Harnessing, tempering and distributing water, heat and
power in a building generate their share of design, technical and coordination disputes.
Within the spectrum of building’s conveniences, devices and their interactions,
the generative relationship between human hygiene and planning has been
highlighted by even the most ancient civilizations. Water gives a building its
potential to service and underscores architecture’s hospitability. Industrialization
domesticated this serviceability through the modern bathroom and standardized
its components. This regularity offered design possibilities for arranging a
building’s service distribution.
Service cores or utility cores in all shapes and sizes
were generated from component standardization. The strategy offered a systemic
design and construction process producing self-contained engine-like nuclei, potentially
reducing system entanglement. The core was to building what the engine was to
the automobile.
Along with simplifying services, the relationship
between the core and its served spaces can engender greater flexibility as the
adjacent spaces can be freed from mechanical constraints. This adaptability in
planning was taken one step further by the Vertebrae bathroom’s inventor. The
bathroom pillar/column is based on the idea of a hygiene hub. The inventor’s
main argument is that in a common bath each fixture is only deployed for
minutes at a time while permanently taking up space. The inventor proposed a
core unit that stacks each fixture enabling its use as required and minimizing
overall spatial footprint.
The Vertebrae vertical bathroom commercialized by
Design Odysee Ltd was developed based on the patents requested by designer Paul
Anthony Hernon. The 150 kg vertical device articulates each common bath fixture
including sink, toilet, shower and some storage spaces onto a vertical service conduit.
Geared to small spaces, the transformable unit serves as a spatial focal point from
which adjacent spaces react. Analogous to a foldable Murphy bed, a
reduction of overall spatial requirements could be attained, as the space is
multifunctional.
Concentrating services into a simple operable
unit, it performs as active built-in furniture relating to the different heights
and scales of the human body. All components rotate a full 360 degrees except
for the shower elements, which align at 180 degrees. Somewhere between a
standard service core and an operable plumbing wall, the vertebrae displays the
longstanding principle of containing all services in a contained commodity-like
core, which continues to defy and appeal to designers.
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| Patent drawing from patent GB2378183 |
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