During my visit to Chicago, I again spent time in a museum, this time the Art Institute of Chicago. Most of what I looked at was not modern art or design, but there was some of that. And it reminded me of a second issue I wanted to discuss after my visit at MoMA: how uncomfortable it is to actually live in a world designed in a modern fashion. I experienced that less when exploring the museum exhibits, and more when I made use of their bathrooms, or those of the mostly modern hotels I've stayed in. Basic elements such as sinks and doors look nice and simple, but basic aspects of them just don't seem to take into account that people would be using them, or how they will do so.
Lets start with sinks. The fact of the matter is that people will be using sinks to wash their hands. For that you need to be able to comfortably get your hands under the sink, have room to wash and rub those hands together, ideally without touching the sink while doing so, and be capable of draining the water, suds, and so forth. It is surprising how many bathroom sinks I've seen recently fail to do any or all of these effectively. One hotel bathroom had a sink that was just a shallow rectangular basin, with the faucet too low over it. As for the draining, since it was rectangular, it only halfheartedly drained, meaning any suds or detritus of shaving had to be actively cleaned off. I've also seen several recent bathrooms where the water, soap, and air drying implements are part of one contraption. Aside from the fact that this does not allow for proper pipelining, as someone washing their hands will presumably be taking up the sink until they are done drying their hands, everything is so close together that it is easy to touch a bunch of surfaces where it would be better to avoid doing so.
As for doors, I can enjoy the aesthetics of a sliding glass door, but when one is used for a shower, it needs to be set up to block off the water from spraying outside - often, that was not the case. And I was in more than one hotel room where a sliding door was used to close off the bathroom itself, sometimes set up so that it would bounce back if simply pushed closed, never really good at keeping sound in, which is recommended if sharing the lodging with anyone.
Many "organic" modern buildings essentially create a lot of dead space at corners while making for a nice-looking façade. There seem to be many of those on the Chicago riverfront, although I have not looked inside to see if my experience with others of the genre repeated here.
I feel like a lot of these problems would go away if designers and architects were forced to live with the products of their designs for at least a week.
