Your Restroom is a Battleground

Your Restroom is a Battleground

Was Frauen tagtäglich und sprichwörtlich am eigenen Leib erleben, betrifft auch andere marginalisierte Gesellschaftsgruppen.

Restrooms are often described as neutral facilities or mere utilitarian infrastructures catering to the universal needs of individuals, when in fact they are contested spaces that are shaped by and in turn shape the ways bodies and communities come together. Restrooms are architectures where gender, religion, race, ability, hygiene, health, environmental concerns, and the economy are defined culturally and articulated materially. In the last few years, the climate crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic, and growing tensions derived from population displacements have made these entanglements more evident. Restrooms are not an isolated design problem but rather symptoms of larger disputes that can be mediated through architectural tools. Restrooms are political architectures; they are battlegrounds.

Matilde Cassani (Italia, 1980) di Architectural Association (Regno Unito, 1847), Ignacio G. Galán (Spagna, 1982) di Barnard College, Columbia University (Usa, 1889), Iván L. Munuera (Spagna, 1980) della Princeton University (Usa, 1746), e Joel Sanders (Usa, 1956) di JSA / MIXdesign and Yale University (Usa, 1701) in collaborazione con Leonardo Gatti (Italia, 1991), Maria Chiara Pastore (Italia, 1980), Pablo Saiz del Rio (Spagna, 1993), Paula Vilaplana de Miguel (Spagna, 1985), Seb Choe (Usa, 1994), Vanessa Gonzalez (Usa, 1997) e Marco Li (Hong Kong, 1984) di JSA/MIXdesign (Usa, 1992)