18 Drops of sweats

18 Drops of Sweat is a collectively built hammam, first installed at La Station - Gare des Mines in Paris in the summer of 2024. Designed as a multifunctional platform, it served as a showering station for young migrant men hosted at La Station when not used as a hammam by visitors.

Beyond its practical function, the project highlights the importance of collective hygiene practices and reintroduces original water-related rituals into urban life, in a time where the hypothesis of going back to public bathing becomes more and more relevant. Built from reused materials—textiles, bricks, tiles, and metal—it gives new life to discarded elements through thoughtful design.

Shaped as an inflated bubble, reminiscent of Hans Walter Müller’s utopian architecture, the hammam seamlessly transforms from an immersive space to a functional platform. This reflection on water and collective well-being extends with a tea salon by Galerie Boketto, whose curated objects echo the radical Italian design movement of the 1960s-70s, embracing design as an evolving, experiential practice beyond the mere object.

Warm Weekend (Thomas Florès, Marlon Bagnou Beido), Mathias Palazzi, and Robinson Guillermet (formerly Niveau Zéro) explore a collective approach to design where the boundaries between disciplines and scales dissolve. Like 18 Drops of Sweat, their projects connect architecture, design, happenings, and theory to create narratives tied to their context of emergence. They view design as a transversal discipline, where form and process are one. The reuse of materials and the importance given to ready-made elements give rise to a radical yet warm formal language, enriched by the history embedded in the materials themselves.