully situated on minimally graded topography tapping deep underground into a confluence of mineral wells that fill communal and private tubs and rinsing showers adjoining wet treatment buildings. Outdoor spaces are shaped and shaded by buildings and structures strategically placed near Tamarisk, ficus, and majestic palms to create cooler microclimates. Gently see-sawing in plan and section, the serially arranged buildings form a dancing dashed line demarcating the immediate northern horizon of the expanded hotel grounds. Constructed of sand blasted and board-formed tilt-up precast concrete panels with inset Douglas Fir wood windows, trellises, and discrete millwork, they are contemporary primitive huts with embedded environmental controls whose self-similar economies of construction and minimally inflected expression form a calm back drop on which shadow calligraphies dance echoing the energetic graphic choreography of the southerly landscape.