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.
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.
The famous Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas devoted a special exhibit at the Venice Architecture Biennale to the dark...
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Nikolaus Philipsen FAIA
Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects
Baltimore MD
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