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Houses of high culture: Pritzker Prize winners design public toilets in Tokyo

This is a concrete structure with a light panel.

Tokyo launched the amazing Tokyo Toilet project, which will build 17 toilets in the city center, designed by world-famous architects and designers. For example, Pritzker Prize winners Shigeru Ban, Tadao Ando and Fumihiko Maki. Tomohito Ushiro, founder of the White Design agency, hopes that the building he created will be perceived as a work of art.

“Location in a park, surrounded by greenery, in an area where many people live, means that the toilet is made to look like a piece of public art, and it is also part of people’s daily lives and always attracts interest,” Ushiro said.

This is a concrete block with two cubicles, equipped with baby changing tables and handrails. On the light panel, which is built into one of the walls, green lights light up during the day and white lights at night. The patterns are constantly changing, so the building always looks a little different.

“You can say that a toilet has 7.9 billion light patterns — as many as people inhabit the earth — because the lighting always looks different, from sunlight filtering through the trees during the day, to moonlight or a firefly flying at night, Ushiro said. “Passers-by will never see the same picture twice.”

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