Roman Bathing Culture

The bathing culture was integral part in the lives of the Roman people. A major success story among Roman building types, baths were found in a very wide variety of sizes, plans and degree of formal complexity. Roman architects let their imagination run freely in bath design, producing many highly original compositions. Like fountains, baths were never difficult to come across. By the end of the fourth century, Rome had eleven huge, symmetrically planned imperial baths and more than eight hundred lesser establishments. The essentials were dressing rooms, an ample water supply, furnaces and boilers, and at least three tubs, plunges, or pools – cold, tepid and hot. Latrines were almost always included. The larger the building the more elaborate the offerings, ranging from sweat rooms, tanning areas, and ball courts, to libraries, lecture halls, running tracks, gardens and spacious peristyles. The largest had lofty, groin-vaulted central halls lit by clearstory windows. Decorated with sculpture, marble and mosaics, major baths were as representative of the political and social order of the empire as triumphal arches. With their large swimming pools and many other facilities, these were grand, multifunctional social centres, in some senses analogues of urban life; all were meeting places central to the life of their cities and towns.

Their universal popularity gave architects exceptional opportunities, of which they took full advantage; no other building types displays such varied configurations of plan and elevation. There was a normal sequence for using cold, tepid and hot rooms with their plunges or pools, and although it apparently was not always followed, these three essential features and the plan relationships and connecting spaces (if any) among them formed the starting points of all bath