In The Bathroom: From Hygiene to Wellness, author Jolanthe Kugler explores the historical and societal dimension of emblematic bathroom objects, highlighting the evolution of representations linked to this seemingly banal room.
Once considered useless, even harmful, the bathroom has become a space for well-being, design, and personal expression. Its evolution, which began in the late 19th century, reflects major transformations related to hygiene, comfort, social status, and the role of women in the domestic sphere. This complex history intertwines technical progress with cultural upheavals, but remains difficult to retrace without falling into a mere accumulation of anecdotes.
The book is part of a wide-ranging reflection on the living environment, addressing design through its various uses and based on concrete cases. Named as the Raddar Collection and launched by mudac (the Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts in Lausanne) this is a series of texts dedicated to design research that are scholarly and provocative, poetic and disruptive in order to offer new interpretations of the defining role of design in today's culture.
Jolanthe Kugler is an architect, urban planner and design historian. He is chief curator and exhibition commissioner at mudac, co-director of the Raddar programme at mudac and a professor at the Politecnico di Milano – Scuola di design in Milan.
