Cute. It's the first prefab pod bathroom. Patent #2,220,482.

The patent gives a clearer idea of the design. It kind of glosses over how this integrates into the rest of the structure. It can have its own outer enclosure and stand alone, which is probably how it's set up in the Dymaxion house, which is round. Most modern pods have at least two right-angled flat sides, so the thing can be stuck in a corner.

It looks uncomfortable and dangerous. An entire bathroom of stamped sheet metal, including the floor. Oh, we'll just corrugate the floor a bit for traction. Right. Electric resistance heating, with 1930s insulating materials. Scary.

Nothing in the patent about the "fog gun" for cleaning. Nor does there seem to be a floor drain, which is common in Japan but rare in the US.

Making it out of fiberglas, like modern bathtubs, would be much more promising. Which is how most prefab pod bathrooms are made now.

Too bad Lillian Gilbreth never worked on this problem. She was the wife of the famous time and motion study guy, and she is responsible for most modern kitchen design. Kitchen counters, all the same height, recessed sinks, not too deep, stove height matches counter height, wall mounted cabinets above the counters, drawers below - all that is her doing.[1] Before Gilbreth, kitchen were uncoordinated tables, cabinets, and appliances.[2]

If she'd done a bathroom design, it would have worked.

[1] https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/10/lillian-gilbreths-k...

[2] https://clickamericana.com/topics/home-garden/antique-kitche...

You can see a real life example of this bathroom (installed in an actual Dymaxion house) at the Henry Ford Museum outside of Detroit.

I haven't been to see it in a while, but, as I recall, my general impression was that the bathroom had a bunch of interesting ideas that all came together in a way that sort of nosed out overall livability/ergonomics for the humans who might want to use it.

Some of these ideas would seem to live on in the bathrooms of modern sailing boats, but a 12 meter yacht imposes some constraints that mean that sacrificing on comfort in the interest of space efficiency is unavoidable.

I also suspect that, much like RVs or the apartments units in the Nagakin Capsule Tower, repairability and modifiability have been compromised in the design. Meaning that the whole thing should probably be considered somewhat disposable: past a certain point, the only reasonable option is to scrap the whole thing and order a new one from the factory. With typical bathroom designs, the initial construction cost may be high, but, later on, if only the toilet is broken, you have the option to replace only the toilet.

This seems remarkably close to a Japanese "unit bath" bathroom. The entire room drains into a drain in the floor so you can use the shower head to clean it. It's small, with a tub, sink and toilet. The tap (faucet) for the sink also fills the bathtub.

To see images try an image search for 3点ユニットバス

before the pandemic, on a holiday with my partner our kids, we had hired a campervan that was infested with bedbugs - they got in everything, bit us everywhere. After cleaning and obsessively toasting everything in the bryon bay laundromat tumble dryers, my partner went with the kids and I drove the van back to the rental place and walked to Brisbane airport with a clean set of clothes sealed in a plastic bag. When I explained to the gate staff that I might have bedbugs on me and wanted to shower and change before I boarded the plane home, they gave me the key to the pilot's bathroom.

It's a dark tiled room, and at the far end of the room is the entrance to a magnificent shower, you step through a rounded rectangle portal into stainless steel balloon, perhaps pressed steel, perhaps, hydroformed, a glorious squircle cube (sphube?), with enough space for a pilot, a co pilot and all the cabin staff to purify and rejuvenate under the monsoons of hot water that torrent from an enormous shower rose at the apex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squircle

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/04/04/higher-dimensional...

I don't believe anything in that article. Buckminster Fuller was a bit of a con artist. He lied profusely about his projects, painting them in a flattering light. He also put a lot of effort into setting the record to match his own made-up version of events.

Lines like this.. "The Phelps Dodge Corporation was to produce the bathrooms but they were met with resistance from plumbers fearful of losing their jobs and so the bathrooms were never produced." reek of his fiction. I would guess that in reality there were serious practical reasons why the bathrooms were never produced.

Sounds like someone should try to revive this. The "fog gun" should certainly find a lot of supporters today. A bathroom that is specifically designed to be easy to clean might also be attractive for single households.

This might actually be more in demand today than when Mr. Fuller originally invented it.

In dwelling places and computer hardware and software, I have developed a preference for maintainability and compatible interfaces over performance and shininess.

This bathroom is fixed. It is not configurable, which means that it's great if it does exactly what you need and is a problem otherwise. I'm 6'5". At various times, there have been people living in my house ranging from baby-sized up through me. It looks like this is optimized for someone about 5'5" tall. Bucky was 5'2".

This bathroom has no ventilation options other than a bizarrely placed under-sink fan. It lacks many affordances - a place for towels, natural light, an electrical outlet for small appliances, any consideration of disability or infirmity - and because of the unified construction, it cannot be changed.

