A Current Overview of the Anatolian Bathroom Culture and Equipment in Terms of Design

Abstract

Physical hygiene has been of importance since the existence of human being. Human being has tried to solve this problem as the problems of nourishment, housing, making life easy against nature, and making life meaningful. Human being has developed an important culture for thousands of years. Human being learning how to make a fire in the Stone Age (Neolithic age) started to worship smoke and water vapor. Human being believed in purifying with vapor or smoke. We see that people started to allocate space to bathing areas in their residences after they began permanent settlement.1 Thanks to the obtained findings, we know that they produced solutions to wet spaces and established transportation systems for clean and waste water. We see the first examples of those in Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and in Hittite in Anatolia. We see that spaces functioning as “bath rooms” or bathing places in gymnasiums in Ionia and Greece were converted into multipurpose social building societies in Rome; and they came to be “bathhouses” having social function and forming bathhouse cultures in Seljuk and Ottoman cultures. At the present time, general bathrooms (bathhouses) lost their importance and acquired new usage functions and approaches. They are one of the absolute must units of the spaces, particularly of residential spaces. They are special and elaborate spaces where the individual prepares himself for the day. Surface covering of bath spaces is ceramic. It is natural that equipments of special and elaborate spaces are also special and elaborate, which is the case at the present time. It has many dimensions from quality safety to aesthetical variety; and these phenomena are main problematic side of design of bath space, its materials and equipments.