Rather than continue down this road of highlighting the systems of service networks that provide and remove from the contemporary home, i would like to focus more on the way modern architecture contends with the problem of human waste, with removing what we have discarded from within our bodies. Waste is a huge part of life, of course we must acquire -food, water, warmth, – to survive, but the ‘getting rid of’ is also fundamental to our being, on a daily basis we must purge ourselves of excesses of toxins, we excrete, urinate, spit, sweat, we shed skin, we shed hair…The architectural space designated to deal with most of these outputs of the human body is the bathroom..a room that is generally tucked next to a bedroom, enclosed, secretive/intimate…covered in shiny white surfaces, pristine and clean…so separate from the bodily muck they deal with…

We go into these pristine rooms, closed away behind doors, most often alone, and rid ourselves of our bodily muck..we usher our ‘moist dirt’ from within our bodies or from our skin (seaping out pores) our shit/piss/sweat/discharge, this covert performance..we send our bodily waste into these shiny white pure as snow devices, and into hidden drain pipes that smuggle our vile – evidence of our animal beings- waste through the walls and through the floor and out to be dealt with by the public sewerage, to mingle and mix with the rest of the cities shameful excrement…somewhere many feet below our paved roads, out of sight out of mind.

William W.  quotes Siegried Giedion in his essay Siegfried Giedion and the Fascination of the Tub:

“The problem of the bathroom has never been clearly stated…with one exception, every room in the American home of today (1931) has a history that stretches back to feudal times. The exception is the bathroom. This room is modern – It is American.”

The above extract taken from Plumbing Sounding Modern Architecture Ed. Lahiji and Friedman, a series of essays exploring the modernist obsession with cleanliness and its architectural response.

“The incitement to cleanliness originates in an urge to get rid of excreta which have become disagreeable to the sense perception” Freud

In their essay “At the Sink” Lahiji and Friedman talk of Freud’s theory that the human obsession with cleanliness is driven by a guilt complex, associating dirty with sin, these binaries of right/pure/clean Vs wrong/evil/filthy. For a modern era welcoming an influx of mechanization, these natural bodily functions seem to have been more and more repressed, made secretive and shameful – seen as falling short of a non human ideal, a mechanized ideal. They take Le Corbusier’s ‘Villa Savoye’ as an example of this thinking:

“in 20th Century modernity, the Villa Savoye functions as an apotropaic object that sustains the fantasy of distance from the unclean, understood as a horrible evil.”

Lahiji and Friedman talk about how we have this tendency in our society and architecture to repress the one thing that constantly threatens to return to haunt the body: namely the abject, the “left-over.”

“modernism emerges from the belief that man is fundamentally clean”

“the pathological fear of “darkened space” that haunts the late 18th C gives rise to the modern space of hygiene, nowhere more purely demonstrated than the white architecture of Le Corbusier, governed by the law of Ripolin ‘itself an eye…not simply the look of cleanliness but the cleanliness of the look” – Wigley

They talk about the avoidance of pain and the aversion to dirt that engenders the super ego, that cleanliness is the response to a guilt modernity has had to internalize. “the process of modernization in the economic developments of the 19th Century brings about the civilization of cleanliness”

Adolf Loos in his article simply titled ‘Plumbers’ (1898) waxed lyrically about his envy at British and American domestic plumbing, about the way they can bath and clean, he states “The plumber is the pioneer of cleanliness” and that “increasing water usage is one of the most pressing tasks of culture….For only that nation that approaches the English in water usage can keep pace with them economically.”

So we have this modern bathroom stuation in architecture , this conflation of bodily and spiritual…as Lahili and Friedman put it “20th Century soul saving requires 20th Century plumbing.”

The sink in the Villa Savoye to be read as ‘a poem about the “Reign of Hygiene”