Public toilets are becoming tourist attractions, thanks to cutting-edge designs

If there’s one commonality among most styles of travel, it’s the humble public lavatory – we all use one at some point or another in our journeys.

They’re also the stuff of memories – though usually of the grim kind. A bad WC stop tends to etch itself into one’s recollections more easily than a clean and tidy one.

Perhaps that’s changing. Recognising that even the most basic of human needs warrants an elevated experience, those responsible for planning and constructing public conveniences are increasingly turning to architects and other designers to create something that’s memorable for all the right reasons.

It’s no surprise, then, that in the new edition of the Lonely Planet book Toilets of the World: 100 Strange & Spectacular Thrones, Commodes, Loos & Latrines, the marvellous loos of Tokyo’s Shibuya feature, just as they did in the award-winning Wim Wenders movie Perfect Days.

The project Tokyo Toilet saw 16 creators from around the world create 17 amazing restrooms with famed Japanese architectural names Kengo Kuma and Tadao Ando involved, as well as Australia’s influential industrial designer Marc Newson.

The structures range from the white concave temple to water, Nishisando by Sou Fujimoto, to the famously diaphanous walls of the conveniences in Haru-no-Ogawa Community Park and the same in Yoyogi Fukamachi Mini Park by Pritzker winner Shigeru Ban – where, worry not, the walls go opaque when the facilities are engaged.

In Australia, three public amenity blocks were shortlisted for the NSW architecture awards in 2023, while Kenilworth on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast was inspired by the Hundertwasser toilet in New Zealand to create a destination dunny of its own. After a design competition that attracted 200 entries, the winning concept, now constructed and titled “Canistrum”, by architectural illustrator and animator Michael Lennie, represents an unfinished basket as a reflection of unfinished history.

Lonely Planet’s Toilets of the World also singles out the Ureddplazzen rest stop, an organically shaped provision on Nordland’s Helgelandskysten scenic road in Norway.

The work doubles as a memorial to those who died when the submarine Uredd hit a mine in Fugloyfjorden during World War II. The Oslo-based architect studio Haugen/Zohar Arkitekter, along with landscape architect Inge Dahlman-Asplan Viak, wanted the structure to fit into the incredible natural environment surrounding it.

In Iceland, a toilet block on a cliffside at Dyrholaey, near Vik, the country’s most southerly village, is positioned and constructed for views of the landscape. Designed by Reykjavik architects Glama Kim, it comprises two separate buildings connected by a covered terrace clad in natural material to limit the impact on the natural surroundings. The buildings’ glazed frontages afford spectacular views towards the ocean.

Restaurants have long been exponents of the spectacular loo. At London’s Sketch restaurant, the egg-like toilet pods are as Instagrammed as the rest of the fashionable establishment (if not more). But according to Toilets of the World, the “sexiest WC on Earth” is public, located on Terreiro do Paco, one of Lisbon’s most impressive public squares.

Bursting with colour, it’s by Renova, a Portuguese paper goods company, and its columns of coloured loo paper have made it a must-visit in its own right.

As architects Edit Collective say in a recent article in online design publication Dezeen, inspired by the decline of availability of public amenities in Britain: “We need more public toilets, not less, and we need more people to be able to access them, not fewer.

“The solution, taking inspiration from Tokyo Toilet, which is now a popular tourist attraction, is to add value to toilets, instead of stripping them further back to bare minimum to reduce costs and combat vandalism. Creating more public benefit could make toilets stack up for the public bodies that commission them.”

See lonelyplanet.com

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