Not long ago I felt blazing hot from a day under the sun. I was in a Study Hall, and when I went to the bathroom to refresh myself I found the boys’s one closed, so I entered the girls one. I refer to the bathrooms in this way because, at the time, it was populated by young Spanish students cramming both the space and their mind due to their finals.

I entered the girls bathroom and I splashed myself with water, hoping that one of these younger women wouldn’t surprise me having been daring enough to use their restroom. Then I thought: no, in my experience, if one of these ladies were to catch me, I would just excuse myself because I’m using it honestly, I would only be nervous if my intentions were other.

I came back to sit down to work, but my thought drifted: why is it that we even have this separation? In Spain, bathrooms are often very private. In Americas I personally know, public bathrooms quickly get you used to becoming very intimate with strangers: we exchange sounds and smells of our bowel movements. We have followed a strange tradition, I guess, of large outhouses: the modern public bathroom doesn’t make any sense in today’s world.

Interface-wise, it is asking you an unnecessary question: are you male or female? I’m simply a human being with an urgent need for disposing of my waste. I prefer to do this as privately as possible, so I wouldn’t even know if the person next to me is of whatever gender that person identifies with.

As such, it is helpful to imagine them as “booths for privacy”, and this seems like an invitation for abuse, here a good architect or engineer would know which material is best for tolerating abuse, just make it as easy to clean as possible. People will be people.

According to some movies I’ve seen, women’s bathrooms have a social life. In my experience, there’s not much conversation on the gentlemen’s side of the bathroom. It is generally not considered a good place to be friendly, unless it’s a more or less specifically social place (like a locker room or a sauna, I guess).

I know very little of the world

It is time for individual bathrooms

As I come out of the bathroom for a refreshment, I found the “gentlemen” bathroom locked. The girls was right next door, nobody was there, so I quickly splashed my face with water, hoping that I wouldn’t inopportunate a lady behind the screens. I sit down and ponder: why is it that our public bathrooms are so archaic? I have no interest in exploring the history of shitting, I would just like to work out what makes a good bathroom. Or do I?

I search in google: “prehistoric latrines”, it shows me a dinosaur dump location. Well, this is nature at work, what does nature think makes a good latrine? Well, not much of the precise location is described. Basic law of nature is “don’t shit where you eat”. Doctrine of nature which can be applied to many areas of life. Let us see what happens when the human intellect comes into play, when was the first time we thought: I can do better than leaving my dumps around my cave. Do formerly inhabited caves have latrines? Now, there’s a search query.

I come back with my intentions destroyed: apparently modern bathrooms are something we should be grateful for. We didn’t even bother not stepping on our own shit until around 50,000 years ago, when we gained enough cognition to think: it’s probably not a good idea to step on shit, and our own excrement stopped recording our footprints. Only by trial and error he would associate the smell of shit with sickness, but apparently we are very slow learners. If we were 10 years of age, we would have stopped stepping on our shit when we were 7 1/2 years of age.

Let us then take a moment to thank modernity, because the great people who have made modern bathrooms are saints. We are so much better than we were some decades ago. Having said that, let us explore what is a public bathroom and how it can be improved.

The bathroom from an architectural point of view

In developed countries I rarely catch sight of a tank, but in my native country, many buildings are topped by water tanks. The water is brought down by the force of gravity (of course) brought through lines, which I would suppose have a name but I am doing a consciousness dump here. I will reason it out: the reason we find “wet rooms” in architecture clustered together (for example, the bathroom may be close to the kitchen in a small apartment) is because a line comes down which carries the water, and you don’t want to transport it too far unnecessarily.

I shall edit this tomorrow, the train of thought is interesting, but I must take myself out once this is written.

What happens with waste water? It comes from the “wet” area and it drains towards a vertical tube in a different location, sewage main. Unfortunately in developing countries one will often find the sewage flowing back to the mains tubing, because even though there are independent and sealed most of the time, and earthquake might cause silent contamination. The water put into the system and it will often come out contaminated. The source of contamination is the system itself.