Matilde Cassani (Italian, b.1980), Ignacio G. Galán (Spanish, b.1982), and Iván L. Munuera (Spanish, b.1980) in collaboration with Leonardo Gatti (Italian, b.1991), Pablo Saiz del Rio (Spanish, b.1993), and Paula Vilaplana de Miguel (Spanish, b.1985)
Matilde Cassani; Ignacio G. Galán; Ivan L. Munuera
The Restroom Pavilion
Album
Description
Restrooms are often described as neutral facilities or mere utilitarian infrastructures catering to the universal needs of individuals, when in fact they are contested spaces that are shaped by and in turn shape the ways bodies and communities come together. Restrooms are architectures where gender, religion, race, ability, hygiene, health, environmental concerns, and the economy are defined culturally and articulated materially. This project presents the issues and conflicts raised by these facilities through an intervention in the public restrooms of the Giardini grounds at the Biennale. The Restroom Pavilion reflects on the aesthetic and technical role that tiling has played in sustaining modern and contemporary ideas of hygiene in the architecture of the restroom. Intervening in this key architectural material, the project unveils how hygiene has most times operated through the creation of increasingly isolating and discriminating practices (with the expulsion of waste to increasingly further spaces, the separation of genders, the eradication of ecosystemic relations, the normalization of activities, the division of tasks). Countering this tendency, the new tiling defined for this intervention conveys the conflicts and limitations of these hygienic practices in the pursuit of a more inclusive world within the restroom.
WITH THE ADDITIONAL SUPPORT OF
Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown, Barnard College (Columbia University)
Princeton University School of Architecture
Yale University School of Architecture
Spanish Government – Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda
Acción Cultural Española (AC/E)
