The Original Hostile Architecture
On New York’s lack of public toilets. Plus: A photography triennial and POPS rocks
Where you read your copy of NYRA #37 isn’t our business. What is is that you subscribe in the first place.
Shit Outta Luck
The city’s planned deprivation of public toilets is the original hostile architecture.
by Aaron Timms
Institutional neglect of the public toilet has not made New York any cleaner. The streets are as stinky and messy as ever, and the city’s administration remains a confusing jumble of rupophobia and mysophilia—reflecting, perhaps, America’s long history of cultural oscillation between prudishness and profanity. The city’s official policy language—which encodes a preference for the daintier, perfumier “restroom” or “bathroom” over “toilet”—suggests a shame about the biological necessity of evacuation at the highest levels. But each human spends an average of three years of their lives in the toilet: we all burp, we all fart, we all piss, we all shit. In this city, it’s increasingly left to private interests to serve the substantial chunk of those three years that unfolds outside the home. Several architecture and design firms, including Sage & Coombe, Dattner, and Garrison Architects, pride themselves on the work they’ve done to study and prototype public toilets. This engagement has produced encouraging results but isolated projects won’t provide the solution to a problem that is, at its core, one of scale and distribution. The toilet blocks that Sage & Coombe have designed for the city’s parks department are functional capsules of tile and steel—the meal tray aesthetic strikes again!—but the one I’m most familiar with, in Bushwick’s Ten Eyck playground, is hardly ever unlocked.
Home Stretch
A city with extreme housing needs must negotiate competing visions of home.
by Veronica Brown
The housing crisis won’t be solved through any one approach, least of all a photography triennial.
This POPS Rocks
The high artifice and warm sensuality of it all tickle in a good way.
A tall granite grotto behind 550 Madison Avenue is a welcome, if chilly, place to wolf down lunch.
New York Review of Architecture reviews architecture in New York. Our editor is Samuel Medina, our deputy editor is Marianela D’Aprile, and our publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
To pitch us an article or ask us a question, write to us at: editor@nyra.nyc.
For their support, we would like to thank the Graham Foundation and our issue sponsors, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and Thomas Phifer.
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