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Architects: Shulin Architectural Design
- Area: 110 m²
- Year: 2024
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Photographs:Yilong Zhao
Text description provided by the architects. The red brick public toilet is located on the sideway of the old street in the Liuba County seated in a ravine, surrounded by schools, resident buildings and bus stops, with a complicated environment and many tourists. Opposite the public toilet is a Liuba tourist service center, which will become a tourist distribution center in the future.
We designed a dual-toliet, so that everyone can use it. On the external side, we designed a unisex toilet, a baby care room and a room for disabled people. There are also benches at the entrance for the residents to take a seat.
The architecture has a very clear structural relationship: the floor and walls are made of red bricks and the roof, of a wooden structure with a truss system. The red brick walls are presented as a sheet wall, with semi-circular arches dug to either serve as the entrance or filled with glass bricks for light.
Three types of translucent materials are used in the building: solar boards on the roof, and frosted glass tiles and corrugated glass for façade infill and doors and windows. The roof is made of two layers of solar boards, staggered and overlapped to form a grid-like texture, and the light that comes down, refracted by the layers, becomes very soft and delightful when it enters the room.Through the use of similar translucent materials, we enriched the layers of light and shadow, which is another attempt in exploring their relationship.
For a small architecture like this public toilet, I insisted on the design principles of visibility, clarity of materials, and exposure of mistakes, to create a building that hides nothing with decoration. We do not distinguish the inside from the outside, but use the language of designing to control.I think such a house has a kind of "readability". Insisting on the exposed construction method is very demanding for the construction team, as there is little room for changing.
If anything goes wrong, they need to do it all over, or leave it there. We started the red brick part from all over, there are defects for the glass brick because they should be piled up differently for different position, and the size of the solar boards on the roofare not aligned with the timber structure. There are mistakes and regrets, but the overall presentation of the building is still successful. I think the tolerance of certain defects and regrets might also be a necessary lesson for the architects.
