Arinah Rizal

This thesis recognises that pavilions and public bathrooms have the power to legitimise and reinforce ideologies through their conflicting qualities. While pavilions exercise this power through their temporary nature and strong association with spectacular events, public bathrooms are more an expression of technical regulations that promote values of society’s most prominent ideology, appearing as ‘mere design.’On a tectonic level, a pavilion’s mobility and ease of disassembly are at odds with the virtue of permanence and unbreakability of the bathroom components connected to the vast, immovable resource-intensive sewer infrastructure that supports it.

In contemporary society, public bathrooms governed by automated fixtures reflect our misplaced preoccupation with the time-saving potential of high-technology devices in aspects of modern life. The heavy automatic doors, flush, and other components serve the purpose of minimising our time in the toilet, presenting our bodies as a burden in this process. Independent of the sewer system, and any ‘official event’, the proposed pavilion recognises our need to use the bathroom as an event: one which follows a schedule not of our own making or that of higher authorities, but of our own bodily organs.

The disavowal towards the public toilet was also present on the pavement by the Victorian Trades Hall lawn. There once stood a public urinal adjacent to it around until 1915, but was then removed due to Victorian society’s growing acceptance for underground public toilets concealed from street view. The proposal’s ‘Disruptive Event’ would operate over a winter season on this site, exploring how deployable architecture produces the framework for the reception of an idea—a process of ‘unfolding’ which takes more time in the sense of a body’s movement through space than an arbitrary calendar day. It presents unconventional ideas of the low-technology decentralised sanitary components with a specific focus on Buckminster Fuller’s ‘fog gun’ featured in the Dymaxion Bathroom from 1936. This fog gun used compressed air and atomised water to deliver an all-over body wash, consuming less power and resources than a conventional shower system. Yet the dominant attitudes towards bathrooms—motivated by luxury and private ownership—resisted, among other aspects, the technology’s implementation.

Following the studio’s brief of a pavilion designed at three distinct times, the ‘Disruptive Event’ transforms from a door ‘installation’, to a fog shower unit, and finally to a complete bathroom through several additional elements, as well as the expansion of the retractable structure it is enclosed within. The time between each distinct moment increases as the pavilion assimilates into urban life, and the architecture becomes an event that ‘serves’ society.