The areas related to both food preparation and body care, reveal the transformations of domesticity throughout history and allow for the analysis of the most radical changes experienced in/inside/within the houses and its inhabitants.
Since the first bonfires, cooking has implied a place, which once linked to the living that evolved, has been constantly displaced within the domestic space. It has been experiencing expansions and reductions, and it has distanced or approached/approximated itself to the rest of the spaces of the house depending on different technological social and ideological variables, and always relating to processes of segregation of the population, in which women have played a leading role.
Furthermore, the two main functions of the bath, cleaning and exoneration, in its origin coinciding in rivers, separately going through a complex trajectory which represents the transition from the public to private, from the dirty to the clean and from the symbolic to the functional until the mid-nineteenth century, when they both was finally get installed in the domestic space as a result of social and technological variables.
Throughout or during the twentieth century, both kitchen and bathroom transformations can be analyzed in conjunction or together within the space of the house, revealing very significant changes, especially during the second half of the century, as a consequence of the new consumption patterns or practices, the gender revolutions, the globalization of the information society and other factors that will cause that these two parts become or turn into the showcase of new ways to inhabit the house or of living at home.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the kitchen and the bathroom are terms that refer to the domestic space-time of a diverse housing, expanded in the city and augmented/enhanced in the virtual world.
On the one hand, the bathroom, as a unity or atomized, works as the maintenance shop of the genderless body, where basic hygienic activities converse with the playfulness and provide a healthy sustainable and responsible pleasure/enjoyment/recreation, which coexists with the psychic imbalance of a perfect body, eternally young, prosthetic and anabolized.
As a consequence or result, the kitchen is a term under constant revision or continuous review, without any other physical definition to that of some deciduous regulations far from the information society; an area where an accelerated ordinariness develops that is linked to some tenants as diverse as unknown. Its segment ranges from some global world consumption habits, going through or passing through the ecological and sustainability consciousness or awareness, the crisis and the concern about a healthy body based upon a responsible nutrition, to the bodies obsessed with the aesthetics of the image that barely require cooked food and that coincide with the ones that cannot do it either because they lack the means.
This thesis studies and relates the evolution of these two domestic aspects, the kitchen and the bathroom, in a time and an expanded and augmented/enhanced space, through different transformation signs with the purpose/objective/object of establishing a future diagnosis in an era of mutant/changing/shifting domesticity like ours.