As some of the most common and least considered spaces, lavatories present fertile ground for both architectural analysis and development. While we all visit daily, in nearly every case, the restroom is experienced as a detour, not a destination. Our sanitation systems are foundational to healthy, livable urban environments. But, as a rule, the bathroom architectures and objects which comprise these infrastructures are forgotten – out of sight and out of mind.
Public restrooms are infrastructure as much as architecture, and, as architecture, they’re often mundane, shaped by the realities of inherited spaces, limited budgets, standardized designs, and ingrained cultural conventions. As the cliche goes, bathrooms are frequently drawn up by those lowest on the design food chain, and resultant spaces can seem like afterthoughts, wholly determined by plumbing, building, and legal codes’ dicta. Generic templates, slotted into place, engender familiar choreographies of ritual abjection and ablution. 1 These spaces manifest as standardized continuations of the plumbing systems they enable. However, at the same time, the toilet is often the only place in a building designed to be directly touched, intimately occupied by the user, hooking them up to hidden systems of the clean and the obscene.
Simultaneously “emblems of civility and containers of social threat,” in contemporary society, public restrooms are more regulated than almost any other typology. These places uphold and enforce society’s “cherished classifications;” 2 they are spaces of discipline, not only through segregation, surveillance, and policing, but equally through the systems of social discipline which users have internalized. 3 Far from being standardized pieces of technology, bathrooms are culturally and historically specific, reflecting the normative politics of their contexts. From the colonial period to today, the idea that certain groups of people are dirty or “excrementally uncontrolled” has been used to denigrate and exclude. 4 Gender, race, class, religion, and ability all factor in. From the introduction of gendered restrooms, to the elimination of racially segregated bathrooms to the Americans with Disabilities Act to the ongoing campaign for gender-inclusive lavatories, public restrooms have long been at the head of civil rights movements. The bathroom’s issues are society’s issues.
From segregated value signaling to intimate ergonomics to the sometimes violent enforcement of racial, sexual, and gender policing, both the environments and behaviors of bathrooms carry heavy symbolic loads, reflecting ideas of purity and pollution, sacred and profane.
This study will seek to interrogate both the systems of flowing resources (energy, water, people, power) and the lived realities of individual experiences shaped by public toilets. Due to the nature of interactions with the typology, interiors are of primary interest, but exterior forms will be noted, particularly for how they signal values and norms, direct behaviors, and (dis)allow various forms of access and use. In many ways, toilet architecture is a quintessential architecture: it facilitates the fulfillment of basic human needs; it is often mundane, systematized, or simply poorly executed; and yet it is, occasionally, sublime.
Public restrooms tend to reveal the realities that other architectures hide. In these spaces, budget shortfalls reveal themselves, lapses in maintenance and care are most conspicuous, and, more than in any other public space, we are faced immediately with the organic realities of ourselves and others. Indeed, bathrooms and shit dissolve the delusive boundaries between pure and impure, subject and object, inside and outside. 5 Within architecture, the traditionally assumed and still overwhelmingly present divisions of public/private and inside/outside are often shored up by masculine/feminine and nature/culture binaries. 6 In the bathroom, we see that all of these dualities are suspect, and ripe for, perhaps not dissolution, but reinterpretation. In contrast to (or maybe more accurately: in reaction to) both the fluidity of the actions they conceal and the ranging realities of sex and gender embodiments are the rigid, architecturally imposed gender divisions common to lavatories. As public toilets are the primary architectural means through which gender is disciplined, they are also ideal sites for deconstructing these divides and fostering cultural change.
- Cavanagh, Sheila. Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination. University of Toronto Press, 2014. p. 21.
- Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- Penner, Barbara. Bathroom. Reaktion Books, Limited, 2014. p. 27.
- Inglis, David. “Dirt and Denigration: The Fecal Imagery and Rhetorics of Abuse.” Postcolonial Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2002. pp. 208-209.
- Douglas.
- Molesworth, Helen. “Bathrooms and Kitchens: Cleaning House with Duchamp.” In Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 1997. p. 78.