This book contains information and instructions for the design of genuine Finnish saunas, with sections on sauna rooms, components, seating platforms and furnishings, and the planning of the related heating, ventilation, and electrical installations, as well as the specialities of sauna stoves and their selection. It also includes a special chapter on building a traditional smoke sauna. This book is all the reader will need in order to successfully plan and build a Finnish sauna.

With a history going back at least one thousand years, the sauna is ready for a new generation of enthusiasts seeking health, pleasure, and peace of mind, and Rob Roy is ready to recruit! "If the sauna is just a bath, then Buckingham Palace is just a house." So writes sauna expert and intrepid do-it-yourselfer Roy in this new, updated version of The Sauna. This completely revised and expanded edition of The Sauna contains everything you ever wanted to know about the famous "Finnish bath." In this inviting book, Roy shares his infectious enthusiasm for the sauna and provides a complete, detailed guide to sauna building, along with resources for equipment and supplies. The Sauna is replete with history, tradition, health benefits, instructions for proper use and maintenance, as well as step-by-step instructions for building a variety of cordwood masonry saunas and, new to this edition, conventionally wood-framed saunas. The beautiful color photographs, also new to this edition, will inspire you to create your own sauna haven.

A Handbook for Experience-Driven Sauna DesignFor Builders of Rustic Sauna Cabins and Designers of Contemporary Apartment SaunasAre you planning a new sauna, renovating an old one, or just dreaming? Do yourself a favor. Save your sauna project and read this wonderfully illustrated book about the design of authentic Finnish saunas!New research has identified Finnish sauna bathing as a source of numerous health benefits. To enjoy these effects, one needs a proper Finnish sauna. This book presents the collective wisdom accumulated by Finnish sauna builders, designers, and researchers across centuries, enabling anyone, anywhere, to design a pleasant bath house for family and friend to enjoy. This book provides answers to three major questions:What is a Finnish sauna?What you should require from its design?How to design a Finnish sauna in detail? The book covers all aspects needed to design a functional, healthy, and delightful sauna, from heating and air quality to interior design. It instructs the reader how to master both tangible and intangible, visible and invisible elements of a sauna. The book puts a special emphasis on the sauna experience, living up to the belief that short-term satisfaction is the first step towards long-term health benefits. It features examples of contemporary Finnish sauna design and outlines why a true sauna experience is so much more than merely 'a hot room'.Author Dr. Lassi A Liikkanen (Aalto University) is a designer and scholar. The book is based on five years of intensive research and interviews of key Finnish sauna experts. For his sauna-focused website at Saunologia.fi, he has authored over two hundred articles. His academic accomplishments include nearly one hundred peer-reviewed papers, the latest of those around sauna bathing!"Lassi Liikkanen knows good sauna design. He also knows how critical good design is to enjoying the authentic Finnish bathing experience. I enthusiastically support this effort to share his special knowledge and sauna wisdom with the world."Mikkel Aaland, author of Sweat, and host of the documentary series, Perfect Sweat.

A celebration of communal bathing—swimming pools, saunas, beaches, ritual baths, sweat lodges, and more—viewed through the lens of architecture and landscape. We enter the public pool, the sauna, or the beach with a heightened awareness of our bodies and the bodies of others. The phenomenology of bathing opens all of our senses toward the physical world entwined with the social, while the history of bathing is one of shared space, in both natural and built environments. In The Architecture of Bathing, Christie Pearson offers a unique examination of communal bathing and its history from the perspective of architecture and landscape. Engagingly written and richly illustrated, with more than 260 illustrations, many in color, The Architecture of Bathing offers a celebration of spaces in which public and private, sacred and profane, ritual and habitual, pure and impure, nature and culture commingle. Pearson takes a wide-ranging view of her subject, drawing on architecture, art, and literary works. Each chapter is structured around an architectural typology and explores an accompanying theme—for example, tub, sensuality; river, flow; waterfall, rejuvenation; and banya, immersion. Offering examples, introducing relevant theory, and recounting personal experiences, Pearson effortlessly combines a practitioner's zest with astonishing erudition. As she examines these forms, we see that they are inextricable from landscapes, bodily practices, and cultural production. Looking more closely, we experience architecture itself as an immersive material and social space, embedded inthe interdependent environmental and cultural fabric of our world.

If you are about to build a sauna but do not happen to have a Finn available then you will find this book really useful! It represents the best of Finnish expertise in sauna design. The information it contains relies on a long tradition, practical experience that has developed over generations and which in recent decades has been complemented and updated by professionals in the field. Finnish Sauna - Design and Construction is a definitive authority for those building a sauna for themselves. The book presents in detail the design of the sauna spaces, their construction, and vital elements such as sauna benches and furnishings. It also discusses the properties of different sauna stoves and how to choose one. At the end of the book, four gems of Finnish sauna architecture are presented, each uniquely realised. The book provides the basis for a successful sauna project, for making your dream a reality.

"On Midsummer Eve, 1865, more than 30 Finnish and Sami immigrants disembarked from a Great Lakes ship to a place called Hancock, Michigan. At the time, Hancock consisted of nothing more than a small cluster of humble buildings, but it was here, on the outskirts of mid-19th-century civilization, that Finnish settlement in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (UP) took root. Much to the surprise of these new Americans, Midsummer was not a religious holiday marked by feasts in celebration of the season's prolonged sunlight. Rather, the newcomers were immediately hastened into the bowels of the earth to extract copper in pursuit of the American Dream. In short order, hardworking Finnish immigrants became reputable miners, lumberjacks, farmers, maids, and commercial fishermen. A century and a half later, the UP boasts the largest Finnish population outside of the motherland and sustains the determined spirit the Finns call sisu--an influence that remains palpable in all 15 UP counties."--

A full-color history and celebration of Finnish sauna in the western Great Lakes region.