The Bathroom

Definition

The bathroom is the domestic room for bodily care and elimination — in this wiki the third room-type page after the dining room and kitchen. Its founding historical claim comes from Lupton and Miller: "The bathroom as an architectural space did not exist prior to the late nineteenth century" (1992/2006, p. 205). In the pre-plumbing era, "America's reluctant bathing customs revolved around portable containers – tubs, pails, chambers pots, and washstands – which were used in the kitchen or bedroom"; as "modern plumbing coordinated the delivery and removal of water and waste from the home, the toilet and tub assumed a necessarily fixed position in the home: they became fixtures" (p. 205). The bathroom is thus the room whose architectural form is the plumbing fixture itself — the room-type created by infrastructure rather than by furnishing convention. Once fixed, it was styled: "While early plumbed bathrooms maintained the decorative features of traditional domestic spaces – draperies, carpets, carved details – the 'modern' bathroom emerged at the turn of the century as an overtly industrial ensemble of porcelain-enameled equipment, with white, washable surfaces that reflected contemporary theories of hygiene" (p. 205; see whiteness).

The room's theoretical weight is double. (1) The laboratory of elimination: the bathroom "became a laboratory for the management of biological waste, from urine and feces to hair, perspiration, dead skin, bad breath, finger nails, and other bodily excretions" (p. 204; see process-of-elimination) — one of the "twin temples to the processes of elimination" (with the kitchen, p. 209). Its regime, established by infrastructure and hygiene science, is the essay's engine of aesthetic modernism: the non-porous surface, the flush plane, the rounded edge — "the more anonymous modernism of the bathroom and kitchen" that preceded the flamboyant 1930s product styling (p. 205). (2) The erotogenic zone of the domestic body: via Freud's infantile-sexuality map, "twentieth-century design gradually articulated the bathroom and kitchen as the erotogenic zones of the domestic body" — the home's symbolic center (the parlor) "displaced by the utilitarian regions of the bathroom and kitchen, which became concentrated zones for built-in construction details, costly appliances and on-going maternal maintenance" (p. 208). The room that was once exiled ("Formerly relegated to the cellar, exiled to the outhouse, or merged with the bedroom") became "the most expensive and technologically advanced" zone of the dwelling, "their disciplined aesthetic radiating outward as a standard for the rest of the home and its inhabitants" (p. 207).

Key Thinkers

Ellen Lupton & J Abbott Miller — the room's historians: the late-nineteenth-century architectural birth, the fixture-form, the hygienic-industrial ensemble, the laboratory-of-elimination thesis, and the erotogenic-zone reading (1992/2006).
Sigmund Freud — the developmental map the bathroom is designed around: the sexual zones moving "from mouth to anus to genitals," desire "lean[ing] on the alimentary functions" (via Lupton & Miller, p. 208).
Reyner Banham — the room's infrastructural patron: "another culture, comprising plumbers and consulting engineers – a culture 'so alien that most architects held it beneath contempt'" — the second culture whose plumbing made the bathroom architecturally possible (1969/1984, via Lupton & Miller, p. 207).
(Discussed in the source, not yet paged — see log: the domestic-hygiene reformers whose "scientifically-based health reforms" set the standards the bathroom built.)

The Kitchen — the bathroom's twin: "The modernisation of the kitchen followed that of the bathroom, whose aesthetic of obsessive cleanliness resonates in the non-porous materials used for kitchen floors, walls and work surfaces in the 1910s and 20s" (p. 205); biological elimination and economic elimination as the paired temple-functions.
process-of-elimination — the room's master concept: the bathroom as the biological strand of the triple elimination.
whiteness — the room's colour regime: "white, washable surfaces that reflected contemporary theories of hygiene" — whiteness's sanitary (not moral-aesthetic) origin, two generations before the International Style's rhetoric.
machine-for-living — the room as the house's machine-component: "an overtly industrial ensemble of porcelain-enameled equipment"; the fixture as the machine-house's literal fitting before the dictum existed.
mechanization — the room's industrial form: the bathroom as the dwelling's factory-fitted organ, its porcelain-enameled equipment the domestic machine's finish.
domestic-interior — the room-type within the house-wide system; the bathroom as the displaced center that "came to command the most expensive and technologically advanced features of the modern dwelling."
separate-spheres — the room's gender economy: the bathroom/kitchen as "concentrated zones for… on-going maternal maintenance"; the consumers "– often female –" who shaped domestic space.
psychoanalysis — the room's Freudian register: the anal-eroticism reactions (fastidious withholding vs. productive giving out) designed into "continuous kitchen cabinets, built-in bathtubs, seamless food packages" (p. 210).
inside-outside-dialectic — the room's boundary work: plumbing as the controlled interface between the body's eliminations and the city's waste system; the bathroom as the interior's sealed, washable inside.
streamlining — the room's style-descendant: the bathroom's non-porous, seamless regime scaled up into the 1930s product shell.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

