Material Morality

The Politics of Surface, 1860 to 2025

Every era inscribes its moral imagination onto matter. In the United States, the materials of bathrooms have traced the shifting line between power, purity, and care (Daston & Vidal, 2004; Forty, 1992).

From the polished marble baths of the U.S. Capitol in 1860, to the green ceramic tile of Truman’s postwar White House, to the black-and-white statuary m…