Amalienbad

Landmark · Reumannplatz, Favoriten (10th)Vienna,Austria

A Viennese public swimming bath of 1926 in a working district, its glass-roofed hall over two tiers of cabins and 24,000 square metres of tile.

Amalienbad is a public swimming bath in Favoriten, a working district well away from the Ring, and it has been open to swim in since 1926. Karl Schmalhofer and Otto Nadel built it on Reumannplatz between 1923 and 1926, and it opened on 8 July that year. It is named after a seamstress who sat on the city council, which tells you most of what the building was for. The swimming hall is roofed in glass over two tiers of wooden cabins, and the original roof was built to slide open in three minutes. Between the street door and the pool you cross a hall of mosaic in dark reds and golds, part of the twenty-four thousand square metres of tilework the building was given. Vienna's council had approved a public bathing programme in 1919, and the point of spending this much in this district was that the people living here should see the money. It is a municipal bath and not a museum.

Worth knowing

Good to know

It stands on the square, not a side street — Reumannplatz has its own metro stop and the bath takes one whole side, the first thing you see from the stairs.
Seeing it means swimming in it — There is no visitor route, no tour and no viewing gallery, so the only way into the tiled hall is to change and get into the water.
The diving tower is not for the public — The historic tower over the sport pool is kept for school classes and swimming clubs, so it stands unused during ordinary public sessions.
The facade is the part you can photograph — Inside, the pools are full of swimmers, so do not shoot there; outside, the carved figures and lettering carry the same design.

Things to do

1
Swim a length under the glass roof
The main pool sits in a hall with two tiers of wooden changing cabins down both sides and a barrel-vaulted glass roof overhead. Swim one length on your back and look up. The architects gave the best view in the building to the ordinary swimmer paying the standard public entrance fee, and this is where you see it.
2
Read the figures over the entrance
Karl Stemolak's carved figures stand above the door, oversized and easy to see from the pavement. They show ordinary working bodies rather than gods, emperors or allegories. Look at them before you go in, because the choice of who gets carved on the front is the clearest statement the building makes about who it was built for.
3
Cross the tiled hall slowly
Between the street door and the changing rooms there is a long hall lined with mosaic in dark reds and golds, lit through a coloured glass ceiling. You pass through it anyway on the way to the lockers, so slowing down costs you nothing, and most swimmers walk the length of it without ever looking at it.