The article “Streamlining: The Aesthetics of Waste” by Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller was, at first, something I hadn’t quite expected to read about in an Interior Design class. Simply put, the discussion of bodily waste and how it relates to the design of objects just wasn’t working for me. After reading it, I failed to make a connection with the information. However, during our class discussions, something finally clicked and I felt that I actually understood the premise of this article. I’d like to share my “findings” here with you today.
I could understand Lupton’s and Miller’s discussion on streamlining of design during the 1930’s. As I understood it, we were abandoning the intricate decorations of the Victorian era in favor of less intricate designs. To qoute Lupton and Miller:
“The plush fabrics, carved moldings and intricate decorations of Victorian domestic objects were rejected as dangerous breeding grounds for germs and dust, giving way to non-porous materials, flush surfaces and rounded edges. This ‘process of elimination’ found its most extreme expression in the streamline styling of the 1930’s, which borrowed the conical ‘teardrop’ from aerodynamics and applied it to countless immobile objects”
Lupton and Miller further suggest that this new aesthetic parallels with our obsessions with bodily consumption and economic consumption:
“Streamlining was born of modern America’s intensive focus on waste: on the one hand, its fascination with new products and regimes for managing the intimate processes of biological consumption, from food preparation to this disposal of human waste, and on the other hand, its euphoric celebration of planned obsolescence and an economy dependent on a cycle of continually discarded and replenished merchandise.”
The modernization of the bathroom and kitchen occurred around this time as well – and an aesthetic of obsessive cleanliness truly becomes apparent in the non-porous materials used for walls, floors, and surfaces. It’s important to note that prior to all of this, the bathroom did not exist as an architectural space and was formerly relegated to the cellar or exiled to the outhouse. Now the bathroom commands some of those most expensive and technologically advanced features of the modern dwelling. With the kitchen and bathroom becoming such integral parts of home, they served to reinforce our consumer culture’s positive valuation of waste by shifting our cooking, bathing, and defecating activities from places once “invisible” to dominance in the home.
All of this now makes sense to me and I actually find this article to be rather fascinating!
Also, I thought I’d share with you the little “flow chart” that I created during our class discussion, which helped me collect my thoughts and make sense of the article (to enlarge the image, Right Click + View Image):
Source: Lupton, E. and Miller, J.A. (1992). Streamlining: The Aesthetics of Waste. In M. Taylor and J. Preston (Eds.) (2006) Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Filed under: Environment, interior design
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