Sex, Bathrooms and Design

North Carolina's week of bathroom talk escalated into a civil rights issue of sorts prompting input from divergent authorities such as Bruce Springsteen, the Deutsche Bank, Paypal, Pepsi and many others.. It brought to light just how sensitive Puritan America is about the space that is elsewhere simply called the toilet.

Bathroom fears

All the talk about who uses which "water closet" or WC (a European term) and when, and whose privacy needs to be protected and how, elicited clarifications from high up that only made matters worse but also served as a stark reminder of how complicated bathroom matters are and how torn folks are between talk and taboo.

In an increasingly sex-positive culture, it seems like bathroom issues are the last thing most people are reluctant to talk about.(Julie Beck, Atlantic 4-16-2014)

It is no surprise, then, that this most private of spaces not only plays an important role in politics but also in architecture. In fact, without fanfare, the bathroom and the toilet are a central tenet of the architect's design practice. People who learned drafting by hand recall entire templates devoted to toilets, sinks, urinals. CAD libraries with endless variations of sizes and shapes are the modern versions of those templates. A fecund body of regulations and literature is devoted to the bathroom regulating the number of stalls per gender, the position of the vanity mirrors, horizontal and vertical controls for sink and toilet, scald guards on pipes and, of course the famous 5' turning circle for accessibility. Those many rules have made the bathroom into one of the most fertile grounds for litigation and professional liability. But architects also take inspirations from those interstitial spaces that have been lurking in dark spaces of buildings.

Roman toilets: A communal act

The famous Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas devoted a special exhibit at the Venice Architecture Biennale to the dark spaces in buildings, one room was devoted to the lavabo (French):

“No architectural treatise declares the toilet as the primordial element of architecture, but it might be the ultimate one.”

“the fundamental zone of interaction--on the most intimate level--between humans and architecture.”

The catalog for the exhibit described the toilet room as

“the architectural space in which bodies are replenished, inspected, and cultivated, and where one is left alone for private reflection - to develop and affirm identity.”

Terminology itself is revealing. The U.S. word is “bathroom”, “loo” or “water closet” the British, and “toilet” the continental one. Americans may employ the greatest number of euphemisms, including other creative but misleading words like “restroom” and “powder room” or more childishly "little boys” and “little girls” rooms. The old British "public conveniences", however, is certainly no less prudish.

This culturally agreed-upon separation creates unique single-sex spaces. There is perhaps no other arena that so stridently reinforces gender separation and difference. (Julie Beck)

Strict separation

The Professor of Sociology and Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, Harvey Molotch, devotes his own publication, The Toilet, to the topic and may well be the most versed authority in the field. He, too, observes the rigid but on second thought rather unconvincing gender separation that is at the root of recent controversy:

Fundamental is the need to keep the sexes apart and reinforce the idea that people come in one category or the other. Those who are disabled, gender queer, from a different social class or from suspect parts of the world can be anxiety provoking wherever encountered, but the public restroom heightens all such tensions. They are laid bare as users carefully manage interactions with one another and the artifacts with which they make contact.

The professor then jumps from the gender observation to the universe of the human condition per se and observes darkly:

Deceiving elegance

The public restroom, where private acts have to be taken care of in semi-public space, is the border zone where universes collide and reveal themselves. On display are anxieties about oneself and the ‘other’. What is often posited as a scientistic or public-health problem between dirty and clean turns out to be a problem of navigating the boundary between self and other.

Another academic on the topic describes the segregation issue as such:

“Public toilets…frequently instantiate the most literal and entrenched social division—the division of people into two unchanging sexes,” ... “This form of segregation is at once immensely naturalized and immensely policed, the most taken-for-granted social categorization and the most fiercely regulated.” Ruth Barcan, lecturer of gender and cultural studies, University of Sydney

Penthouse bathroom with a view: Silo Point, Baltimore

As for design and architecture, Molotch, the expert, thinks of the bathroom as a stepchild of design, the many rules not withstanding:

Unfortunately, despite the positive effects design can have on people’s comfort level in the bathroom, it’s rarely given much thought.
I’ve been on a lot of building committees for major university buildings, and the thing that is least talked about is the public restroom. If someone were to bring it up, it would cause giggles…In architecture firms, the lowest-ranking person designs the bathroom.”

