The Loo A collaborative design workshop where we all meet in a public toilet.

-Project Statement (max 150 words) The Loo is the second installment of the Back to Basics series, a program of design workshops that question the basic principles of why and how we do architecture. The prior Sleepingtories workshop at Hello Wood 2015 tackled the necessities of sleeping, reassessing the design of public architectures that deal with primary bodily functions. This second iteration will discuss another basic bodily function: excretion and hygiene. With our current understanding of bodies and gender, are public toilets what we want and need them to be? Do they respond, intensify, and/or satisfy our behaviors? Do they provoke and/or explore new ones? Project Village 2016 thinks of the arrival. We think that upon arrival one needs to pee, shit and hopefully take a shower. So, why do we do public toilets? How do we do them? The Loo is open for collaboration.

-Project Narrative (max 400 words)

We do not quite understand how or when this happened. Public bathrooms used to be palaces. Places for the rest and comfort of bodies… What happened to them?

Well, maybe we do know. In Mechanization Takes Command, Siegfried Giedion explains that during the nineteenth century machines took over and this, mixed with the West’s relatively new obsession with hygiene, spread the gospel. Thus, bathrooms became efficient hygienizing machines. But even then bathrooms had their charms. Now they do not. They have become an Autocad block with fixed dimensions—with female, male, and accessible compartments jammed together—the smaller, the better. They are horrendous places were noises take you through the guts of the world, smells make you ashamed of the human race, and horrible plastic, ceramic, or metal claddings reflect you and others in odd moments of cultural and personal collision. Today, going to the bathroom is no fun, less so in public places.

For our village we do not want crammed, stinky, dark, small, bathrooms. We do not want to stand in line looking at our cellphones while almost shitting on our pants, hoping to be out of there ASAP. For our village, bathrooms can be different. They can be The Loo.

The Loo will be a destination in our village, not a place for express passing. We will want to go and stay there, have a chat, spend some time, relax, do our business, with ourselves and with others. To quickly establish a first landmark for The Loo, we propose to reuse the water tower built by Mjölk team for Hello Wood 2015. This will become the center of The Loo within the new settlement. In order to select its possible location, we would like to discuss with Hello Wood organizers so as to understand ideal areas to tie into their septic and water supply systems. In terms of design strategies, we think that we should strategically consider three separate functions: peeing, shitting, and bathing. These three activities present different degrees of privacy, have different rhythms, and their outcomes require completely different treatments. Excretion produces waste that can be reutilized: peeing serves as irrigation and shitting can be decomposed as fertilizing. Washing can be thought through as a recycling cycle. Each function will be analyzed and rethought through, so as to be recombined in different artifacts. All these artifacts together will build The Loo. And how does The Loo tie to Project Village 2016? We believe that society has changed to the extent that the design of public toilets should be discussed and reassessed. The understanding of gender is completely different; although hygiene and washing rituals have been mechanized, cultural differences still prevail, standardization seems to be obsolete; the culture of the body has revived. The Loo will be an endeavor to question these realities. Our new village will serve us as our field for experimentation.

- A Feasibility concept summary As a sequel to the workshop Sleepingtories (2015), The Loo will question the way in which we think and design public toilets through the iterative design of artifacts. These artifacts will be conceived as 1:1 scale models. In this way, wood will become our best ally, to quickly sketch, test and produce our ideas. We have ten people and seven days. We are inspired by the organization of film-making and believe in the project of collaborative design; we will all be designing at the same time, with the same level of compromise. Film making, because the film industry has kept on developing internal structures that allows for the development of expertise. There is a cameraman, a costume designer, a set production manager, a director, a scriptwriter. Each knows their role and contributes with their expert knowledge. Here is what we propose. We will convoke each student to present themselves as an expert in one of the following categories: Person 1 Person 2 Person 3 Person 4 Person 5 Person 6 Person 7

(Tina) (Pete) (Shanaya) (Wanlika) (Pedro) (Jean Louis) (Xian)

Wood Joints Wood Structures Wood and Fluids Wood Durability Loo Ergonomics Loo Psychologies Loo Hygiene

Person 8 (Possum) Person 9 (Lila) Person 10 (Jocelyn)

Body-Waste Economics Jolly Joker Organizations

We will all be experts in our field. Each of the seven days will be a charette day. We will summon in the evening and produce a design by midnight. We will wake up at 7 am and work until 7 pm on the design of an artifact. By 12 am we will have another design and wake up to produce it the next day. And so on. Each day will focus on a design triggered by a specific topic; readings will inspire these topics and become our script. Each day we will discuss personal experiences and related articles about loos in the urban environment (from newspaper articles to passages in a novel). The experiences and readings will be indicative of loo issues such as: gender, body cultures, exclusivity v/s inclusivity, specific environments, accessibility, private v/s public. We need approximately: 150 meters of the 5 x 5 cm planed wood joists, 150 meters of the 2.5 x 5 cm planed wood joists, 150 meters of the 2.5 x 10 cm planed wood joists, 50 square meters of 6mm wood boards, 50 square meters of 12 mm wood boards, nails, glue, 5 colors of paint, transparent varnish, 50 square meters of tent tarp or water resistant textile. So each night a reading, a discussion, a design; the next day, a construction; and after six of these rounds, a zoo of artifacts, loos for people to pee, shit, bathe, or anything else...

Helloooooo Woooooooooddddd 2016!!!!! - Bio (max 150 words) Jocelyn Froimovich is an architect from Chile, who lives and works in New York. She studied in Universidad Católica de Chile and Columbia University. She has been a teaching assistant in both Universities. Jocelyn is a licensed architect in Chile and New York State. She has worked for Bernard Tschumi, Weiss Manfredi, and Izquierdo Lehmann Architects, participating in projects of various scales, locations, and programs, such as Le Rosey Concert Hall in Switzerland, LAIFEX offices in Dominican Republic, Krishna P. Singh Center for Nanotechnology University of Pennsylvania, and a number of international competitions. Since 2013, Jocelyn works as an independent practitioner in New York. She was a collaborator of the winning proposal for MoMA’s Young Architect’s Program COSMO, exhibited in 2015 at MoMA PS1. She has participated in research of diverse disciplinary natures, pursuing a longstanding interest in the relationship between the domestic and the urban. This topic has been followed through different investigations such as A Sleepingtory for Bombay, Atelier Bow-Wow’s domestic Tokyo, and Housing in Density - Transformation of the Central Zone of Santiago respectively supported by Columbia University and Universidad Católica awards and fellowships. She was one of the team leaders during the Hello Wood summer camp in Hungary, July 2015, with the workshop Sleepingtories, which built community places to sleep in public.