Berlin-based designer Tal Engel has designed a bathtub which draws influences from traditional asian boat building techniques. Otaku is made of a pressed woven veneer sheet and a steel frame. The pressed surface is coated with a polymeric material which allows water resistance and structural strength to carry heavy weights.
This project emphasizes on a unique relation between sailing and bathing – as states of mind, and between the boat and the bathtub as functional entities. This concept formulates an almost paradoxical analogy, from-which the ‘inside-out’ theory had emerged; the concept of washing in a bathtub is completely the opposite from the concept of floating in a boat – the inside becomes the outside. Hence, the ‘outside’ of the boat became the ‘inside’ of the bath.
Based on this notion and by using a language of craft and industry, Otaku’s design attempts to draw a portrait of a special relationship between our body and water.
Tal Engel’s Otaku bathtub was presented at imm cologne 2016.
all images courtesy of Tal Engel