Oh brother, are you in hot water! Symetrics: the Dornbracht modular bath sysem.
As long-time aficionades of modular design, we might have finally found our Shangri-La, our Holy Land, our Nirvana – and lo, it is a bathroom. Yes, a bathroom, or more precisely, a line of bathroom fixtures and fittings based on a modular grid designed by the German company Dornbracht. Or more precisely still, a design system for planning, constructing and fitting out a bathroom, which the company has dubbed Symetrics.
Among the many intriguing aspects of the Symetrics initiative is that we have a rare occurrence of a manufacturer advancing a series of products linked not just by a few common details or surface characteristics, but by a larger context of formal relationships that guide the placement of the products in their setting. The glue that binds the various products together, of course, is the grid – an underlying vertical and horizontal mesh of 60 millimeter square cells in which can be fit any of the Symetric products.
In a languorous music-backed video on their website (link is below), a narrator tells us that the unifying effect of the Symetrics system concentrates the design focus “on the room as a whole, as opposed to the individual fittings”. Presumably our minds derive greater emotive pleasure when disparate things hold together by means of common measures and orientations than when they are randomly sized and capriciously oriented to each other. At least, that is the position of the rationalist school of design, to which not everyone necessarily subscribes.
At the end of the video Dornbracht’s tagline appears: “The Spirit of Water”, it says. On seeing this we were rather struck by the inherent contrast between the crisp, geometrically pure and eternally fixed square geometries that underlie the Symetrics system and the unpredictably fluid contours of water. At first we thought that the Dornbracht people were vulnerable to charges of being inconsistent in their philosophy and approach (or at least, in their tagline). But then we recalled the iconic image of the Vitruvian man, an ancient Roman icon that embodies the possibilities of reconciling organic nature and abstract geometry, the curvilinear and the rectilinear, the eternal and the ephemeral. So maybe the Dornbracht people have it completely right, in which case we may truly have found Nirvana after all.
References:
Dornbracht Symetrics Bathroom Fixtures, Fittings and Planning System
Dornbracht Symetrics Video
