Site_My Bathroom, Rolleston, Canterbury
Site analysis.
My bathroom at my parent’s house in Rolleston is a 1750 mm by 3500 mm room in their 2009 Stonewood Eco home. We selected our house from a variety of pre-drawn generic house plans at a Stonewood showroom in Rolleston and had them altered slightly by one of the architects at Stonewood.
Image 2, Stonewood. (2009). Site Plan. Rolleston, Canterbury; New Zealand. Photocopy (NTS).
The alterations we made to the bathroom were only slight; we asked to have a sliding door between the bathroom and my sister’s bedroom. The door means that she has the freedom to walk between bathroom and bedroom during the touchy teenage years (she is not even a teenager yet). We selected out bathroom ‘products’ from one of the recommended bathroom product stores, upgraded the shower head and tubing, chose the colour of the faucets – chrome or matte, and voila, the bathroom.
The bathroom was to be ‘Spanish White’ courtesy of Resene and painted over the AquaLine Jib, required in wet-areas of the home. The floor was to have grey marbled 500 x 500 tiles that enclosed the bathtub and it’s surrounding wet-areas. The bathtub, sink and shower cubicle (products) were a pristine white with chrome faucets, taps and drains (sub-products). There was to be a large mirror about the sink with chrome and matte glass light fittings above it. The doors – swing and sliding – were to be ‘V-groove’ and painted the same ‘Spanish White’ and span from floor to ceiling and to be possible one of my favourite features of the house. Behind the swing door, mounted on the Spanish White wall, is the heated towel rail – chrome with 4 rails to hang our towels. On the ceiling sits the heat lamp, and on either side of the heat lamp sat a standard light, all enclosed in an oval fixture. All in all the bathroom was plain and simple, nothing fancy, affordable and gave us a place to perform our bathroom rituals, routines and daily actions. In December of 2009 – just before Christmas – we moved into our shiny new Stonewood home[xx1] .
MORE PHOTOS HERE INC DESCRIPTION OF B/R THROUGH PICTURES.
Analysis of My Bathroom
Modelling My Bathroom
Image 3. Lorna Smith. (2011). Modelling my Bathroom. Rolleston, Canterbury; New Zealand. Sketchup[xx2] .
In order to understand my bathroom more, I modelled it digitally using Google Sketchup[xx3] – a brilliant tool for quickly sketch-modelling 3D. Modelling the existing bathroom space quickly helped me understand the space I was dealing with – drawing the concrete slab, Damp Proof Membrane (DPM), studs, dwangs, lintels and jib create an impenetrable shell (with the exception of doorways and windows) for design to occur within.
Image 4. Lorna Smith. (2011). Modelling my Bathroom. Rolleston, Canterbury; New Zealand. Sketchup.
The final Sketchup model of the bathroom allows the reader to visualize the room in which I bathe, shower, wash, clean and admire myself. It demonstrates the bathroom’s rigid structure and layout of the products the room contains. Using this initial model, my next intention was to re-configure the products within the bathroom. It is my belief that the layout, or arrangement of bathroom products, is a result of the room provided to be labelled ‘the bathroom’. I believe the bathroom is not designed for convenience of the use of a product, nor for the logic of the rituals a person performs within the walls of the bathroom – I believe it has this layout simply because the products do not fit into the bathroom any other way.
PEREC is relevant here. “The interest of such an undertaking [as living in an airport for X amount of time] would lie above all in its exoticism: a displacement, more apparent than real, of our habits and rhythms, and a minor problem of adaptation”[1]. We will always adapt to the space or room provided for us. Perec suggests that it is not in fact where we live and perform our daily actions that matter – as humans we will adapt to the environment we inhabit. This to me also speaks to the idea of reconfiguring the bathroom – no matter where products are situated within the confines of the bathroom, we will adapt to that configuration. In short, we will shower wherever the shower is.
The arrangement of the shower, bath, sink, mirror and towel rail within my bathroom is not logical. I set out to see if my bathroom products could be re-arranged another way which was logical, and if my bathroom layout is they way it is due to the simple fact that the products do not fit into the allocated space any other way. Taking Perec’s idea of adaptation into consideration, I decided to visually reconfigure my bathroom. I printed out two plans of my bathroom at scale 1:20, one with the products overlayed red, and another white. I cut out the white products and started to move them around the plan of the space that is my bathroom (below).
Image 5. Lorna Smith. (2011). Reconfiguring the Bathroom. Rolleston, Canterbury; New Zealand. Paper cut out.
[xx2]I desire more context- sun direction. Or rather, you decide how much context it includes such as the view to the neighbours or the sea or the mountains, the distance to the laundry room, toilet etc.
[xx3]OK, you do not need to tell us this but what I do want to know is what you learned from modelling it, how that differs or parallels the actual, and how modelling it in cad allows you to explore it further.
