Cal State Fullerton Teacher Hopes His ‘Urban Outhouse’ Takes Privy Discussion Public

It looks like something the Apollo astronauts left on the lunar surface, but its antecedents were about as low-tech as low-tech gets. What, after all, could be more primitive than the little shed with the crescent moon on the door?

Bryan Cantley’s take on the outhouse features a crescent moon, too. But it also features a bank of photoelectric cells, full automation, a gravity flow flushing system, chemical waste breakdown, doors controlled by hydraulic pistons, and the ability to pull itself to pieces when the occupant’s quarter runs out.

Cantley, an assistant professor of environmental design at Cal State Fullerton, calls his version of the venerable Paris pissoir “reaction architecture” and speculates that the reason that he hasn’t heard a word from the judges in the recent “urban outhouse” design competition in New York is that reaction to the model for the structure may have been a bit severe.

“It may have actually scared the jury members,” he said, smiling.

Which is fine with Cantley. The design, which was produced through exchanges of phone calls, faxes and computer information with Cantley’s partner in Atlantic City, designer Kevin O’Donnell, was not meant to be a true contender in the competition but was meant to stimulate thinking, to open minds to possibilities in the arena of public sanitation, said Cantley.

“I think the shock value will have a lot to do with educating designers and the general public,” he said. And a bad reaction to it is not necessarily a bad thing. We were just looking for reactions, period. We approached this with a lot of humor, but it’s a very real topic. We take our design very seriously, but we don’t take ourselves very seriously.”

The pair also took the reason for the competition seriously. Sponsored by the Vermont Structural Slate Co., the “urban outhouse” design contest, which took place early last year was intended to coax designers, planners, engineers and architects into producing models for an amenity that is seriously lacking in American city life: the public restroom.

More than 2,000 applications were mailed out, and 309 designs for self-cleaning facilities were sent in by May.

The need for a public restroom that can take the punishment of city streets has become acute, according to urban planners. As the number of homeless people increases in cities, more city alleys and streets have begun to reek of human waste. Many existing city restrooms have been closed because of the vandalism, drug-dealing, prostitution and other crimes that routinely take place inside them, and budgets for many new public structures don’t allow for restrooms at all. Los Angeles’ new subway is one.

As a result, private facilities such as restaurants and hotels have become besieged in many areas. And if homeless people are turned away from those places, the only alternative is the streets.

Now, however, planners are looking to the idea of the free-standing street-side restroom facility, and Cantley is looking to the future.

His model, he said, “is probably 10 years down the road” in terms of technology and affordability, but that didn’t stop him and O’Donnell from pushing the outside of the basic plumbing and structural envelope.

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The model looks like almost anything except what it actually is. Cantley compared it to the Transformer or Go-Bot toys that drastically change their shape with the movement of a few panels. Which is exactly what happens with his urban outhouse. The potential user enters the restroom proper by ascending a small ramp emblazoned with a crescent moon icon and inserts money--or possibly a “debit card,” said Cantley--in a slot. At that moment, hydraulic pistons are activated that pull the walls of the structure together and raise the ramp to form an enclosed room around the occupant.

Inside, the user is presented with not only a conventional toilet and sink but, said Cantley, a condom dispenser. While the business at hand is going on, the occupant also is presented with a bit of video distraction in the form of brief advertisements that play on a monitor set into one of the walls.

“Nike or Coke might pay a pretty penny to have a captive audience for about three minutes,” said Cantley.

(A second, far larger “digitized display” is attached to the outside of the structure and plays continuous ads that can be seen by pedestrians and drivers passing by.)

Finally, the toilet is flushed using collected rainwater and a gravity feed system, solid waste is broken down in a holding tank by chemicals and any methane gas is automatically drawn away.

Everything is powered, said Cantley, by the sun, through the use of photoelectric cells fitted into a halo-like device above the roof of the structure.

When the occupant is ready, a button is pushed, and the entire structure unfolds--or “deconstructs,” as Cantley says.

“We wanted to see what would happen when the whole building deconstructs itself after you’re done,” said Cantley. “The whole thing’s automated, so we figured we might as well go whole hog and have fun with it.”

A plus: Unless more money is fed into the slot, the structure will unfold, ready or not. This means, said Cantley, that it won’t become a haven for drug dealers and prostitutes.

But will it work? Theoretically, said Cantley. What will it cost? “We have no idea,” he said.

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For the time being, Cantley and O’Donnell are content to let their urban outhouse snap heads around and cause a few heads to either shake or nod.

“We’re really dealing with the MTV generation here,” said Cantley. “We’re trying to change people’s ideas of what they think design is about. We could see this on the ‘Blade Runner’ set quite easily. We want people to be curious and to come up to it and check it out.” People will have a chance to do just that in February. The design has been accepted for display at the 15th international “Making Cities Livable” conference in San Francisco. Sponsored by the Carmel-based Center for Urban Well-Being, an international organization of mayors, city council members, architects, social scientists and other professionals involved in urban planning, the conference showcases the most innovative new designs applicable to an urban environment.

Cantley’s design was not included in the conference displays at first, said Suzanne Crowhurst Lennard, the director of the center, but Cantley’s persistence and a second look at the design changed a few minds.

“We suggested that his design was at rather too early a stage to be appropriate for the exhibit, and we urged him to develop it a bit more before submitting it to the conference,” said Lennard. “It was very futuristic. But he was very eager to display it, and we felt that if it were developed more practically it might be useful, so we accepted it.”