Yet because the bathroom is so essential and so consistently used, some considerations must be addressed to make it comfortable, even if it has very small dimensions. Barbara Penner goes even further to indicate its importance by writing that “The bathroom connects our daily domestic lives with large-scale infrastructures of water, waste, and sanitation.” Even though most clients and architects are aware of the bathroom's significance, it is often reduced to its minimum size in service of other spaces. Image © do mal o menosīeing one of the smallest and most complex rooms in a residence, and containing complicated equipment and several hydraulic installations, it is essential that the bathroom is carefully planned. Save this picture! Casa no Restelo / aspa. But privacy and related concerns about decency began to shape these establishments, too communal privies were downsized and public baths were more rigorously subdivided to ensure the segregation of men from women, and, with partitions and cubicles, men from other men and women from other women.' The concept of private bathrooms inside buildings is not, therefore, as old or as natural as many would think.

Up until the 1920s, and sometimes well after that, the urban and rural poor were mostly left to carry on as before with communal privies (which remained sites of socializing) and public bathhouses, showers and swimming pools. And given that private was increasingly equated with exclusive, it is not surprising that private and often very luxurious bathrooms first appeared in European aristocratic or bourgeois homes. But the rise of privacy has resulted in the general privatization of western bathing, though this did not happen evenly or all at once. Barbara Penner, professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, points out that “No less than the rise of the field of public health, it was the modern invention of privacy that caused a decisive break with earlier attitudes toward the body that had marked much of human history. In Roman civilization, collective latrines were also places for socialization and debate. Image © Fernando Guerra | FG+SGĪlthough today the bathroom is mostly private and reserved, this arrangement has not always been the case. Save this picture! Casa Pavilhão / Andreia Garcia Architectural Affairs + Diogo Aguiar Studio.

Small ada bathroom layout