Austria!

Here are a couple of photos from my awesome office trip to Austria this week. They took the entire office by bus through the alps, and down to a small village in Austria called Bad Kleinkircheim, where we (Behnisch) have just completed a thermal bath / sauna building. The photos aren't great, because they asked for us to wait until the public left before we started taking them. Fair enough I suppose.

The building is beautiful. Lots of wood and stone. Very simple, but well done. Lots of little pools and saunas which look like big white stones. There are lots of outdoor areas too with great decks and pools and all sorts of stuff. There totally need to be more of these buildings in the world.

So, it was totally awesome, but, visting a sauna in Europe can be a bit wierd with your co-workers. The saunas here are nude, though you walk between them with bathrobes and towels and such. Still. Can make for some interesting situations. To counter this, I hung out with a group of 4 girls and we would post a watchwoman in front of whatever room we took over. Worked quite well. They let us have the place to ourselves after closing hours, and then we could wear our bathing suits. That made the American crowd very very happy. :)