Staring out of the floor to ceiling window the city is laid out before you. The soft lights of your hotel room appear reflected in the glazing like UFOs in the darkening sky. Your own reflection floats like a ghost amongst the cityscape.
With its huge plate window the room feels more like its part of the city than connected to the corridors and cores of the hotel it is actually part of. It’s both an auditorium whose view of the city is wide-screen panoramic and a stage where your own intimacies are performed with the city as a witness.
Behind you is your room – a bed, a bath, a glass screen still dripping from the shower you just took. All handled with that monastic-luxury pallet of blond wood, grey carpet, slate tile that seems at once like an acetic cell yet simultaneously soft and sensuous.
Its not any kind of traditional room. Not quite bathroom, bedroom or office. Rather these usually distinct spaces have been smeared together to create a blurred space defined not by walls but by punctuations of sanitary-ware, Egyptian cotton and recessed technology.
This is the space of modern luxury – the kind of space formed at the intersection of high aesthetic culture, consumerism, thats part experiential installation and part functional cabin. Its the space we imagine appropriate for contemporary international traveller of a certain gauge of hipness.
The acts of sleeping, washing, sitting, eating become highly calibrated events. After all we’re not living in a hotel room but staying and, as Elton John once sang, “Some things look better baby / Just passing through”. Liberated from all those heavy ideas of home and dwelling mean this is a different kind of being – that temporary less than that heightens the feeling of being in space.
This kind of luxury priorities individuality, authenticity and personality. This is not simple surface flattery though. Its present in its spatial conception too. It places a focus on you your own body as a thing treated and serviced, a thing that nurtured by experience. The extreme focus on sensation is nothing less than a come on – a non-stop suggestion of indulgence, in sensory pleasure and the promise (or the expectation) of sex. And nowhere more than in the ever more complex arrangements of what one might just still call a bathroom.
Here the idea of the body, of privacy of traditions of hygiene and self image are staged. Glass wall that dissolve traditional boundaries, bathtubs that have migrated into living areas, basins that have become complex water features – all dotted with vials of gels and gel and cremes scented and branded with messages that speak directly to us.
But shallow as they may seem, the lineage of these kinds of space is deep. The journey to these heights of luxury design begins in a very different place – in the filthy sewer-less streets of the early industrial city.
It was out of these festering cess pools and the need for sanitation that a new idea of architecture and the city emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century. This was an idea of cities and buildings that could be planned, of places filed with light and air, of hygiene. Advances in engineering and infrastructure, the desire for social reform and development of medical science began to transform the relationship of the city to the body. For architecture, these tendencies catalysed as the thing that became known as Modernism.
And its possible to argue that the bathroom was the real battleground for these new ideologies, sensibilities and technologies.
Washing, hygiene, the cult of health and outdoorsness, the heliotherapy that the medical profession advised to cure rickets and tuberculosis, merged with the aesthetic and cultural project of Modernist art.
Think of the bathroom of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye – with its tiled chaise longue next to the sunken bath, daylight and openness to the rest of the house. It suggests a very new way for the body to occupy space – exploding usual domestic privacy with a image of bright exposed nakedness.
Hygiene here is far more than practical, its also moral, channeling a secular version of John Wesley’s ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’ and revelling in John Ruskin’s declaration that, ‘A good sewer was a far nobler and a far holier thing . . . than the most admired Madonna ever printed’.
For all its ideological moralism, it was plumbing that fascinated the Modernists. By the end of the 19th century, Adolf Loos, in an essay titled ‘Plumbers’ , waxed lyrical about Anglo Saxon waste management:
“The plumber is the pioneer of cleanliness. He’s the State’s top tradesman, the quartermaster of civilization, the civilization that counts today.”
And in the foundation text of architectural modernism, Le Corbusier wrote “We no longer have the money to erect historical souvenirs. At the same time, everyone needs to wash! Our engineers provide for these things and so they will be our builders.”
Sigfried Gideon argued that the American bathroom was the only room in the house whose history was not tied back to feudal times. “This room is modern“ he said, “It is American.”
At the same time though, we should also remember that into the mix other Modernist ideas were folded into the mix, of psychoanalysis for example, where Freud told us:
“The incitement to cleanliness originates in an urge to get rid of excreta which have become disagreeable to the sense perception”
These narratives continue to be staged with the bathroom as its theatre. And in no more extreme form than with the luxury hotel bathroom – a space that we could imagine as a still-plastic proving ground for ideas of modernity and the body. These are a type of space bequethed to us by psycho-aesthetic-medico-engineering, where the pleasures and perversities of the idea of cleanliness can be acted out.
Given their history, these spaces of hygene-as-luxury are sexual-infrastructural inevitabilities whose trajectories were set long before we, the corporate luxury industry, or chic interior designers even took our first shower. They are the moment that hygiene and fantasy merge, put together by Freudian-plumbers.
And they are where we confront those age old morality tales where our filthiness of mind and filthiness of body is mediated by stainless steel and porcelain.
First published in Art Review