Primary school bathrooms as hybrid technologies: Materials, objects and practices (Buenos Aires, 1880-1930)

Abstract

This article aims to share part of some middle-term research focused on Argentinian school bathrooms. Bathrooms in Argentina emerged around 1850 and have been present–with nuances–in public and domestic buildings since the last third of the nineteenth century. Particularly, primary-school bathroom history is marked by two facts. First, these spaces are closely related to central schooling topics such as behaviours, privacy, intimacy, as well as gender and generational roles. Second, architectural and engineering developments and the proliferation of bathrooms were contemporary processes. The goal here is to trace some relationships between school spaces, materials, objects, and practices present in school bathrooms in the city of Buenos Aires between 1880 and 1930. The focus will be on school bathrooms, but it is also worth mentioning some connections with broader networks such as sanitary bureaucracy and transnational commercial circuits. As a general method, we pursued the Grounded Theory proposal. We worked with several sources: National Council of Education (CNE) files, construction and sanitary regulations, the Sanitary Ministry memories and documents. Due to our interest in objects (for example, sanitary artefacts) and materials, we took in commercial catalogues, a sanitary workers’ journal and archaeological works. First, we will briefly describe some features of the “latrine model”. Then, we would like to discuss the mutation to a more industrialised model, which is the one that persists to this day.