Designer bathrooms for a theatre

The project for the bathrooms in the foyer of TAM Teatro Arcimboldi in Milan, developed by the theatre’s curator Giulia Pellegrino in collaboration with design collective Collettivo Invǝrso, has created original, vibrant and highly coloured spaces. Architect and designer Maurizio di Mauro, one of the founders of the collective, explains the origins of the project and the identity of the creative team involved: “The artistic workshop was founded as a kind of creative melting pot by myself, architect and designer Elena Reggiani and graphic designer Paolo Tegoni. After years spent working in the fields of architecture, design and graphics, we set up the collective out of a need to share our diverse skills, experiences and backgrounds and shift the focus of attention from individual projects to society as a whole. ‘Bagno di Folla’ (literally ‘Crowd Bath’), a name chosen by the event’s curator Giulia Pellegrino, came to symbolise this philosophy. The word ‘crowd’ is normally taken as meaning ‘an anonymous multitude of people’, and bathrooms designed for use by such crowds are often anonymous and colourless. But if we reimagine a crowd as a collection of individuals, each with their own unique emotions and experiences, it is no longer an anonymous multitude but a representation of life itself, manifested on a theatre stage where emotions and feelings are brought to life.

“Colour, as a metaphor for emotion, weaves a visual narrative throughout the architectural space. Ranging from white to black and all hues in-between, it mirrors the diverse spectrum of life and individuality. The bathrooms, designed to cater to the theatre’s functional and artistic needs, embody this ethos of inclusivity.”

For the transition from concept to execution, the architects made full use of the unique qualities of ceramic tiles. The material’s technical characteristics and limitless variations of colours and designs made it ideal for creating bathrooms suitable for ‘crowds’ in terms of durability as well as creativity and energy.”

For the bathrooms both on the ground floor and in the basement, the project featured not only floor tiles but also 120 cm-high wall panels. These protect the main contact points on the walls while leaving ample space for graphics and vibrant colours on the remaining wall sections and ceiling. The choice of a 60×120 cm size tile, installed with the shorter side parallel to the floor, allowed us to accentuate the sense of vertical movement by eliminating horizontal interruptions. The individual tiles become the basic modules of a kind of ribbon that unrolls up the walls and conceptually could extend to infinity. In response to the client’s request for an explosion of colours on the ground floor, we chose a coloured ceramic tile with desaturated tones to avoid overwhelming the graphic design,” explains Maurizio di Mauro. This led to the choice of versions dominated by colour rather than material: Chromagic in the Sage&Butter colour and Tadelakt in the Atlante colour, both from CIR.