More Bathroom Blogfest: clean, simple, 60s

Thanks to the folks at Results Revolution for listing my first Bathroom Blogfest post. They bring up some good points about restrooms as key places where the concept of visitor comfort can be extended or utterly neglected.

Another BB post linked from the same entry is from the Kitchen and Residential Design blog by Paul Anater. He notes that being “stuck in the 60s” (the theme of this year’s BB) isn’t necessarily a bad idea if you’re talking about bathrooms, and provides illustrations of some classic modernist, human-scale bathrooms from the early 60s that look as if they could have been designed today.

In that spirit, here’s a women’s restroom (photos by Beth) from Palazzo Grassi, the just-too-cool museum of minimalist, conceptual, and terminally hip art in Venice, Italy. As I noted in an earlier post, the seating in this museum is lacking, to say the least; but the restooms are clean (literally and design-wise), simple, and classic – completely in keeping with the White Cube look and feel of the museum.

 

 

 

In terms of access for people with mobility problems or in wheelchairs, they are a bit tight, however.

 

Worst Seating Award: Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Italy

Palazzo Grassi is a museum of contemporay art in Venice, Italy. From the outside, it’s a classic Venetian palazzo fronting on the Grand Canal. The interior has been extensively remodeled into a series of classic White Cubes displaying a major collection of minimalist and conceptual art.

Here is a photo of the only seating in the whole place:

That’s it: two padded cubes in one room of a huge five floor museum. A grim denial of the frailty, or even existence, of the human body. Talk about suffering for Art.

On the other hand, there wasn’t a lot of competition for these cubes. We were two of only about a dozen visitors in this heavily promoted museum – in a city that gets tens of thousands of tourists a day.