SAUNA MOTHER

SAUNA MOTHER is a private sauna. There is one room, booked whole by a group of up to four for two hours at a time, and men and women may use it together. The idea it is built on is that the visitor spends those two hours as an infant rather than an adult.

The rooms are laid out as a birth. The hot room stands for the womb: red light, a low ceiling, cedar benches, and a recorded sound of a heartbeat and of the outside world heard from within. It is held at 85 degrees with humidity at 40 per cent, and water can be poured on the stones by the people inside. A bench at the back is shaped for sitting curled up, and a round window looks in on it.

Out of the sauna comes the cold bath, at 15 degrees and 80 centimetres deep, so that a body feels smaller in it. A curtain around it is meant for the blurred sight of a newborn, and a large model of a hand pours water from the wall. After it a shower falls from three sides at once, in place of a bath.

The last stage is a scent. The operators had it made from lactones, and describe it as the smell of a mother's skin.

The Mother Sofa

The sofa in the rest area is the centre of the place. It is shaped to hold a body from head to foot in the curve an infant sleeps in, and padded so that no part of the body takes weight. It rocks, at one of three speeds between 0.4 and 0.71 hertz, and a mechanism strokes the person lying on it. A face is projected onto it, chosen from four: Izanami, the mother of the islands in Japanese myth; a mother in the manner of an anime; one drawn from painters who took mothers as their subject; and goddesses from myths elsewhere, such as Gaia and Isis.

The operators say the sofa is designed around oxytocin, the hormone released by touch and by being held, and that the point of putting it at the end is that the body is at its least defended just then. They state plainly that this is not a medical facility and that no such effect is guaranteed.