The coin laundry is a space of negotiation between the intimacy of private life and the public realm. This negotiation happens at different scales: in the drums, shared and used by the various publics for the washing and drying of personal items; in the aisles of the laundry room, where ones clothes are deposited in full view of everybody else; in the laundry space itself, where strangers spend long moments together; or through the window frontage, where the laundry users are exposed to passers-by. These fragile relationships are most visible when the boundaries are trespassed, provoking shame, fear, shock, inappropriate curiosity, or even love.
Class Category: Thing of Modernity – Mapping the Micro-geography of Everyday Environments
Bath
Taking a bath in Japan is a not a strictly private affair. Nevertheless, the rituals of undressing, cleaning, and relaxing are carefully orchestrated and clearly separated from other extraneous activities. The conventions of who can enter the room are as similarly well-regulated as the behavior of the user. This makes any disturbance, departure from, or violation of these well-settled rituals all the more dramatic, be it the private noise of the neighbors in multifamily housing or, in the most extreme case, the sudden intrusion of a murderer into the bathroom—transgressions that throw the vulnerability of the bather and the violence of the intruder into all the sharper relief.
Rice Cooker
Rice cooking is an essential part of Japan’s kitchen culture. More than other devices, the rice cooker illustrates its own transformation through technology. In the traditional Japanese household, cooking took place in the kamado, a kitchen space at the entrance with a fixed stove fueled by charcoal. By contrast, today’s rice cooker condenses the functions of energy provision, heating, cooking, and smoke extraction in one single technical device, transforming rice cooking into a more rapid, convenient, clean, and less space-demanding activity. The modern rice cooker is small, lightweight, portable, and easily replaceable, yet as opposed to the kamado it is also deterministic and monofunctional, challenging our understanding of what kitchen culture might be.
Genkan
The genkan serves as a physical and symbolic threshold of the house. Differing in its position, its geometry, its sunken level, sometimes also in its flooring material, from the other spaces of the house, it is nonetheless firmly situated inside the house. Similarly, it is in the genkan that the rites of passage from inside to outside, from private to public and vice-versa, are performed—where messages are transmitted, outdoor garments and shoes are taken off, strangers are welcomed or turned away. These rites are reflected in the changing behaviors of the visitors as well as of the residents performed at the genkan, where personal feelings in front of each other are hidden behind a required formalism, yet are correspondingly revealed once the doors have been closed.
Toilet
Equipped with sound effects, deodorizers, sanitizers, automatic lid-opening and -closing systems, as well as washlets and seat-heating mechanisms, Japanese toilets are striking in their modernity and comfort. Animated and interactive, and due to their digital technology reaching a new dimension of anthropomorphism, they surpass by far their Western, mostly mechanized equivalents. Yet as contemporary as all these effects might seem, more than anything they recall core features of the traditional Japanese house: the sound imitates the running water outside the home, the deodorizing smell is a reminder of the Kinmokusei flowers planted beside outhouse toilets, the pre-warmed seat is the counterpart to the absence of heating in the traditional toilet.
Glass
Glass is a transparent material in terms of light and sight, sometimes also for sound or temperature, yet at the same time is opaque in terms of smells or the movement of persons or things. In separating different environments, it simultaneously links them; it allows interactions, yet no physical contact. These distinctive features appear to allow certain forms of human interplays to unfold that otherwise would be impossible. This is particularly true in the case of private encounters, where gestures and gazes can be exchanged through the glass; where a forbidden closeness is possible, albeit devoid of all transgression; or where even, through the reflection of the glass, silent observation is possible.
Elevator
Usually, elevators are supposed to smoothen vertical transportation inside a building. Perfectly integrated into the layout of contemporary office buildings and towers, as well as into the habits of the users, its presence only becomes palpable when the movement of the elevator is disrupted, when the cabin gets stuck, a button does not react, or when the doors do not work as commanded. One of the most common of these frustrated expectations is the sudden closing of the doors of the elevator directly in front of the user—be it by inadvertence, late arrival, or by the deliberate actions of a person inside the cabin—thus deflecting the user from a trajectory that was until that moment taken for granted, and yet simultaneously turning it into a new opportunity.
Private Garage
Spaces sometimes surpass or deviate from the expectations of their designers. While conceived as a specific space to park one’s car, garages are often transformed into storage-spaces, workshops, or even living rooms, revealing the ambiguous status of this space as both an extension of exterior and interior activities alike. Correspondingly, the car itself can be understood either conventionally and functionally as a vehicle to drive from one place to the other or as a space of intimacy for living, resting, or even hiding. This appropriation can, as in advertisements, transform the car itself into an object of desire, to be cared for and even cherished as a piece of art to be exhibited in one’s home.
Konro
One of the paradoxes of modern technology is the synchronicity between the emancipation of individuals and their collective dependency on far-reaching technical networks, fostering on the one side a new relationship between technical objects and their environments, and on the other between the technical objects and their users. The konro (a grill) is a prime example of this transformation in that it links the territorial dimension of gas networks with the intimacy of the individual kitchen. The ostensibly impersonal and faceless realms of the technical object find their correlation in the anthropomorphizing imagery of commercials. In a powerful leap from a matter of fact to a matter of concern, the blue flame of the grill is for instance transformed from a mere chemical process of methane combustion into a primordial symbol of the household, the technical object into an animated cyborg. The konro shows, in an exemplary way, how the modern kitchen has been filled by these essentially troubled cultural-technical hybrids.
Mosquito Net
The primary and original goal of a mosquito net, or amido in Japanese, is to keep out insects, to protect the interior of the house from undesired outside intruders. As such it is a useful boundary device that complements other similar types, such as the screen or the wall, while still letting in light or air. Yet as the lightest and most transparent of barrier mechanisms, the mosquito net also allows a series of non-intended interactions, emotional as well as physical, ranging from the gentle to the aggressive: allowing the observer to see without being seen, allowing a nasty mosquito to bite without encroaching. Much more than a simple boundary, the mosquito net is a lively interface.