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1. Ronald van Tienhoven is an artist, designer, and intermediary at large, specializing in fine
cultural forensics. He marvels at the concave beauty of stainless sinks, although they are
also associated with the many contact lenses that have disappeared down the drain.
Sinks and Sewers in the Age of Enlightenment (the Born and the Made)
On a winter evening in 1764 anatomist doctor Giuseppe Salerno and Raimondo di Sangro,
Prince of Sansevero, succeeded in preserving the complete circulatory blood system of a
man and a woman after having removed the flesh. Only the skeleton remained for
supporting the intricate netting of viscera, arteries, and veins. Until recently nobody
understood how Salerno and the prince had managed to undertake this amazing feat.
Many assumed they had injected some devilish hardening agent into the living
bloodstream of the unlucky couple by means of a procedure called metallizzazione umana
(human metallization). Recent analysis indicates that the exposed blood system is
composed of beeswax, iron wire, and silk. Nevertheless, the two ‘anatomical machines’
that still can be seen in the basement of the Sansevero chapel in Naples are an eloquent
example of a system that is fully known, but usually remains hidden from view.
Salerno's experiments predate the conception of the human body as a logical machine, or
architectonic structure. The human circulatory system resembling a system of conduits
and pipes, entering and leaving a building. Architecture is nothing more than a constructed
simulacrum of the human body, a configuration of hubs, nodes, and connections that
merge the machine-as-body or building-as-body with interrelated structures. In that light
sinks and drains are both start- and endpoints: the mouthpieces and puns of some
submerged aquatic story that wells up deep down below, fulfilling its silent duty.
The age of Enlightenment exposed all that used to be hidden: bodies’ innards were laid
bare, and functions of both natural phenomena and man-made structures were revealed
by the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Athanasius Kircher, Denis Diderot, and Jean le Rond
d’Alembert. Finally, the world and its workings were visualized through diagrams, exploded
views and cross-sections. Gradually religious bans got overruled by the evocative power of
systems: the anatomy of human activity was revealed for all to behold; sinks and drains
became the entrances to an intricate system of conduits and pipes, subterranean cisterns
and canals. Bricks and earth just needed to be excluded mentally and visually, until the
subterranean arteries of the city could be exposed.
To a certain extent the Enlightenment already had started with Marco Polo’s forays into the
Mongol empire and his subsequent encounter with Kublai Khan in the late 13th century, as
described by Italo Calvino in his seminal novel Cittá Invisibili (Invisible Cities, 1972).
Unable to encompass the vastness of his realm the Khan urges Polo to describe in detail
the splendid cities the explorer has visited. As expected, the Khan’s inquisitiveness is as
boundless as his empire, and Polo is forced to describe another city every time the
monarch summons him to the palace. The explorer vows to “put together, piece by piece,
the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals,
of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them.” Polo’s promise leads to an
array of descriptions of cities he has visited: a city that produces maps as big as the
kingdom, a failed astrological city leading to the birth of monsters, and the singular city of
Armilla, which consists only of sinks, water pipes, showers, and bathtubs occupied by

2. nymphs and naiads. Armilla is the epitome of exclusion: Marco Polo subtracts all
components, to the point that only the aquatic circulation system remains.
Essentially Polo speaks of only one city, his hometown of Venice. But with each story he
omits one aspect of Venice for the sake of another. Kublai Khan wonders why he never
mentions his city of birth, until the explorer admits there is something of Venice in every
city he describes.
The only medium Marco Polo is able to resort to, is his legendary eloquence and the
evocative power of his descriptions. His words change cities into living organisms, into
bodies with unique properties. He can’t show drawings or the kind of Vedute the Venetians
excelled in, in later times. In that respect Cittá Invisibili is Calvino's plea for a renewed
attention to the power of story-telling, in the same vein as One Thousand and One Nights.
The specific historical encounter between a western explorer and an eastern ruler contains
a host of possibilities: two world perceptions meet, and a foundation is laid for the fictitious
dialogue between the inquisitive, poetic mind of the Venetian and Kublai Khan's insatiable
curiosity.
Next to being sensitive to the poetic way Marco Polo describes the richness and diversity
of cities in the Mongol empire, Kublai Khan also has a penchant for rational, technological
structures. Had he been able to jump six centuries forward the Khan would marvel at the
detailed cross-sections of great infrastructural projects undertaken in New York City in the
second half of the nineteenth century.
Week by week the New Yorkers were informed about the development of the bridges
spanning the East River, the construction of subway tunnels, and the enormous sewage
system that was under way during the eighteen-eighties. Detailed engravings depicting
these large public works, and published in magazines such as Scientific American,
resemble anatomical drawings that were produced in the same period: exact
representations of the city as a growing, pulsating organism, with a multitude of ant-like
people occupying the city's system of submerged arteries. This visual exactness ran
parallel with the advent of standardized systems, patented products and mechanized
efficiency. Consequently, every component needed to be described and patented, for the
benefit of exchangeability. In the course of only a few decades patent offices received a
staggering number of inventions and product descriptions. In 1800 the US patent office
received 41 patent applications. In 1900 this number already had grown explosively to
71.795 applications. Also sinks and sewer systems were produced in an infinite number of
patented variations.
In Mechanization Takes Command (1948) the eminent historian and critic of architecture
and urban design Sigfried Giedion concludes: “mechanization is an agent, like water, fire,
light. It is blind and without direction of its own. It must be canalised. Like the powers of
nature, mechanization depends on man’s capacity to make use of it and to protect himself
against its inherent perils. Because mechanization sprang entirely from the mind of man, it
is the more dangerous to him. Being more easily controlled than natural forces,
mechanization reacts on the senses and on the mind of its creator”.
There always has been a conflict between the perception of the human body as a spiritual
whole and the human body as a configuration of definable parts. The body-as-factory
became the prevailing metaphor, before it was replaced by the more recent metaphor of
the body-as-computer, steered by multiple algorithms.
In the nineteen-twenties the German physician and information designer avant la lettre
Fritz Kahn succeeded in merging the human as factory, and the factory as organism. In his

3. humanoid diagram, the human body is represented as a series of control centers and
situation rooms inside a chemical refinery. In Kahn's scheme the intensity and complexity
of human endeavour is epitomized by both Man as system, and Man as Steward at large,
controlling the laws of cause and effect. There is a beginning and an end, a system of
entrances and exits, sinks and drains, feeding and relieving the arduous labyrinth of Man's
transitory system. Kahn’s diagram seems to predate the contemporary vision that the Born
and the Made are essentially indistinguishable, waiting to be merged completely, and
ultimately liberated from the boundaries between the natural and the artificial.