The Bathroom: From Hygiene to Wellness examines the bathroom through its defining objects, tracing how a room once organised around utility and cleanliness became a space of ritual, identity, and designed experience.
About This Book
What the bathroom contains — its taps, basins, mirrors, and tiles — is never merely functional. In this focused design history, Jolanthe Kugler applies the tools of curatorial and art-historical analysis to the bathroom, reading its emblematic objects as indices of changing attitudes toward the body, hygiene, and self-care. Published as part of the Raddar series by mudac (the Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts in Lausanne), the book belongs to a lineage of design research that refuses the comfortable and the decorative. Scholarly yet accessible, it makes a compelling case that the most private room in the house is among the most culturally loaded — a fitting companion volume to Kugler's kitchen study.
Key Features
- 128 pages of cultural and design history focused on the evolution of bathroom objects and domestic space
- Written by Jolanthe Kugler, curator, urban planner, and art historian
- Part of the Raddar design research series, launched by mudac (Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts, Lausanne)
- Published by Les Presses du Réel
What You'll Discover
- How the bathroom has shifted from a space defined by hygiene and medical necessity to one shaped by wellness culture and designed aspiration
- The societal meanings embedded in everyday bathroom objects — and how those meanings have changed across history
- A method for approaching domestic design research through concrete cases rather than abstraction, grounding cultural argument in material evidence
- How the Raddar series positions design research as both scholarly inquiry and cultural provocation, challenging received ideas about ordinary spaces
About the Author
Jolanthe Kugler is a curator, urban planner, and art historian whose research focuses on design within the lived environment. Her work uses concrete material examples to examine how designed objects carry and transmit social meaning.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 128
- Dimensions: 12 x 19 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9782378965792
- Publisher: Les Presses du Réel
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Designers, architects, and researchers with an interest in the material culture of domestic space; readers drawn to design history that moves between the scholarly and the provocative.