Tigu. A sauna with no doors in the center of Vilnius

Tigu, which in Estonian means “snail”, is the name of the latest experiment carried out by the Estonian Academy of Arts EKA together with the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Led by Professor Hannes Praks, a team of students developed and built, in just four days, a small public sauna, renamed “the snail”. This unusual title is due to the gesture that each person is forced to make to enter and use the hot space. To enter the wooden cabin you have to bend over and then re-emerge in the area saturated with boiling air. There are no access doors, but only an open and lower corridor designed specifically to avoid heat loss. 

This small design exercise is a real challenge for Estonian students who, for some years now, have been investigating the sauna, a symbol of excellence in Northern Europe, in all its aspects: from the functional and engineering one to the experimentation of unusual materials, such as plastic.