Bathroom

Description

The story of the modern bathroom is both one of grand feats of engineering and mass production, and of the unremarkable, mundane and repressed. The most private place in the home, the bathroom is where we perform the most intimate of our daily routines; it is also a space where we take refuge from the outside world. Yet the moment we turn on a tap or flush the toilet, the smallest room is hooked up to the largest of all infrastructural systems: a vast and complex network of pipes, pumps and treatment plants. Bathroom charts the evolution of the bathroom and the habits and lifestyles to which it gave rise. The book considers how and why the bathroom emerged and how it became an international symbol of key modern values - of cleanliness, order and progress.

Barbara Penner is Senior Lecturer in Architectural History at University College London. Her publications include Newlyweds on Tour: Honeymooning in Nineteenth-century America (2009) and Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (co-editor, 2009).

"For an investigation of how we evacuate and what we do with the results, this is a remarkably clean book. . . . Where the body and technology meet, this immensely useful little volume points out, is exactly where we have to confront our most basic self-image, but we always do so through an elaborate system that plugs that sense of our body into a network of implements and biases that are socially constructed." -- "Architectural Review" "A wide-ranging examination of bathroom fixtures, finish materials, and spaces.... Focuses on design but also discusses cultural influences, technology, and political forces." "Penner finds as much meaning in art about bathrooms... as in bathrooms themselves, and she uses a wide variety of sources deftly. The book is handsomely produced and briskly written, with a generous number of high-quality color photographs."--Alison K. Hoagland, Michigan Technological University (emerita) "Winterthur Portfolio"