Public toilet Art gallery

This project responds to the overarching Unit question of ‘what can urbanism be’ and looks at re-defining the relationship between user and the public facilities required to conform to the operational city. Whilst also opening up the dialogue of the cultural identity for a fragile community within a looming, fast gentrifying, city. Turbo Island is the acute site for this intervention; where the chaos of street drinking and the calmness of street art conform as one. It plays host to informal communities, such as the unsheltered, the creative, the activist and the social.

The irony of this informal ownership being that land is deemed a conservation area and should be protected for these communities to carry on forging their own presence on the land; yet now it is a mundane land-banked plot, diminished to advertising. The proposal revolves around two researched theses; the public toilet as an essential yet dismissed essential facility and also street art as a tool for activism but also a craft often misinterpreted.

The public toilet is a core facility of the operational city, often tarnished through negative stigmas such as; their inaccessibly, abundance of privacy, unsanitary conditions and segregation. In addition to this, although at the heart of a creative community, street art remains under tension as a misinterpreted craft. A negative stigma established by the underfunding of creative arts at a primitive educational level and the ideology that when produced in a graffiti style, often deemed a vandalism. Applying these theses into a meaningful intervention, this project re-defines the public toilet perception through the power of street art. Its dialogue can be framed as though it is a magnificent sculptural facility within the urban landscape. It attacks the common mundane purpose of a public toilet by creating art from it and therefore by enclosing these toilets within a structure, they become an art within a gallery; although it a public toilet art gallery. Applying this ideology technically, the building not only dedicates the first floor to the public toilet, elevating it out of the underground, but also uses the façade as a tool to express the notion of Stokes Croft as a Cultural Quarter.

It is designed as a double skin facade with a detachable outer layer to create an iterative canvas with the ability to adapt and become timeless at the hands of its own communities. Innovative and experimental in tectonics, the proposal further ties back to the unit theme of Land as a secret weapon seeking ownership into the hands of the Stokes Croft Land Trust and furthers this by offering opportunity for the transient to remain attached to the land in a newly formal manor through a new transient employment scheme.