Given some creativity and freedom, innovative architecture can emerge from the humblest places – such as a public washroom. In these three projects, architects took on the task of building WCs – or, in the case of Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, renovating ones that were 40 years old – and created new spaces that serve people’s practical needs and also deliver a splash of beauty.
It’s a return to a 20th century ideal, when, architecture had the grand ambition to deliver good design to everyone. Today, this can feel quaint. Here in Canada, we don’t have anything to match the grand public projects, universities, cultural buildings and schools, that helped reshape our society at mid-century. But as these projects show, good design comes out of constraints.
Borden Park
It looks like a minimalist flying saucer: round, glassy and reflective, a shimmering cylinder in the grass. Located in Edmonton’s Borden Park, this pavilion is both gorgeous and wildly out of place. Five years ago, under mayor Stephen Mandel, the city held a design competition for five park buildings as part of a plan to revitalize its open spaces; this inscrutable object by the Toronto architects GH3 is one of them.
Step inside, and it reveals its purpose as public washrooms. Within its circular floor plan, a smaller core contains the amenities – with a “reductionist palette,” says GH3’s Pat Hanson, of white mosaic tile and stainless-steel trough sinks. The outer ring is a highly refined space with custom beech seating that evokes the Eames Walnut Stool where visitors can simply enjoy the landscape. This room has a polished-concrete floor, and its outer glass wall reveals the park’s landscape in 360 degrees, punctuated by zig-zagging trusses of glue-laminated Douglas fir.
“There are very few details in the building,” Hanson says. “There was a discipline in making it as simple as possible and deciding where we were going to spend our effort.”
While the washroom reflects GH3’s precise design vocabulary, it also reflects the tradition in which the 20-hectare Borden Park was designed a century ago. “The circular building really looks back at English park design,” Hanson argues, “which is a fusion of axial design and curvilinear paths.” He also places it in the tradition of the folly – a small, often whimsical structure that serves to enhance the landscape around it. That’s a lot of work for a bathroom to do. “It’s inviting and playful, in the way a park building can be,” Hanson says. “Just running around it, watching the reflections on the façade – it invites you to engage.”
Assiniboine Park
Many things in Winnipeg are more expensive because of the city’s relative isolation, but one commodity is actually cheap: shipping containers, which carry consumer goods there, and in many cases wind up stranded. “I liken them to glacial till,” says the Winnipeg-based architect Peter Sampson. “It’s the result of living at the end of the distribution line, top of North America.” That insight was the starting point for the bathrooms that Sampson’s office designed for Lyric Theatre in the city’s Assiniboine Park.
In purely visual terms, the “washroom boxes” are striking – three rectangular slabs sitting on a wood deck, wrapped on two faces with cedar siding and on the front with precisely tailored glass. That glass is reflective, so during the day the façades reflect nearby foliage and camouflage themselves against the trees; at night, they reveal the vivid colours on the inside of the washrooms, yellow, turquoise and deep red.
They barely look like shipping containers. But the boxes, 12 metres long by 2.7 metres high, were what made the project viable: The washrooms were built out in a warehouse and brought to the site by truck, on a budget that was about half the cost of conventional construction. Working in a design-build partnership with Jeff Olafson of Winnipeg’s Gardon Construction, Sampson’s office delivered the washrooms – from conception to completion – in less than five months.
Shipping containers are sexy in the architecture world, and the architect and builder had previously used them on two small projects – including the award-winning bikeLAB at the University of Winnipeg – while preserving their steel outer walls for an industrial-chic effect. In this case process trumped aesthetics, and the steel is exposed only on the inside and on the back end (if you look).
ROM Currelly Hall
When Toronto’s Superkul took on a project at the Royal Ontario Museum, the modest task of renovating a 40-year-old bathroom came with some high aspirations. “They said, ‘We want award-winning washrooms that are both indestructible and gorgeous,’” recalls Superkul principal Meg Graham. Her office created an object sculptural enough to belong in a museum: a long wave of white Corian swoops along one wall, rising and falling to define a low sink, counter and diaper-changing table without ever hitting a right angle.
There is a strong practical rationale for this: It uses the limited space very efficiently, in concert with special Dyson fixtures that combine a hand dryer with a faucet into one object. (Bring your hands under the centre, and you get water; move them apart, you get hot air. Once you figure it out, it is genius.) This attention to space and the movement of people is crucial, given the museum’s high volumes of visitors and the fact that the adjacent space, Currelly Hall, is often used for large events. The Corian structure is also “pretty much indestructible,” Graham says – definitely strong enough to support little kids climbing on top.
But of course the aesthetic dimension is crucial. Thus the washroom features an unlikely range of textures and finishes – glimmering tile on the walls and the blue-grey terrazzo floors, the architects say, hint at the minerals in the museum’s collection. The vocabulary of swooshes stands in contrast to Daniel Libeskind’s angular and clunky Lee-Chin Crystal just outside, and shows just how much talented designers can achieve on the smallest canvas. Graham credits the museum’s leadership for balancing durability with higher ideals. “It is an institution of cultural history,” she says, “and they understand the possibilities of design.”