Why are most designers (architectural, interior, or industrial) incapable of creating deeply satisfying bathing environments? Because the key metaphors of design--efficiency, slick modernity, overwhelming visual appeal--are antagonistic to a profound bathing experience. Extraordinary baths instead are complex and distinctly elemental--earthy, sensual, and animistic. They are created by natural geological processes or by composers of sensory arousal working in an intuitive, poetic, open-minded--undesign--manner.
Leonard Koren, who trained as an artist and architect, was the founder and creative director of WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, one of the seminal avant garde publications of the 1970s. Among Koren's other books are "Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers" and "Arranging things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement."
