ABOVE FAT’s Bathroom Sweet (2000) – ‘a Siamese architecture of interlocking bodies’ FRONT FOR EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY architects, hygiene and plumbing were intrinsic parts of modernism. Le Corbusier famously put a hand basin in the entrance hall of his Villa Savoye (1928). Its placement was both a provocation and a symbol for a new kind of architecture. Proudly displayed, the basin served a similar role to the machine parts that featured in Le Corbusier’s purist paintings: a massproduced item that would improve lives and make more efficient houses. The supposed rational qualities of plumbing were only partly the point. More ambiguous desires were at play that fetishised those objects with which we have the most intimate relationship. Placing a hand basin in the hallway declares the interior as a place of purity and a sanctuary from the city. But it also dissolves the boundary between the public spaces of a house and its more private domain. The cellular division of houses into functions – living room, bedroom, kitchen etc. – is a device for ensuring privacy, as Robin Evans observed in the essay Figures, Doors and Passages. The idea that having a bath is a private activity is enshrined in the arrangement of house plans. The degree to which we unthinkingly subscribe to such conventions makes their power more insidious. These conventions should not go unchallenged. I have explored the concealed power of such private spaces through a series of projects over the last few years. These projects explore the micro-territories of the home. They are exposing in the literal sense – laying bare things that are normally hidden. Ideas of privacy, of things we consider dirty or obscene, and of sexual identity and gender stereotypes are constructed through a form of spatial ideology. While our houses are a source of comfort and familiarity to us, they are also mechanisms for segregation and control. FAT’s Bathroom Sweet (2000) removed the bathroom’s walls and made the equipment of bathing and ablutions into the architecture. This project – undertaken in response to a brief to opinion ––– Let’s kick down the toilet door Bathrooms are too often defined as spaces of privacy, shame or gender division, writes Charles Holland. We need to challenge the spatial ideology of our domestic interiors 22 FAT : I M AG E S iconeye.com