The Cadyville Sauna was designed and constructed along the Saranac River in upsate New York. It is a compact structure, covered with mirrors. It is built up against a cliff, and the wall of rock forms one interior wall of the sauna. Twenty feet below the sauna the river coils into a deep and powerful whirlpool, spinning reflections of sunlight back up on the rocks around it and the sauna above it.Questioning appearances, the Cadyville Sauna casts a veil of doubt over the arrangement of existing structures of the world. Even the natural world is found, through its own mirroring, to contain eddies of uncertainty and rivulets of contradiction. What appears to be one thing, one space, one tree, actually turns out to be its double, its inverse, and its representation reduced to the thinness of silver film. Or, one could read it another way; rather than a complicated mirror-image, perhaps the dysapparent structure dissolves instead, becoming phenomenally nonexistent, and evaporates into the surrounding environment. The sauna’s boundary is not simply the surface of glass. This surface, and, by extension the building as a whole, loses itself in the landscape just as the landscape tends to lose itself into the sauna. Regardless of the path, the result remains the same: the structure has become d-y-s-apparent, as if the sauna has donned some strange and perfect camouflage.
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