As part of the Magic Carpet 1.0 option studio at UBC SALA, Tobias Allard reinterpreted the Swedish textile Svarta trädgårdsmattan by Märta Måås-Fjetterström as a spatial code for designing a public sauna and cold-water bathhouse. Drawing on the social and cultural rituals of Nordic bathing, the project, titled Folkets Bastu (The People’s Sauna), explored the sauna as a democratic heterotopia — where the body, nature, and architecture converge. The carpet became a generative framework for thresholds, transitions, and communal spaces, while references to Scandinavian artists like Anders Zorn and Edvard Munch informed the project’s treatment of nudity, ritual, and the gaze. Through weaving landscape, symbolism, and public bathing culture, the project proposed an inclusive space for collective presence and embodied experience.

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