Barbara Penner's book Bathroom is from the Objekt series, published by Reaktion Books. Like many subjects in this series (bridge, computer, factory, railway), a bathroom is not really an object. This fact is, indeed, central to Penner's thesis. A bathroom contains many objects, each with its own history and purpose: toilet, sink, bathtub, tiles and so forth. Yet a bathroom is far more than a room full of things. The modern bathroom that emerged in the USA, the UK and other Western countries over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries occupies the crux of a vast infrastructure for purifying, delivering and treating waste. The bathroom, argues Penner, is a small room connected to a big system. The modern bathroom presents itself as the correct and final conclusion to a universal human problem. Yet this peculiar amalgam of plumbing parts, social customs and public works is far from perfect, and far from universal. The modern Western bathroom embodies and perpetuates our own beliefs and taboos about privacy and waste. Fuelling the modern bathroom is a ceaseless flow of water. Although flush toilets were promoted to improve urban health in the mid-nineteenth century, they triggered rising levels of pollution. In London and many other cities, effluent from toilets typically flowed directly into waterways like the Thames, creating stinking rivers of waste. With the discovery that bacteria in the water spread disease, public health officials and reformers realized that wastewater must be treated before it gets sent back into the water system, resulting in more complex systems for managing waste. Tethered to a costly network of water pipes and treatment plants, the plumbed bathroom became the norm, and the shower and the outhouse came indoors.
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