Architecture Students Designed and Built the New Public Toilet on the Tovární Playground

The children's playground on Tovární street in Holešovice has a new step-free public toilet. It is not the catalogue cabin a municipal district usually buys. The larch-clad structure was designed and built by students of Ateliér Mádr at the Czech Technical University's Faculty of Architecture, working with the Prague 7 district council. It has a changing table and is open from April to October between 8am and 6pm.

On Tuesday 22 September at 4pm the students and their teachers met on the playground. The council says the gathering "concludes a successful collaboration on the creation of the new toilet in this place", and every student design for the toilet was exhibited there — not only the one that got built.

A house inside a house

The built scheme is by Klára Klingová and Viktor Ondřích, and the faculty describes its principle as a house within a house: an inner volume holds the lavatory itself, while an outer skin of vertical larch battens shades and protects the structure and, at one point, turns into a bicycle stand.

That last move is the substantial one. A public toilet on a playground is usually a foreign body — a locked cell nobody wants in view. Here the skin is also a piece of street furniture, so the object does two jobs at once and does not have to be hidden in a corner of the site.

According to the faculty the structure was assembled in front of the school building and delivered to the playground finished; it has been in use since September. Josef Mádr and Štěpán Tomše supervised the work.

Why it is worth recording

Prague 7 has been fitting toilets to its playgrounds for some time, and one WC would not be news by itself. The brief is what makes it one. The district did not procure a product; it procured a prototype drawn, and then actually built, by people who are still studying architecture.

Design-build is a regular part of architectural teaching. It rarely ends in a structure that enters a district council's operating schedule and gets cleaned eight months of the year.

Neither the council nor the faculty says what the object cost, who paid for it, or how long it took to build. That is normal for a commission of this size and it is also the one thing still worth knowing: without a price there is no way to say whether a student prototype comes in under a series-built cabin, or over it and better.

For a reader outside Prague 7 the model matters more than the building. The district gets a small, authored object in public space at low risk; the faculty gets something to offer students beyond paper. How many commissions of this size Prague hands to practices each year without any of it touching a school is a question the Tovární toilet puts more plainly than most conferences on the subject.