When I was building 39BC, one name kept resurfacing: Leonard Koren. Buried in research on ancient baths or ritual oils, and suddenly there he was again — an American architect who turned bathing into a counterculture.
I first stumbled across him when writer Isobel Van Dyke mentioned WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, the cult publication he launched in Venice, California in 1976. Thirty-four issues before it folded in '81, and its legacy is still outrageous. Even the tagline made me stop — gourmet bathing. Who else, in the middle of post-war minimalism, dared to make bathing sound decadent, erotic, and absurd all at once?
WET was a pulp-poetic collage: design experiments, essays on Japanese monks, articles comparing the flush power of toilets, erotic photo spreads, parody ads. Irreverent, sensual, knowingly ridiculous. Reading back issues now feels like eavesdropping on a late-night party between philosophers, hedonists, and designers who'd all had a little too much wine. It made the bath feel radical again.
Fifteen years later, Koren published his strange, meditative little book: Undesigning the Bath (1996, reissued in 2025). On the surface, an essay on architecture. In reality, a manifesto. His thesis is brutal: the more you design a bath, the less alive it feels. Polished marble, symmetry, efficiency — all of it deadens the experience. True bathing belongs to instinct, not instruction. Water should be elemental, not engineered.
He celebrated imperfection. Lo-tech mud baths. Hillside onsens. Hammam courtyards. Steam rising from cracks in the earth. Sunlight falling through leaves onto stone.
Reading it felt like permission. Permission to think about bathing as culture. To design 39BC as a theatre of scent, skin, and memory — not merely a brand of glossy products, but a ritual older than architecture.
Even now, somewhere in the background, Koren is still whispering: slow down. Undress your mind. Don't overdesign it. Let the water teach you something.
– Shar
