ISBN: 0938437429 9780938437420

Category: Unavailable

Page count: 74

"Between 1890 and 1940, America's culture of consumption took its modern form: products were mass produced and mass distributed, designed to be purchased and rapidly replace by a vast buying public. The same period saw the rise of the modern bathroom and kitchen as newly equipped spaces for administering bodily care. The bathroom became a laboratory for the management of biological waste, from urine to feces to hair, perspiration, dead skin, bad breath, finger nails, and other bodily excretions. The kitchen became a site not only for preparing food but for directing household consumption at large; the kitchen door is the chief entryway for purchased goods, and the main exit point for vegetable parings, empty packages, leftover meals, out-moded appliances, and other discarded products. By the phrase process of elimination we refer to the overlapping patterns of biological digestion, economic consumption, and aesthetic simplification. The streamlined style of modern design, which served the new ideals of bodily hygiene and the manufacturing policy of planned obsolescence, emanated from the domestic landscape of the bathroom and kitchen. The organically modeled yet machine-made forms of streamlined objects collapsed the natural and the artificial, the biological and the industrial, into an aesthetic of waste."--back cover.