Discovering the house through the bathroom in Berlin by Emanuele Coccia
The latest essay by Emanuele Coccia, Philosophy of the home (Einaudi, 2021), is worth reading even only for the lines dedicated to the bathroom, where the philosopher reflects on the irreducibility of this environment to become a room like any other, despite the evolutions recent due to the design. The story begins with Coccia who goes to live in Berlin at the end of the last century and there, in the reunited German capital, he discovers the singular location of the toilet in the apartments: since the end of the previous century, the bathroom had been provided for health ventilation in the intermediate landings of the stairwell. Over time, to allow residents to wash themselves without leaving the house in the cold, a shower was provided in the apartments in the room where one would least have imagined it: the kitchen. “I had one too. Next to the sink, the oven, the dishwasher, the shelves with the packs of pasta, spices and oil, there was a Plexiglas cabin dedicated to cleaning my body. The gestures that usually led me to isolate myself in the bathroom coincided dangerously with those that opened my body to friends in the kitchen (…). It was not always a pleasant effect, yet it was this experience that made me understand that bathroom and kitchen were two morally distinct universes and difficult to reconcile”. That bizarre plan leads Coccia to rewrite customs, sensations, emotions.