Doors to Theology Building
My group explored the relationship of the bathroom location to our societies’ views of privacy when it comes to using the restroom. We looked at academic, residential, and commercial sites and their privacy from the public, privacy from genders, and privacy within the bathroom itself.
Long hallway leading to restrooms in Chipotle
Privacy within bathrooms is a big concern to most Americans which is why our restrooms are designed to provide users with maximum privacy. The restrooms were generally located in the back of the commercial sites and were hard to find in the older academic buildings, giving them a sense of privacy.
Zoe’s Kitchen bathroom with stalls
Public restrooms are usually divided by gender, and they are either singular or they have stalls, which fulfills Americans need for privacy within the restroom.
Inside of Chipotle’s single, private bathroom
A reason why we are provided with this amount of privacy within restrooms can in part be attributed to American’s privilege; we like to have our private lives kept private from strangers and we can afford to do so, so we make our restrooms as private as possible.
White Hall’s restrooms
We observed that the commercial restrooms generally had singular restrooms while the academic restrooms had stalls. It can be concluded from this that commercial sites were aware of the publics desire for privacy and provided this to them so that their customers feel comfortable at their restaurants, and the academic sites saw a need to accommodate a larger number of users at the expense of increased privacy.