Where's the washroom?

So, where's the washroom?

You can hear The Silence.

"To talk about architecture without talking about toilets is to operate in denial of a whole array of sexual, psychological, and moral economies. For all the endless apparent talk about the body in architecture, architects don’t really want to talk about it. Architectural discourse is a deodorizer" (Toilet Architecture: An Essay about the Most Psychosexually Charged Room in a Building, by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, 2017).

Where's the washroom? It's a challenging question when washrooms - bathrooms, toilets, restrooms, loos, whatever you want to call them - remain a taboo subject in polite society. But who hasn't been caught short, with their pants down, so to speak?

The dearth of public toilets in Winnipeg, indeed across Canada, is a crying shame, literally.

Here in Winnipeg, BridgmanCollaborative has been lobbying for well over a decade to bring public toilets to the City's public policy table. Now with COVID-19 and lockdowns, the issues are even more pronounced, with restaurants and shops closed, opened, closed again . . . . The relationships between public health, planning and design have never been so exposed in recent history, as they are today.

We're working on a new prototype, known as the LOO LOO™, following from the success of our POP-UP Winnipeg Public Toilet. More news in the coming months. In the meantime, check out what's in the works.

At BridgmanCollaborative, we're challenging The Silence.

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