Stuart
These are not the very bathrooms in question, but same idea.
A small Texas town called Sulfur Springs has two brand-new public bathrooms made out of glass. They cost about $25,000 each. I am not going to make a big joke here about how they’re a performance art piece on the nature of shame or something, because Texas might be a lot of things, but it’s not a place where someone’s going to spend a lot of taxpayer money on a structure where people can see you take a dump. So rest assured, they are totally private — you can see out but you can’t see in. It’s still pretty neato. Here is a video of the glass bathrooms being described on a news segment (warning: painful metaphors).
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They appear to have used one-way glass for these, like the stuff you stand behind when picking out a criminal from a line-up (no? Just me?). They kind of go on and on, at great expense to my level of interest, about how special this type of glass is but basically you can only see through it one way so I’m going to call it one-way glass. How it works is, it must always be lighter outside than inside for the bathrooms to be private. At night, they use LED bulbs, and the Texans can still whiz away in peace.
The bathrooms are based on a design from Italian artist Monica Bonivicini, who did them outside a Swiss museum back in 2004, during that wonderful era when people had the capacity to be impressed by a glass bathroom instead of merely terrified about the collapse of the Euro. (Actually, that’s probably what we’ve got a photo of up there.) At any rate, glass bathrooms make waste elimination entertaining, and that is good for any time in history.
