EN Over the last sixty years, one place

within the home has undergone an amazing

transformation: in its meaning, image and role.

The bathroom.

From a technical utility (a reductive but

appropriate term) merely providing hygiene,

to a place for wellbeing and for expressing the

individual lifestyle.

The journey between these two extremes has

been shaped by changes in behaviours, cultural

acquisitions, developments in taste, aesthetic

paradigms and semantic codes. In fact, the

history of Italian society and our way of life has

evolved in parallel with that of industry and

design. It is worth taking a brief look back over

this history to enhance our understanding of the

present, from the original viewpoint of changes

in the world of the bathroom and its main raw

material: ceramics.

Starting from the Sixties, the bathroom

gradually shed its ‘utility’ status to acquire

a new position within the home’s hierarchy

of spaces: a private room, still dedicated to

hygiene, but worth proudly displaying to visiting

guests. In this period, the (new) role of the

architect-designer was fundamental. We need

only remember Gio Ponti, and his importance

in the ceramic sanitary ware and coverings

industry. Suddenly, sanitary fixtures could be

viewed as sculptures, and tiles as interior design

items in their own right.

The Seventies brought major technical

innovations (Marazzi patented the single-fired

tile process and launched the first ‘large’ size,

60x60 cm) and experimentation with aesthetic

effects, especially colours, which verged on

the psychedelic. Haute couture also began

to migrate onto ceramic surfaces, in a trend

consolidated in the following decade, when

the bathroom became a space specifically

dedicated to health and beauty, a location

for fulfilling the individual’s narcissistic

expectations. The growing importance of the

image also transformed the way products

were marketed: top photographers produced

advertising campaigns for the industry’s leading

brands, which also drew on creative inputs from

artists.

Aided and abetted by the Starck revolution,

bathroom design underwent a period of

destructuring, with the first free-standing

washbasins, which broke down the functions

of the traditional vanity unit and marked a turn

away from mass production to the one-off

piece. Technology at the service of wellbeing

swept the board, making a status symbol of

the hydromassage tub, while plastics, metals

and resin began to undermine the monopoly of

ceramics.

In the Nineties, there was another conceptual

revolution. The principle of cleansing the

mind as well as the body emerged: use of the

bathroom acquired psychological implications,

alongside a new focus on protecting the

environment, natural materials and minimalism

of form.

With the new millennium the hierarchical

relationship between the rooms in the home

was transformed again.

The bathroom began to interact with the rest

of the house in a different, more fluid way, in a

blend of individualism and micro-socialisation:

it became not only a gym or a private beauty

centre but also a library or a lounge, perhaps

with a sculpture-like tub standing in the middle

of the room as a metaphoric substitute for the

sofa. In other words, the bathroom became a

place to be lived in.

The amazing acceleration in technological

research and innovation in the last twenty

years means that now every architectural

ambition can be realised. Porcelain stoneware

enhances the performances of ceramics in

sustainability and other areas, exploring minimal

thicknesses and daring to adopt extra-large

sizes; decoration is no longer merely a factor of

surface design but involves three-dimensional

expression and textures; and digital printing

enables ceramics to take on the appearance of

almost any other material, in a form of

hyper-realism, or (re)invention of nature itself.

Special Bathroom

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