Toilet

...no architectural treatise declares the toilet as the primordial element of architecture, but it might be the ultimate one... Once a respectable communal activity, the toilet gradually became privatized, enclosed within architecture, plugged into plumbing, placed in counterintuitive proximity to baths and showers, eventually transformed into a piece of (digital) technology... and enshrined in a private room that proliferates within wealthier dwellings everywhere. The toilet is the fundamental zone of interaction - on the most intimate level - between humans and architecture. We can imagine buildings without almost any of the other elements of architecture but not without the toilet. Life, especially in the urban context, is difficult to sustain without the toilet; a comfortable and profitable life demands it. But at the moment when the globalization of the Euro-American toilet and its attendant behavior - wet for "evacuating" into; dry for cleansing - is on the brink of completion, the model it depends on - abundant water, sophisticated plumbing, large-scale sewage systems - is increasingly unsustainable and unaffordable... The toilet is the site of cultural superimpositions and political resistance, surveillance technology, always imminent crises, philanthropy, and habits that only seem to be intractable...