Streamlining: The Aesthetics of Waste (Lupton & Miller 1992/2006) — the founding source: the room's architectural birth ("did not exist prior to the late nineteenth century," p. 205); the portable-to-fixture transition; the hygienic-industrial ensemble with "white, washable surfaces"; the laboratory-of-elimination thesis (p. 204); the erotogenic-zone reading (p. 208); the conquest of the house ("from positions of invisibility to dominance," p. 207); the bathroom as "a compact organism lodged at the core of the home" (p. 209).
The Apartment (Perec 1974/2006) — the room-type's fixture-definition and its timetable, the primary-text confirmation of the Lupton & Miller thesis: "a bathroom is a room in which there is a water inlet above a bathtub; when there is only a shower, it is known as a shower-room; when there is only a wash-basin it is known as a cloakroom" (p. 259) — the room-type graded by plumbing fixture alone, exactly as the fixture-thesis predicts (the room created by infrastructure, named by its inlet); and the nycthemeral day's six washes (nycthemeral): "07.15 The child gets up and goes into the BATHROOM"; "07.30 The father gets up and goes into the BATHROOM"; "08.30 The mother performs her toilet in the BATHROOM"; "18.50 The father goes to wash his hands"; "20.00 The child goes to brush his teeth"; "21.45 The father and the mother go and brush their teeth" (pp. 260–262) — the room as the day's hygiene circuit, sequenced by rank and schedule (the child first, the parents last, the mother's "toilet" in the work-gap). See domestic-interior, kitchen.

Open Questions

If the bathroom "did not exist prior to the late nineteenth century," what was the last room-type created by infrastructure rather than furnishing convention — and is the bathroom the model case that the room-type itself is an infrastructural artefact (see dining-room's room-code question for the opposite case)?
The bathroom's "disciplined aesthetic radiating outward as a standard for the rest of the home" (p. 207): is the washable, non-porous, white interior the true origin of twentieth-century interior aesthetics — hygiene as modernism's unconscious — rather than the manifestos of the avant-garde? Compare whiteness, modernism.
The room is designed around excretion yet styled as the home's cleanest space: does the bathroom confirm Jones's "withholding" reaction as the interior's structuring affect (cleanliness as fortified denial), or does the essay's "giving out" pole (creative waste) show the same room's doubleness?
A public twin exists in the wiki already: Edelman's men's room (see mens-room) as "the very site of the symbolic gaze." Can the domestic and public bathrooms be read in one frame — the same fixture-program serving private discipline and public gender-assignment — or do the two rooms belong to different theoretical registers (psychoanalytic-hygienic vs. queer-theoretical)?
Lupton & Miller's bathroom is white, enameled and fixture-built — the pre-history of Loos's white purity and the International Style's washable stucco. Does the bathroom's hygienic genealogy whiteness's moral rhetoric (Batchelor/Wigley) back into a sanitary pragmatics the whiteness critique misses?
Perec's definitional cascade — bathroom ("a water inlet above a bathtub"), shower-room ("when there is only a shower"), cloakroom ("when there is only a wash-basin") — grades the room-type by fixture-presence, confirming from the primary-text side that the room is named by its inlet. Is the room-type therefore a continuous variable (how much water the room commands) rather than a type at all — and does the timetable's six-wash circuit (child, father, mother, hands, teeth, teeth) show the "same" room serving the day as a sequenced hygiene infrastructure? See nycthemeral, process-of-elimination.

Notes

This is the wiki's third room-type page after dining-room (which first posed the room-type question) and kitchen. The room-type pages are annexes of the domestic-interior hub.