Galvanized by the national debate around granting transgender individuals access to sex-segregated public toilets, architect Joel Sanders, AIA, teamed up with transgender historian Susan Stryker and legal scholar Terry Kogan on a new project, Stalled!: Social Equity and Public Restrooms. The project aims to explore ways to create a more equitable public restroom experience for everyone.
According to Sanders, Stalled! treats restrooms as a means to generate a conversation about the relationship between environmental design, the human body, and social equity, seeking to create restrooms that serve people “irrespective of age, gender, religion, or disability.” Together with Stryker and Kogan, Sanders drew up prototypes that depict what inclusive all-gender restrooms might look like at an airport and in a university field house. Transforming stalls into completely enclosed areas and designating separate areas for grooming, washing, and eliminating are just some of the ways in which Stalled! seeks to improve on the standard public-restroom model.
Stalled! was selected by AIA’s Technology in Architectural Practice Knowledge Community for a 2018 AIA Innovation Award. The project also won a 2019 New York State Council on the Arts Independent Projects Award, a grant that will facilitate its further development.
