Less lake, more precisely
Chicago's shoreline has no shortage of lake. What it rations is the moment of transition — the threshold where a city person becomes a swimmer. The bathhouse is that threshold built at civic scale: changing rooms, showers, a sauna and a cold plunge, arranged as two pavilions holding a courtyard open to the water.
The steel frame is welded, painted black, and left to state its dimensions plainly. Between the pavilions runs a colonnade of eleven bays; each bay frames the horizon at a slightly different height, so walking its length tilts the lake like a slow hand on a picture rail.
Winter is the season
The commission assumed a summer building. Attendance data argues otherwise: the sauna and plunge run October through April at capacity, and the courtyard's windbreak geometry came from a winter's worth of anemometer readings, not from the rendering. Cold water, it turns out, is a public amenity.