Hasta La Ideas

Reviewed by Virginia Gardiner

For those of you who want to become experts on toilets, the reading list isn’t long, because not enough serious books have been written on the subject. There’s Alexander Kira’s seminal book from the ’70s, The Bathroom: the first to address ergonomics in this intimate place for industrial design. More engrossing and pithy is Ellen Lupton and Abbott J. Miller’s The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste. When it comes to eco-toilets, the most informative might be Lifting the Lid: An Ecological Approach to Toilet Systems by Peter Harper & Louise Halestrap, while the most fun is certainly Joseph Jenkins’ The Humanure Handbook.

But as of fall 2008, your first book will have to be Rose George’s revelatory The Big Necessity: Adventures in the World of Human Waste. With good humor and deep seriousness, George travels the world and presents impressive research about the current state of sanitation.

Colorful encounters with people and places are centered around dismal facts. 2.6 billion people worldwide currently have no toilets–as George puts it, “Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket or box.” Resulting waterborne illness kills about 7000 people every single day. The centuries-old solution that’s still current–flush toilets with sewers–is already taxing the richest economies, and won’t be sustainable anywhere in the long term.

George asks why such a fundamental aspect of our designed lives remains on the margins of polite conversation. After all, she points out, Le Corbusier called the toilet “one of the most beautiful objects industry has ever invented.” Its purpose is unremittingly crucial. “The toilet is a physical barrier,” she writes, “that takes care of the physical dangers of excrement.”

And toilets embody lots of other shit: physiologies, cultures, infrastructures, economies, even politics. They are a perfect example of how objects are much more than objects. They are the vehicle that carries away our largest bodily contribution to the planet (about a thousand pounds per person per year) and yet our current solution is to flush and forget using several gallons of drinking water.

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