An inconvenience truth

Getting caught short is trickier these days, with public conveniences being replaced by ‘privatised’ loos in cafes and pubs. So is it time to revive the art of building toilets?

IT’S THE architecture that dare not speak its name. We all make use of it, so many times a day that few of us care to count them, and yet how often do we sit down and truly address the issues and iniquities of public toilets?

Public toilets, or a lack of them, can define our use of both cities and the countryside. They also create, and underline, divisions of class, culture, gender and age. And once you start looking into them all sorts of thoughts about the use of public and private space, repressions and social tensions, and the individual’s place within society begin to emerge.

It’s difficult to talk or write about toilets without bad puns coming into play or without resorting to euphemism. Even the phrase I have just used, “looking into” public toilets, carries an unintended double entendre, and you find yourself checking that you’re not creating too many sniggering moments, because toilets are a serious subject.

If your normal day takes you from home, via a short commute, to a well-maintained workplace with its own facilities, toilets aren’t a problem. But for the elderly, those with small children, people who drive for a living, the disabled or infirm, tourists or anyone away from home, where to pee becomes an issue of considerable importance. Increasingly, across Ireland, public toilets are padlocked to discourage anti-social behaviour, while huge stretches of motorway have been built with nowhere to stop for what Americans, masters of toilet euphemism, would call a comfort break. Comfort breaks are harder to find these days in the US as well: the New York subway system once had 1,676 functioning public toilets, now it has just 10.

Your best option in a foreign city is to seek out the familiar. Thus McDonald’s and Starbucks become de facto public toilets, and in that sense echo the privatising of a great deal of formerly public space and public responsibilities. Just as cafes rent, and therefore also police, stretches of pavement, and just as private security firms take on the role of gardaí in shopping malls, so restaurants, pubs and department stores are, like it or not, the new public conveniences.

This development creates class and cultural divisions: it is easier for some people to breeze past the doorman at Brown Thomas and for others to nip into a pub. Equally, some are better able to carry off the don’t-even-think-about-saying-patrons-only insouciance necessary when finding out where the toilets are in a city hotel.

Needs, when taken short, are also gendered. I have always been envious of men’s ability to pee standing up, especially when feeling somewhat desperate on a long car journey or surveying the levels of grime in a public convenience.

The politics of the loo, sexual as well as cultural, are taken up in a new book, Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing,edited by Harvey Molotch and Laura Norén. It aims to tackle the language around toilets and open up debates that have gone on, so to speak, behind closed doors and that never get resolved. Why, for example, are we so resistant to unisex toilets? How bad would it be to have men and women going to the loo side by side?

The book is the result of a conference, Outing the Water Closet: Sex, Gender and the Public Toilet,which took place in New York in 2007. With contributions by sociologists, anthropologists and architects, its language can be quite dry, but the ideas are fascinating. Although the title of Ruth Barcan's essay, Public Toilets as Technologies of Separation and Concealment,is a clue to the academic tone of the book, her thoughts on how "architecture is a practice that can make cultural separations concrete" and on how toilets are thought of as "culturally dirty spaces", in which architects must try to design a single site to accommodate a range of ambiguities and uses, are well worth reading.

One of the reasons we find it so difficult to explore the toilet issue is disgust. As an evolutionary mechanism to protect us from the unhygienic, and therefore the dangerous, disgust has also distanced us from our bodily functions, to the degree that many polite people don’t quite like to talk about toilets. Even the names for them – loo, restroom, bathroom, ladies, gents and (my least favourite) little girls’ room – tend not to get too descriptive.

One of the results of this is increased automation, so much so that you can now go to the loo without ever touching anything. Automatic flushes, air dryers, taps that turn on with a wave of the hand, all dematerialise the physical. As Molotch writes: “The loo also teaches about silence. Avoidance, because of distaste or whatever reason, has special consequences on the nature and distribution of suffering, the givens of the physical world, and the pollution of the earth.”

Because they are private spaces in the public realm, somewhere that you can go and be unobserved, toilets and antisocial behaviour go hand in hand. Drug abuse and sexual activity are the most-cited reasons for closing down toilets, and the term “cottaging”, for brief anonymous gay sexual encounters, was coined from Victorian public toilets designed to look like country cottages. Automation has also seen the disappearance of attendants, who might otherwise have kept an eye on things, and who might also have helped those who don’t quite fit into the ladies and gents separation.

In her essay, which carries the catchy title Why Not Abolish Laws of Urinary Segregation?, Mary Anne Case cites as examples the mother of a young son who is too old for the ladies and too young perhaps to go to the gents on his own, and the man with an Alzheimer's-afflicted mother, both of whom have to wait anxiously outside.

Public toilets tell us a lot about who we are and what we value, and also what we're prepared to put up with because of pride or the desire to avoid embarrassment. When Jonathan Swift described in his poem The Lady's Dressing Room the horror of the hero on discovering that the beautiful "Celia, Celia, Celia shits!", I wonder if he ever imagined that most of us would still like to pretend we don't, nearly 300 years later.

Perhaps we get the public toilets we deserve, but imagine how much better things could be. As Clara Greed writes in her conclusion to Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing: "Public toilets need bringing in from the cold; they should be features of public art in their own right, not clutter to be swept away. Let's have fabulous, glamorous toilet architecture."

Oh yes, let’s indeed!

Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, edited by Harvey Molotch and Laura Norén, is published by NYU Press

Loos with a view Great toilets

* Monica Bonvinci's Don't Miss a Sec, LondonThis toilet cubicle with one-way mirrors was installed outside Tate Britain in 2003. The mirrors were on the outside.

* Bar 89, Mercer Street, New YorkThe transparent doors turn opaque when you click the lock.

* The gents' at the Peninsula Hotel, Hong KongMen describe the novel sensation of peeing over the city from 28 floors up. Designed by Philippe Starck.

* Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue, LondonAt dusk at weekends an open-air urinal emerges from beneath the pavement. And disappears at dawn.

* Croagh Patrick, Co MayoSurely the loo with the best view is the public toilet that gives pilgrims relief at the top of Croagh Patrick.

* Can't find a toilet?There's an app for that: sitorsquat.com includes listings in Ireland. You never know when you might need it.