I don't like using public bathrooms, but they should still be designed better
Public bathroom design by Shigeru Ban
I recently met up with my book club in the park for a socially distanced hang. Sunshine, fresh air, the yellow and green leaves dancing in a light breeze. It was the perfect kind of day for being outside and gabbing about romance novels. And it was all interrupted by one of the most annoying things about being a human: needing to pee.
Three from our group tore off to the nearby fieldhouse, past a kids’ soccer game, past families strolling with their dogs and toddlers, only to discover that the fieldhouse and its much needed bathrooms were locked. A grocery store was a brisk 7-minute walk away. Where were those kids supposed to pee? There weren’t enough trees or bushes to provide significant cover for an outdoor emergency (I looked). Were they really going to all hustle to the grocery, or could their parents drive them home fast enough?
As enraged as I was, I was not surprised. A few months prior, on a bike ride by the lake, my partner and I stopped at five different public bathrooms in the Chicago Park District to discover them locked. We also had to leave the park for a grocery store bathroom.
I couldn’t believe the city’s negligent cruelty. Why lock all the bathrooms (presumably all of the +240 fieldhouses) when the parks were open? There were scores of people walking, on bikes, some on rollerblades. Maybe there were concerns about COVID, but the parks were open. If you’re going to invite people into a space let them use the full space. You wouldn’t invite people over to your home and then tell them they couldn’t use the bathroom.
So what does it mean when a city doesn’t provide basic amenities for its citizens? I can’t not see these locked bathrooms as a metaphor for how poorly we can treat other humans. It’s a way of saying, you are not wanted in this space.
Japan, however, seems to have the opposite attitude. Instead of trying to keep people out, they are thinking of ways to make public bathrooms better. Maybe you saw the articles dotting the internet over the summer about The Tokyo Toilet? Public toilets, though plentiful in Japan, were still comprised of a lot of squat toilets. Ahead of the now-postponed Olympics, Japan decided to redesign and update public bathrooms. They hired world-renowned architects to create “unique” public bathroom facilities.
This design by Shigeru Ban grabbed headlines. His single-occupancy stalls utilized colored glass that was transparent when the door was unlocked and opaque when locked. The idea was this would allow people to see if the bathroom was occupied and how clean it was before entering. It is agonizing to pull on a locked door in a moment of crisis! Plus, this could take care of the other issue with public bathrooms: the surprise, gross-out factor of a filthy bathroom. But the transparent glass weirded people out. I get it, I would be low-key worried about a malfunction in the tech that would suddenly make the glass transparent and expose my derriere to innocent passersby. Still, I am all for experimenting with new designs of public bathrooms to make the experience of putting my butt on the same place that a stranger’s butt touched less icky.
Per Forbes, on a statement from the The Nippon Foundation:
The mission was to apply innovative design to make public bathrooms accessible for everyone regardless of gender, age or disability, with a goal '“that people will feel comfortable using these public toilets and to foster a spirit of hospitality for the next person.”
That bit, “fostering a spirit of hospitality” is enough to bring tears to my eyes. In these world-feels-like-it’s-on-fire times, I’m ready to latch on like a barnacle to anything, whether it’s a nation or a person or a toilet, that wants to make something better, especially something that is using design for a public good.
The everyday kind of hospitality of hanging out at a friend’s house or visiting your family for dinner doesn’t happen much nowadays. Instead, the opportunities for hospitality happen outdoors. In cities like Chicago, where so many of us live in apartments and are thus deprived of a private backyard, it happens in parks. To see friends, family, colleagues safely we need to use public spaces. Breathing the open air and seeing trees and sky instead of the same walls is a shimmering bit of joy, a memory made, instead of another dull moment inside, so similar to all the others it’s easily forgotten.
I get it, we don’t want to think about public bathrooms, or even private ones. We think public bathrooms are gross because we think human bodies are gross, with our farts and fluids and waste. We are ashamed of these things now, but not always. The Romans had extensive, probably co-ed, public bathrooms. Rows of seats were next to each other with holes in the bottom for butts. We all used to poop together.
This is basically unimaginable nowadays. Farting in public or even around trusted friends could stop your heart from intense mortification. The shame of the smelly things our bodies do is hard to overcome. And we in the U.S. don’t really do public bathrooms. Truly public bathrooms—those not housed in a theater or mall, restaurant or office building—are not common. We are a nation of cars and many of us live within a short drive of our homes and our private bathrooms. Gas stations abound for when an emergency comes up. And for those long drives in our private bubble on wheels, there’s rest stops along the highways. But those too have a stigma. (I used to hold it in for miles until I could get to a fast food restaurant or gas station).
But we all will probably use public bathrooms multiple times over the 1.5 years of our lives that we spend in a bathroom. The Nippon Foundation made a point in it’s statement about making a public bathroom for everyone regardless of gender. The group Stalled! is re-imagining the public bathroom to be truly inclusive “for everyone regardless of age, gender, race, religion and disability.” Locks are not always needed to keep people out. Sometimes fear can, sometimes inaccessibility or lack of needed amenities can.
Stalled! went a step further than many of the designers of the The Tokyo Toilet by designing a space that would not isolate two genders into separate spaces. Rather Stalled! envisioned a bathroom as one big space with private, single-occupancy units, including ambulatory stalls and family rooms on one side, and an area with sinks for washing on the other. The safety comes from the overall bathroom space being open and accessible for everyone, rather than denying certain groups access. This bathroom design also incorporated a lounge area where you can rest. This, I’d say, is hospitality.
But it is probably strange at first: all genders using one space. When traveling, I ran into something like a beta version of Stalled!’s design. At this restaurant, there were no separate men’s and women’s rooms, rather a few private, single-occupancy stalls and a row of shared sinks. I was shocked when a man emerged from one of the stalls and started washing his hands next to me. It felt totally weird, and I panicked that I got turned around and went to the men’s bathroom. But we politely ignored each other, as you do. It’s just something to get used to.
And I think we can get used to it. Our ideas of what is appropriate for a public bathroom have changed over time. Assumptions we have about the roles of men and women, cultural norms of what is and is not appropriate (18th-century women would surreptitiously relieve themselves in public by concealing a porcelain dish under their voluminous skirts) and technological innovations find their way into the design of the public bathroom. In other words, design is infused with the surrounding culture.
The Tokyo Toilet and Stalled! are two groups pushing design forward by putting intention and creativity and thought into a space that we just do not think of until we must brace ourselves to use it.
Part of the design of a public space, and inviting people to use that space, requires acknowledging that we all (and we all of different genders, bodies, ages, religions, etc. ) eventually need to use the bathroom, and acknowledging that yeah, our bodies are smelly at times. So why not make public bathrooms better, why not make them places you at least don’t mind being in, if not ones that spark amusement. At the very least, unlock the damn bathrooms. Everyone should be welcome.
For more on the history and future of the public bathroom, listen to 99% Invisible’s episode on the topic, which partly inspired this letter.
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