It's an interesting design, but the reason people didn't adopt it is that it isn't adaptable.

This reminds me of the kitchens in the Barbican* which were based on a boat's galley and manufactured by Brook Marine, a yacht builder.

More info: https://www.barbicanliving.co.uk/flats/rooms-and-features-2/...

Photo: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/69383650494817609/

*a Brutalist housing complex of 2,000 units in London

I like this in theory, but when I've experienced it, I don't necessarily enjoy aggressively pre-fab architecture in a place I'm staying. One example is earlier this year I booked a room at a hotel near CDG so I could spend the night and catch an early flight. For a very reasonable price I got a room with a shower, a bed, a chair, a desk, and a (thankfully soundproof) window where I could marvel at the engineering of the underbellies of planes every few minutes. It was clean and quiet. The problem was that everything was CNC cut plywood or molded fiberglass and put together with exposed carriage bolts, so it had the feel, not even of being on the deck of the Starship Enterprise, but on a cheap plywood mockup of it. In a bathroom you need cupboards to keep your denture glue and hair bands, and surfaces where you can put random toothbrushes and face creams, and you might even want to put a hook in the wall to hang your loofah. You want to be able to look at the random patterns in the shower tiles and imagine faces and puppy dogs and stuff. I feel like if this bathroom was in my house, brushing my teeth or bathing in it would feel like being in a dystopian movie about an overpopulated, resource-barren, industrial earth. But maybe it was just ahead of its time in that regard.

Fuller had some interesting ideas and thought about things that most people don’t consider (e.g., how much does a house weigh?), but the problem here, like much of the Dymaxion project is that it’s a complete break from the status quo in a way that doesn’t really allow for incremental change. It’s an early version of gadgetbahn: https://www.cat-bus.com/2017/12/gadgetbahn/

> they were met with resistance from plumbers fearful of losing their jobs

Same thing happened to waterless urinals. Those are still making headway due to the waterr saving benefits but it’s been a hard fight.

Scrubbable stainless steel surfaces. Only generous radius corners. No tile grout or silicone caulking. And the whole thing cleanable with a hose if necessarily. As a parent of children, I'd totally go for this, style be darned.

I like that the article makes out like we’d all be showering in our Dymaxion toilets if it weren’t for the plumbing unions.

- "with many small and seemingly impossible to clean nooks and crannies prone to leaking and harboring of bacteria"

Ahh! I've wondered for a long time why this specific issue doesn't have mass-market solutions. I thought it was intuitively obvious that contaminable surfaces need to be high-radius convex and easy to access, else you're wasting valuable time playing stupid geometry games. Who wants to spend their life cleaning bathrooms? Clearly, the engineers who design these things don't clean their own houses, and don't talk to the people who do.

Today I learned the term "Dymaxion" and I will endeavor to find ways to use it in my speech and writings from today onwards.

"Dymaxion, a portmanteau of the words dynamic, maximum, and tension;[1] sums up the goal of his study, "maximum gain of advantage from minimal energy input."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion

If you go with a wall-mounted toilet and tile with a dividerless shower you can get quite close on the cleanability even now.

In anonymous congregate housing I can see optimizing for cleanabilty and surface lifetime. I.e., if the common manner is to carry in and out (as in a basket) all personal items with each visit. In such case, nooks and crannies are an antifeature. I could imagine some roommates or even families uniting around such behavior.

I lived in an apartment with one of these sorts of bathrooms in Tokyo. It was made of two molded plastic parts put together: a bottom half and a top half. I had no idea what that was called, but now I know!

“The Phelps Dodge Corporation was to produce the bathrooms but they were met with resistance from plumbers fearful of losing their jobs and so the bathrooms were never produced.”

This is why we can’t have nice things.

The human waste composting feature seems like an idea that has not aged well considering the PFAS accumulation and the various medications we take.

I've clicked on the title and found than this beautiful quote on the front page of that site:

“We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.”

-R. Buckminster Fuller-

This particular design would actually be real pain to clean, being small and full of curved, occluded surfaces. Allegedly smooth surface notwithstanding - over time even steel gets brushed, bent and the joints damaged.

Aren't these similar to the concrete all-in-one -unit bathrooms in the ADX Florence? Those bathrooms are designed to minimize water waste and cleanup. I can see why it did not catch on.

> many small and seemingly impossible to clean nooks and crannies

Honestly I thought this perfect bathroom will have smooth curves wherever two right angle surfaces meet.

It's like an airplane bathroom.

Someone should build Dymaxion houses and put them on Airbnb- they would do really well

I'm sorry, it shrink-wrapped your poo for you?!