The Evolution of Bathrooms: Historical Lessons to Aspire to a Future of Safe and Inclusive Spaces

Moving forward also means looking back. Fulfilling the mission of creating safe and inclusive bathrooms that meet the needs of a diverse range of people of different ages, genders, religions, and abilities requires a broad perspective. To understand how we arrived at the current "stalemate" regarding the debate over the design of these spaces, we must consider that bathrooms were and are designed within a particular social and historical context.

This article, written by Joel Sanders as part of the research by Stalled! to create safe, sustainable, and inclusive public restrooms, is a translation of his original essay published in -Stalled! Online-, which you can read in English at the following link.

History is a crucial tool, a constant testament to the fact that practices evolve and that the future can be different from the present. Creating public spaces that foster diversity and inclusion depends on first identifying and then overcoming the deeply ingrained historical and ideological forces that have shaped the spaces we inhabit daily. We must understand that architecture is an inherently prescriptive and forward-looking discipline: we draw up blueprints for spaces we will inhabit in the future. If we want to imagine an alternative future, history is a crucial starting point.

There is a vast body of literature dedicated to the history of bathrooms that allows us to understand the evolution of these spaces over time—primarily from an Anglo-American perspective. A wide range of authors from diverse fields, such as architectural history and psychoanalysis, have explored this rich territory from various theoretical, social, economic, and technological viewpoints—access the bibliography recommended by Stalled! at the following link. This text does not aim to be a descriptive, dispassionate account or a mere compendium of information. Rather, it seeks to problematize our current ideas about bathrooms, synthesizing key historical aspects to destabilize how we understand this everyday space—the sex-segregated restroom—whose design is often "taken for granted" as universal and inevitable. My goal is to dispel the prevailing assumption that bathroom design is shaped solely by function, as dictated by biological and technological parameters. I hope to demonstrate that the history of design is culturally relative—a complex narrative shaped by an interconnected series of political, economic, and technological forces driven by shifting cultural conceptions of health and hygiene, privacy and decoro, wealth and poverty, sex, race, and gender.