In 1863, a public toilet was built near Queen Street Wharf on what is now Customs Street to serve the wharf and surrounding areas. The rudimentary structure – with a urinal and water closet – was Auckland’s first.
“The establishment of public toilets and the changing ways in which they have been needed and used tell interesting, somewhat indecorous stories about aspects of our social history,” notes Samantha Waru, former Auckland Council senior archivist and researcher of online exhibition, Flushed Out: The Secrets of the Public Toilet which looks at the history of our public restrooms. “For something as seemingly mundane as a toilet, we really can infer a lot about what was going on in our city, who was here and what their needs were. One group that had not been catered for prior to 1910 were women.”
Yes, it took an astonishing 47 years after the opening of the men’s first public toilet for women to have their first convenience – but even that was shared with the men, at the corner of Symonds Street and Grafton Bridge. It would be another five years before a standalone women’s toilet was built, in an underground section of Wyndham Street.
Following intervention from the National Council of Women, in 1926, a Karangahape Road convenience built with six toilets, a lounge room, a change room, a mother’s room, an attendant’s room and pram storage was labelled “well ahead of its time”.
From the stylish to the sustainable and everything in between, Aotearoa New Zealand has continued the trend for imaginative public dunnies such as Steffan de Haan’s spectacular surrealist sculpted heads at Matakana and the stencil-adorned rusty-coloured cylindrical cubicles among the Redwood Forest in Rotorua. Wellington’s ‘lobster loos’ (or ‘crayfish crappers’), designed by architect Bret Thurston, are crustacean-themed conveniences that were ranked the third best toilets in the world in a 2015 poll. The Mitchinson Simiona-designed toilets at Karekare Beach are built from beautiful macrocarpa wood and treat wastewater onsite, while the Hundertwasser Toilets in Kawakawa, by artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, have been described as “the world’s most architecturally important public bathroom”.
EARLY PASSAGES
While we may be able to pinpoint Auckland’s original public convenience, finding history’s first is a little more inconvenient as it depends on what we deem a toilet. Though the 50,000-year-old fossilised faeces of Neanderthals has been found, few would count that spot as a designated toilet. But the discovery of water-repellent bitumen-coated brick chairs built over cesspits proved that the Mesopotamians were developing sanitary waste disposal methods at least 4,500 years ago.
The flushing toilet was created way, way earlier than you likely imagined, also. Around 3,500 years ago, the Minoans on the Greek island of Crete added the ability to ‘flush’ via a piping system – fed either by water from jugs or a rooftop reservoir – that ferried waste to an underground sewer. Interestingly, a similar system was developed around the same time around 4,000km away in the Indus Valley.
“From there, toilet technology took off,” writes Chelsea Ward for Nature. “In the first millennium BC, ancient Greeks of the Classical period and, especially, the succeeding Hellenistic period developed large-scale public latrines — basically large rooms with bench seats connected to drainage systems — and put toilets into ordinary middle-class houses.”
Then, archaeologist Ann Koloski-Ostrow says that the Romans “were unprecedented in their adoption of toilets” with public latrines becoming “a major feature of Roman infrastructure, much like bathhouses”. By 315 AD, there were around 150 public toilets in Rome – comprising stone benches, with evenly spaced holes and wooden seats – and visiting them was seen as a social event.
The version of the flush toilet that we recognise today was invented by Elizabeth I’s godson, Sir John Harrington, in 1592. Around 300 years later, Thomas Crapper patented several toilet-related inventions but did not actually create the modern toilet as he’s often credited.
MEMORABLE MOVEMENTS
This month marks the end of the Tokyo Toilet, a project that has seen 16 internationally recognised architects and designers renovate 17 public toilets in the district of Shibuya to ensure they’re accessible to all regardless of gender, age, or disability, while also addressing social issues.
Japanese graphic designer Tomohito Ushiro, founder of White Design, has built a toilet featuring a large light massive display panel that projects 7.9 billion different light patterns in a reference to the world’s population at the point the project was conceived. “The location in a park, surrounded by greenery in an area where many people live, means that it is also like a piece of public art that is part of people’s daily lives, and is always posing questions,” says Ushiro. “I hope this toilet will become a monument that continuously makes people think about the project’s significance.”
Industrial designer Marc Newson has designed a concrete public convenience that comprises men’s and women’s toilets placed on either side of a central disabled toilet topped by a pitched copper roof – a nod towards the traditional Japanese temples and tea rooms. Newson says that it’s important that the toilet feels “trustworthy and honest” with a focus on “functionality” and “simplicity”.
Simplicity was not at the forefront of the architect of a gold toilet at the Swiss Horn Gold Palace in Hong Kong that entered the Guinness World Records for having the world’s most expensive toilet bowl valued at over $5.5 million (even the room is made of gold meaning visitors must don protective footwear), while the world’s humblest – and loneliest – public lavatory title could be given either to a clifftop cubicle in Serbia or a roadside outhouse outside the city of Vallejo, California.
The Russian offering sits perched at 2,600 metres above sea level at a remote weather station in the Altai Mountains in an area known as Kara Tyurek (which translates as ‘black heart’ in the regional dialect), while the Californian crapper can only be reached by rafting through a marsh then walking through tall grass (it’s called ‘Lone Toilet’ on Google maps).
And though not a public convenience, an honourable mention must be given to the world’s scariest toilet which sits atop a lift shaft in a luxury penthouse in a building in Guadalajara, Mexico. The bathroom’s fully glass floor means that if you look down while answering the call of nature, you ‘ll be staring into the abyss of a 15-storey high void.