In spite of this perceived lack of design attention, little other architectural space has changed more dramatically in the last hundred years than this personal sanitation area. Few other spaces express historical circumstance so vividly—class, culture and tradition—as the toilet, and the space in which it sits.

No matter how old they are, Greek temples, Gothic cathedrals, mosques, feudal mansions, and splendid plantation mansions, there are pretty consistent and stable through the centuries in their basic means of expressing splendor, power and space.. But even in those most richly appointed places the bathroom was a matter of utter misery for most of history, maybe with the exception of ancient public bath houses, which, true to the word, were for bathing and not for pooping.

Les Pissoires de Paris (1865)

To get a tiny impression of the not so distant circumstances and standards of private hygiene that can make even hardy souls shudder, one needs to only venture to some old corner-dive-bar in a working class neighborhood of an older industrial city. There we can find how basic the loo had been until very recently. (A trip to Europe could serve a similar purpose). There it is, at the end of a long trail of obscure signs (in Europe of the signs often simply show two zeros "00", relegated to the basement, a tiny hole in the wall, dark and barely larger than an airplane restroom. Graffiti graces the walls and a strong smell hangs in the air, especially in the men's room where a tiled wall and a small gutter in the floor serve as the squeeze in urinal. It took decades of research until manufacturers finally found materials that could contain and resist the ubiquitous splatter of uric acid.

Inside our houses, the architects and homeowners of the late 19th century were as confused as the engineers about what to do. People had washstands in their bedrooms, so at first they just stuck sinks and taps into them, and put the toilet into whatever closet in the hall or space under the stairs that they could find, hence the “water closet.” They quickly realised that it didn’t make a lot of sense to run plumbing to every bedroom when it was cheaper to bring it all to one place, and the idea of the bathroom was born. Lloyd Alter, The Guardian)

In old times as in current days, different cultures express themselves differently in looks and arrangements for bathrooms. Germans and the Japanese, for example, rarely put the toilet in the same space as the tub or shower and they usually put neither right in their bedroom. While the Japanese toilet is famous for warm water douches and a host of automated body services provided by a machine that can cost half as much as a small car, the traditional Turkish toilet consists only of two spots to set one's feet on and a shallow basin to squat over.

the claw-foot tub, all the rage again

There are also technological and environmental differences: American toilets, until recently, used enormous amounts of water in the bowl that a small child could drown in them. The bulky huge porcelain urinals crowned by a wild display of exposed chrome valves and pipes make European visitors wonder about American anatomy since their own modern urinals are small with all plumbing concealed. Germans used way terrible dry "presentation" toilets late into the 1960s, possibly for fear that a pool of water could splash them wet.

Lately, concern for water conservation has led globally to low-flow toilets with super smart hydraulics that distinguish between #1 and #2 (oh the code!) and can do the trick with less than 5 liters of water. It was also America which developed accessibility as a civil rights issue until finally toilet rooms were freed from their minimized, uncomfortable straight jacket and became spacious, joyous and often day-lit affairs, outdoing kitchens as the pride of the house. In public toilets the extra space is ostensibly for the wheelchair user and the turning circle, but is there anybody who doesn't enjoy it? Private bathrooms in suburban mini-mansions have grown in size along with the family vehicle and become supersized bathroom "suites" as big as small New York apartments. These are spaces are certainly not designed by lowly drafters, but have their own interior decorators selecting hardware that is worth as much as a year of college tuition.

the old separation is on the way out

It cannot be entirely unexpected, then, that places that were subjected for so long to strict gender separation and an entire lexicon of taboos would cause consternation once that simple identifier goes away.

But here we are, the bathroom has broken out of the hidden spheres into the bright daylight of design and the flashlight of equal access is on it. The solution is easy: The unsegregated bathroom.

The single-user, unisex bathroom, initially a domain of airplanes, trains, and gas stations, has already become commonplace in many U.S. hotels and restaurants. The multi-unit gender-neutral bathroom is still only a Utopian idea. Meanwhile we can watch the slow retreat of silly North Carolinian bathroom laws. Freedom always takes its time.