The history of the bathroom has always fascinated me.
The bath, as an act of purification and regeneration, is an ancient practice. Ritual ceremony for Assyrians, Egyptians, Cretans and Greeks becomes customary phenomenon with the Romans. Thermae were widespread throughout the empire; famous those of Caracalla adorned with mosaics, marble columns, gold taps and massage rooms decorated with tritons.
Places of care but also of pleasure and sociability, mundane gatherings where amid the vapors are plots political and intertwining love. Also the term "spa" is Latin and means "Salus per aquam". The heritage of the Roman baths triumphs in the East with the spread of Turkish baths or hamman, public or private meeting places.
The Middle Ages brought distrust to water and only in the 19th century the practice of bathing returned among the aristocracy and the fashion of bathing, therapeutic and social baths broke out.
In the cold of northern Europe the bath ritual is above all warmth: the Finnish sauna was born over 2000 years ago and is still a practice of the Nordic tradition, a symbol of domestic well-being.
The Japanese spas are called Onsen and Furo and are deep circular pools to bathe, elegant wooden structures open to the beauty of Zen gardens.
In the West for the invention of the "water closet" (WC), a vase placed in a small room, was conceived at the end of 1700 by Alexander Cummings, English watchmaker and had to wait until 1883 for the toilet as we know it today. The domestic bathroom comes from the natural need for comfort combined with secrecy, technology and aesthetics.
In the twentieth century two opposing visions coexist: the rationalism without the trappings of Adolf Loos and the ornamental and refined Art Nouveau.
At the end of the '20s Mies Van De Rohe wrote a manifesto where the bathroom is made of chromed pipes, white tiles and full-length mirrors and separates the bathroom from the rest of the house, as Le Corbusier integrates it.
After the years of modernism and rigor, decorative exuberance triumphs. Pietro Fornasetti creates dreamlike interiors where the ornament is omnipresent, from the walls to the furnishings.
Movies celebrates the room of the self. And it anticipates the all-contemporary tendency of relaxing in the bathroom. The bathtubs in the living room and in the bedroom were the dream of the 50s and are today's reality.
In the 80s, rooms in full color: optical, geometric or neo-romantic.
The contemporary bathroom is confirmed as a place of great experimentation, to furnish with care and to live in a free and flexible way.
There are no rules, creativity dominates. The most flexible and ductile room in the house is the bathroom.
The spas of the future will be a temple of wellness and an architectural destination at the same time.
To the delight of the eye, body and mind, the bathroom becomes a sensory experience.
There is a surprising book*, tinged with humor that has accompanied my studies, where the author asserts that the history of peoples is better learned from their bathrooms than from their battlefields!
And I could not agree more ...
*“Civilization in the bathroom of Lawrence Wright -ed. A.Vallardi”
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