Written by Elsa Brown: Visits to public restrooms are rarely planned in advance, but they can be as memorable as some travel experiences. In the best case scenario, they do so by providing unexpected encounters with good design. A public restroom project by Bunzo Ogawa of Future Studio currently holds this potential for park visitors in Hiroshima city.

The restrooms are a series, plotted throughout the city’s parks, and each is designed to act as an “absolute axis” referenced from the horizontal and vertical axes that align the earth. The design responds to the idea that when we walk around a city, an “absolute” experience of space is unavailable. We understand our position relative to the streets, buildings, people, cars and trees that immediately surround us, but never as a set of objective coordinates. Ogawa’s project inserts the possibility of absolute urban spatial awareness in the respite of public, multi-purpose restrooms. Click Read More for additional information and photos.

Aside from these ambitions, three variations of plans make the restrooms easy to recreate in all of the Hiroshima’s parks, leading to lasting city-wide improvements. A translation of Ogawa from Arbitare reads: “Five restrooms in five parks are completed in October in 2009. And next seven restrooms will be completed in March 2010. After that it is built around five places sequentially every year. The public restrooms with this absolute axis is being embedded infinitely in all over Hiroshima-city.”

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