So Happy Together: Hot and Cold Taps

Let's talk about bad design.

Brief rant: I feel so strongly that when you wash your hands in the bathroom, you should be able to ensure a reasonable temperature. If as a sink designer, and your aim is to do that, then you would not be doing yourself a favor by separating the tap that provides hot from the tap that provide cold. Nevertheless, that is the standard situation in England. You have to turn to separate taps, and then the hot water is boiling, and the cold water is freezing. So you end up cupping your hands and wiggling wildly in discomfort as you alternate between burning your hands and freezing your fingers.

Why? Well, it has been explained to me that historically you were supposed to plug up the sink and fill it with a mixture of hot and cold, thereby creating the perfect temperature in the standing water. But firstly, who has the time to do that? Secondly, how do we overcome the grossness factor when we're using a public toilet. We don't want to wash our hands with the scum from the last person's hand-washing activities that are all over the sink bowl. I have clearly thought about it a lot. But, I think it is a deeply flawed design. And I urge sink designers to reconsider.

Advice, Ideas and Identity in Graffiti

I was sitting on the thrown reading the graffiti in a cafe on Valencia in San Francisco, and I was struck with amusement, enjoying the little nuggets of advice people had written. I was tickled by the importance of these sentences, their authors must have felt so strongly about them and so I dove in.



First I read a bit of light advice, "stay classy San Fran" next, the slightly bolder, "Eat an 8th of mushrooms with a close friend in a safe environment. Really."



And then, "go back to Europe." I suddenly thought, what is this? Is this a slur against immigrants? I prefer to assume not. Is this some sort of message for me to go back to Europe. I just came from Europe...

Obviously, this person didn't have me in mind. And yet I feel certain we have a psychological tendency to interpret things as applicable and relative to ourselves. But when it comes to open-ended advice that strangers write in bathrooms, what are the odds that someone will read it and feel like it was written precisely for them, precisely at that time? What are the odds that someone will suddenly be swayed by this guerrilla advice-giving technique from an unidentified stranger?



Looking at everything on the door I noticed that one person had tagged the door many, many times and I thought about what this person was trying to achieve by writing their name over and over. Is there a sense of ownership that comes out of tagging? Or is it an attempt to assert one's existence, a meager act of rebellion against our inevitable mortality by indelibly recording one's name in this public, subversive way? And to add to it all, tagging is also relatively anonymous. This person must not be searching for any public recognition. This fascinated me briefly. And then I stepped out of the toilet and went on with my day.

Graffiti-art in Bathrooms

I always wonder about toilets with graffiti-art all over the walls. How was this look achieved? Is this something one member of staff did to encourage customers, who then progressively went wild all over the walls, fixtures, doors, rubbish receptacles and even the toilet seat itself?

Or is it all staged? I wonder sometimes.






These were taken at a pub near Harvard Square in Cambridge, MA.

Spread Eagle, Shoreditch

There are no words to describe the genius that made this urinal. I was so excited by it, I might have wet my pants with delight.




























Needless to say, I think this bar was more interested in men's experience in the toilet. I think the decor choices in the women's (seen here) were rather weak sauce.

Chelsea Stadium

If I'm going to go to a Chelsea football game, then the toilet had better have visual cues to remind me that I am, in fact, still at the Chelsea stadium. Otherwise, I might just forget in my drunken excitable state.
















So! Do not fear! They have inserted soap dispensers with so much spirit, the threaten to knock my socks off as I try to steal one and take it home. To no avail, of course. I'll have to make do with a photograph.

Paying Homage to Crapper

Here's a man who has had a huge impact on our contemporary culture: Thomas Crapper, the best promoter of the flushing toilet.

I love the BBC for having this video in honor of the 100th anniversary of his death, last week.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8481283.stm

Hellish Hetero Club Toilets

If you know me you can guess the tirade I'm about to jump into. So, here's the abridged version.

Certain nightclubs, ones with widely presumed wealthy clientele looking for casual, often predatory sex and superficial thrills in the form of women cheaply displaying themselves for the male gaze, disgust me.

I don't often find myself in such situations, but every once in a while it happens. At one such club in South Kensington, Amika, I ran for refuge in the toilet to avoid being grabbed and oggled or ramming accidentally into one of the low tables decked out with overpriced alcohol in plastic lit up wells. And that's really where the feminist rant begins.

Women in the bathrooms, already caked in foundation were applying mascara to tarantula eyelashes, redoing their eye liner so that it looked like the paint along the side of a road. Collagen-inspired lips and industrial back-combed hair invaded the space, in stark contrast to the skin-tight leggings and sparkly sequined boob tubes that adorned their essentially bare bodies. This was not a happy place. Women did not converse with each other, or if they did it was on the topic of makeup and lotions. As if these are the only things women are capable of contemplating. Needless to say, there was an added discomfort in the form of a woman, noticeably not one of the clientele by her relatively conservative dress and lack of face paint, who was squeezing soap into the palms of these barbie dolls and handing them paper to dry off their lotioned limbs. This detail added a whole sense of discomfort for me.

Going to wash my hands, I noticed in the sink a little collection of rocks. As if to suggest that the sink was in fact some natural stream in which these women had come to bathe themselves. This suggestion of nature and natural imagery was just the most comical point in comparison to the worship of artifice that surrounded it along the mirrors. I don't think one woman was wearing a natural material. They were decked out in lycra, nylon, polyester, plastic, and who knows what else was in their war paint.

Who comes here and sees this as leisure? What does it mean that women are engaging in these rituals of reapplication in the bathroom, rather than in public. Do they think anyone out there looks and them and thinks they are naturally this way? I wonder what the men's bathroom looks like? Who's there to give them soap and towels? What lotions do they use? What do they talk about and think about?

And does anyone notice this strange collection of rocks in the sink?