Isabel Strauss has won a competition to design a public restroom outside the Gropius House—the 1938 home of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
Strauss is assistant professor of architecture at Smith College. Previously she was a curatorial contractor at the National Museum of African American History and Culture; and she worked for SOM, Johnston Marklee, MASS, and XL Scenic.
The forthcoming restroom by Strauss will replace an existing porta potty next to a garage designed by Gropius. The garage will remain in place.
Strauss’s project title is “One Bathroom After Another,” a twist on the latest Paul Thomas Anderson flick? Its design is inspired in part by the garage, but also works by Marcel Breuer and Herzog & de Meuron.
The new volume by Strauss will be proportionally the same as the garage. It will be composed of field stone, a material that the Gropius House uses in its foundation.
The material choice is meant to create zero confusion in regard to old and new, and authorship more broadly, while the envelope creates a sense of continuity with what’s already there.
The main entry will face the forest, not the driveway, to give patrons privacy. The goal was to create something “deferential yet monumental, and inexpensive to build,” Strauss said.
In plan the restroom will be square. Upon entry to the antechamber visitors will encounter shared sinks and benches. ADA accessible stalls will support all genders.
A skylight inspired by the work of James Turrell will illuminate the interior space.
The interior surfaces will have white, square, glazed tiles covering the floors, walls, and ceiling. This material choice will simultaneously make for ease of cleaning and tie back into the Gropius House’s aesthetics.
The competition to redesign the restroom was announced last November by Historic New England. The powerhouse jury included GSD professor Antoine Picon, architect Nader Tehrani, writers Philip Kennicott and Suzanne Stephens, and MoMA’s Tanja Hwang.
Jurors received over 280 submissions from 40 countries.
Strauss was shortlisted alongside AUYON BACHAR; Mohsen Laei, Nasim Shirkhani, and Masoumeh Niyazi; Monika Puchała and Tomasz Sachanowicz; and Payette.
“The competition unfolded just as we had imagined,” Allen Kolkowitz, a Trustee of Historic New England, said of the submissions more broadly.
“In its openness, a voice emerged that might otherwise have remained unheard—bringing forth a proposal of quiet intelligence and poetic vision,” Kolkowitz added. “This is the enduring promise of an open competition: to discover new talent, and to allow the strength of an idea to rise—clear, resonant, and unmistakable—above all else.”