In November 2025, practically 300 designers started work on their submissions for the competitors of a lifetime: the chance to design a rest room for probably the most well-known architects of all time.
The competitors known as on designers to think about a brand new public restroom for the Gropius Home, the household residence of the late German architect Walter Gropius. Gropius based the famed artwork and design college the Bauhaus (1919–1933), which defined an entire era of modernist design by way of its revolutionary method to know-how and virtually reverent obsession with supplies.
His self-designed house is now preserved and made open to the general public by Historic New England, a non-profit that oversees 127 privately owned historic properties in New England. On Could 7, the group introduced Isabel Strauss because the winner of its name for submissions.
The Gropius Home’s precise on-site restrooms aren’t obtainable to the handfuls of tourists that cease by every single day, given the property’s age. As an alternative, in response to Vin Cipolla, CEO of Historic New England, guests had to make use of a single porta-potty propped up towards the property’s customer’s heart. “Our customer expertise workforce estimates that about 4,000 individuals a yr use the porta-potty,” Cipolla says. “We’re contemplating this a considerably pressing matter.”
Final fall, Historic New England determined to share its rest room design course of with the general public by turning it into a contest open to designers all over the world. So how does one create a commode worthy of actually standing alongside Gropius’ work? Strauss says the reply is all about supplies.
A rest room on a well-known web site
The lavatory competitors got here with an inventory of tips and two important targets: to characterize analysis and reflection on Bauhaus design rules, and to supply a inventive design answer to a decades-long infrastructure drawback.
Submissions wanted to be located as both an extension of the customer’s heart, which is positioned inside what was as soon as Gropius’ storage, or a separate construction close by. They needed to be ADA accessible and embrace two bogs and two wash basins.
Lastly, they wanted to replicate the extraordinary care and thought that Gropius put into the development of the particular residence and its grounds. From its Bauhaus furnishings to its native building supplies, fashionable fixtures, and gleaming white exterior sandwiched snuggly in a transplanted copse of timber, each a part of the Gropius Home was deeply thought of.
“Gropius Home mixed conventional parts of New England structure—wooden, brick, and fieldstone—with revolutionary supplies together with glass block, acoustical plaster, chrome banisters, and the most recent know-how in fixtures,” Historic New England’s official webpage on the location reads, including, “He designed the grounds of the house he constructed for his household in 1938 as rigorously because the construction itself.”
Strauss, who’s a graduate of Harvard’s Faculty of Design and at the moment works as an assistant professor of structure at Smith Faculty in Northampton, Massachusetts, had already visited the Gropius Home a number of occasions given her proximity to the location. Final yr, on a motorbike journey along with her husband (who additionally works as an architect) to the close by Waldon Pond, she first discovered concerning the rest room competitors.
“My husband was going to do the competitors, after which he didn’t have time as a result of he had too many different tasks,” Strauss says. “I used to be like, ‘I’ll give this a attempt.’”
A humble—but design-forward—commode
Strauss’ first step was to show on to Gropius’ personal work. She used his unique sketches of the Gropius Dwelling’s storage to design the bones a WC that will mimic the storage’s precise dimensions, standing only a few ft off to the aspect—like a contemporary reimagining of Gropius’ unique construction.
The lavatory is sort of sq., with two equally-sized rooms on both aspect of a central divider, just like one thing that one may discover firstly of a mountain climbing path. Strauss says she was impressed by the “basic outhouse typology” for the constructing’s lay-out, however its similarities to a bathroom within the woods finish there.
Practically all the supplies making up the toilet are pulled instantly from the identical sources because the Gropius home: the skin, for instance, is clad in layers of fieldstone, which serves as the home’s foundations; the ripple glass within the transom home windows additionally seems in the home; and even the easy white tiles within the stalls are recreations of the unique rest room tile.
Strauss’ Bauhaus rest room is so easy and natural that it virtually slides into the background of the pure wooded surroundings. Cipolla says that, amidst tons of of different designs his workforce obtained, the competitors judges had been constantly drawn again to her humble-yet-grounded method.
“It’s quiet—it doesn’t name consideration to itself,” Cipolla says. “It sits inside the material of the location in a fairly unobtrusive means, drawing on vernacular supplies, a naturalistic answer, and reflecting the materiality that already exists.” Now that the competitors is closed, he provides, the Historic New England workforce hopes to get building underway inside the subsequent couple of years and eventually put the porta-potty to relaxation.
Strauss’ rest room is proof that, within the palms of a devoted artist, even one thing as quotidien as a pair of stalls can grow to be a mirrored image of design historical past.
“What I hope the spirit of my interpretation of Bauhaus design captures is taking supplies which are abnormal or industrial that aren’t essentially luxurious, and, with cautious design, elevating them so that everybody has entry to lovely and purposeful design,” Strauss says.
