What is a bathroom if not a place of existential vulnerability? We enter alone. We lock the door. We look into the mirror and confront our most porcelain truths. Architect and CULTURED at Home Kitchen and Bath Editor Sam Chermayeff asks: Is a toilet a throne or a confession booth? Is a Kleenex box an invitation to weep or a prompt for the next dramatic monologue?
Set in Berlin’s Baugruppe Kurfürstenstraße, Chermayeff, photographer Oliver Helbig, and friends offer us less of a design proposal than a moment of transcendental meditation inspired by the most coveted toilet in design history: Luigi Colani’s 1072 Granny Smith Green for Villeroy & Boch, and Slavoj Zizek’s claim that the bathroom is “knee deep in ideology.”
The faucet, stripped of pretense, becomes a monument to function; the bath tray hovers like a minimalist altar; the tub comes off the wall; soap dangles; a lemon appears. Chermayeff invites us to contemplate the metaphysics of rinsing, wiping, and reclining in suds. Ultimately these bathrooms scenario a noir novella—Kafka meets Kohler. It’s as if Donald Judd moonlighted as a plumber, leaving behind cryptic blueprints and spatial puns. You don’t read these images. You squat with them, loiter beside them, and eventually flush your assumptions away. In the temple of the toilet, Chermayeff is both priest and prankster. A king on his throne.
Concept and Creative Direction by Sam Chermayeff
Modeling by David Voigt
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