Bathroom [Paperback]

 

Considering how and why the bathroom emerged, Barbara Penner describes how it became an international symbol of key modern values such as cleanliness, order, and progress. She explores how colonialism, the media, fashion, world expositions, and tourism led to the bathroom being exported across the globe and explains the tensions this process has caused. While Penner investigates bidets, high-tech toilets, cast-iron bathtubs, and walk-in showers, she also ponders the low-tech, sustainable alternatives available to us. Filled with illustrations,Bathroomis an amusing and eye-opening cultural history of one of our most used but overlooked rooms. 

 Barbara Penneris a senior lecturer in architectural history at University College London. She is the author ofNewlyweds on Tour: Honeymooning in Nineteenth-Century AmericaandLadies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender.

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 plugslã$