Plumbing the Political

In the introduction to Purity and Danger, a seminal treatise on dirt and morality, social anthropologist Mary Douglas makes a striking claim:

In chasing dirt, in papering, decorating, tidying, we are not governed by anxiety to escape disease, but are positively re-ordering our environment, making it conform to an idea. There is nothing fearful or unreasoning in our dirt-avoidance: it is a creative movement, an attempt to relate form to function, to make unity of existence. If this is so with our separating, tidying and purifying, we should interpret primitive purification and prophylaxis in the same light. ¹

For Douglas, the stakes of our hygienic practices transcend the body. Ethics—not biology—is the domain of dirt. To be unclean, after all, is to be more than grubby; it is, instead, to be dangerous. Bathrooms are, thus, fraught spaces—even for moderns. Whether dirty or clean, public or private, these are spaces which architecture must approach with caution. In the bathroom, after all, much is at stake. Amid urinals, sinks, stalls, and mirrors, social order is consecrated and sometimes transgressed. Perhaps this is why Douglas channels Louis Sullivan’s famous dictum, which always contained an element of wish fulfillment. Form and function, cleanliness and godliness—wouldn’t that be nice?