THE BATHROOMS THAT NEVER WERE

Et qui videra les pots de chambre? -- Remark attributed to an aristocrat of the Ancien Régime, on being told of a Utopian scheme for the reform of society.

In his pioneering English translation of Christianopolis in 1916 Felix Held indicated that the citizens of Christianopolis lived in three-roomed apartments, each of which contained ‘a bathroom, a sleeping apartment, and a kitchen.’ (ch. 23)  In the description of the accommodation provided for the children, there are, according to Held, ‘bathrooms and dormitories’ in the college where they are boarded. (ch.81)

• This idea was picked up by Abercrombie in 1920 when in the course of a short review of  Held’s translation he referred twice to the bathrooms of Christianopolis. (Town Planning Review No.8).
• Ross, who described Andreæ as ‘a preacher and a teacher contemporary with Luther’, remarked of Christianopolis that ‘the only interesting features were the systematic sanitation exemplified in the bathroom and the central heating by furnaces.’(Utopias Old and New 75-7)  
• Lewis Mumford seized on the idea in his The Culture of Cities (1938), and stressed the way in which by providing for a bathroom in each apartment Andreæ had anticipated what the 19th century would hail as a mark of mechanical progress. He repeated this passage verbatim in his City in History (1961), along with a second reference to Andreæ’s provision of a bath room ‘to each three room apartment’. (Mumford’s italics).
• More recently Eliav-Feldon continued the tradition in Realistic Utopias, an otherwise admirable book, by stating that ‘in Christianopolis there is even a bathroom in each home and only young children wash in public baths’ (p.41)

It would indeed have been remarkable, as Mumford observed, if Andreæ had anticipated the 19th century in this way. The technical problems of providing bathrooms throughout the three-storied buildings of Christianopolis would have been formidable in Andreæ’s day, and indeed were not solved until the end of the 19th century. It was well into the 20th century that hotels began to provide en suite bathrooms as a matter of course. 
It would also have been quite out of character for Andreæ to have introduced such a futuristic concept into his ideal community of Christianopolis. Where Campanella was given to speculative leaps, putting flying machines, ships which are propelled against the wind, land carriages which are powered by springs within springs, etc. into his City of the Sun, Andreæ has no more than contemporary best-practice technology; where Campanella has medical advances which allow people a greatly extended life-span, Andreæ assumes that his citizens will die with dignity and resignation at the usual age. Why then did he leap ahead in the matter of bathrooms?
The short answer is that even though Andreæ was certainly more enthusiastic than most about cleanliness, he did nothing of the kind. The real difficulty is that Andreæ was using a classical Latin word to convey a 17th century German concept. In Christianopolis each apartment has hypocaustum, cubile, et culina, and in the Christianopolitan college the two upper floors have hypocausta et cubilia for the youngsters who board there.  
It is perfectly true that in Classical Latin hypocaustum means a system of underfloor heating which was often used in the baths which were central to so much of Roman urban life and culture. (In Roman Britain the hypocaust system was often extended to the entire underfloor area of a large house; but that is a comment on the climate.)  But this is emphatically not what the word meant in Christianopolis. Held blundered here on two counts: he assumed that the classical Latin hypocaustum  meant 'baths' in Andreæ, and he confused the Roman 'baths' (which could be gigantic edifices, as in the Baths of Caracalla) with the domestic bathroom of the modern European household.

By the 17th century, however, hypocaustum was used to describe the stoves which were a feature of German domestic life, and by extension the word was also used to describe a room in which there was a stove. In short, hypocaustum in the Latin of Andreae means a Stube or parlour – a sitting room warmed, as the name suggests, by a stove. This was not a common arrangement in England at the time, where open fires were in use, not enclosed stoves. The hypocaustum can however be seen quite clearly in Comenius’ Orbis sensualium pictus where the following illustration (no.71)  is of the parts of a house, containing a bathroom at ground floor level and a hypocaustum-Stube-parlour upstairs.

The Hypocaustum is on the first floor, here coloured in yellow. It is quite obviously not 'a bathroom' –  the bath-house is outside the building in the usual 17th century way, in the yard across from the well from which water would be drawn with a rope and bucket. 
Andreæ remarks of the housing in Christianopolis that ‘they drive out cold with furnace heat’(ch.23), and it is clear that a cosy ‘sitting room’ is all that was intended.   This is exactly what is shown in Orbis, illustration 72:

The bedroom is on the left and the 'stove' or sitting room on the right. It has windows, wainscotted walls, chairs, bench and a table. A guitar or lute can be seen to the left of the table, indicating that this is a room for entertainment. Above all, there is a fornax or 'oven' at the end of the room, which would today be described as a tiled stove. This is what warms the room in winter, when 'they drive out cold with furnace heat'.
Hence the accommodation in each apartment in Christianopolis consists of a kitchen (culina – in which to prepare the meals of the household), a bedroom (cubile – in which to sleep) and a parlour or sitting room (hypocaustum – heated by a stove). There are simply no bathrooms in these domestic arrangements.

Where then do the people of Christianopolis go to have a bath? Andreæ does not say with any clarity, but it is implied that they had the normal German 17th century arrangement of a communal bathing facility for the adults, with more private provision for the children. Using Comenius Orbis again, we can look inside the bath-house in his illustration 74:

This is clearly far removed from the kind of bathroom which 'the 19th century would hail as a mark of mechanical progress' – there is nothing mechanically advanced about the place. Certainly water is flowing from a pipe, and in the foreground the bath-woman (balneatrix) is carrying a bucket of this water to the bath. On the left the bath-keeper (balneator) is lancing a visitor's arm, and using cupping-glasses, to draw blood. In the background we can see a steam room on the left, where someone is sitting down to rub himself with a pumice stone, and on the right there is a changing room where the visitor takes off his outdoor clothes and puts on an apron. Through the window it is just possible to see someone who prefers to wash in cold water going down to the river.

Finally, lest it be thought that there is a gap between the use of 'hypocaustum' in Andreæ and in Comenius, here is the plan of the three floors of a house from Andreæ's Collectaneorum mathematicorum of 1611.