Park toilet in the park on the Ilm, Weimar: Genius Lokus

The young Weimar architecture firm of Julia Naumann and Max Wasserkampf recently completed a remarkably beautiful park toilet in Weimar’s Park an der Ilm. The client was the Klassik Stiftung Weimar.

The large “Park an der Ilm” presents itself as a unique landscape garden on the edge of Weimar’s old town. It is a World Heritage Site, which is why even the smallest changes and buildings are subject to strict supervision. While elsewhere street furniture such as benches, waste paper baskets, telephone booths and toilets should remain as visually invisible as possible, the client, the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, was concerned with architecture when it came to a “toilet facility” for the park.

Park toilet as a total work of art

The young Weimar office of Julia Naumann and Max Wasserkampf devoted a lot of time to the task of creating a public park toilet for visitors. They had noticed that cities used to pay much more attention to appropriate, well-designed street furniture in their public squares and also saw this as part of city marketing, as they say today. This is why the architects looked for historical models and their interplay, translated them into a contemporary language and thus created a remarkable architectural housing. When planning the interior, a rare opportunity arose for a small “total work of art”, as even the design of the signage could be included.

Attention to detail

Instead of a banal, industrially prefabricated functional building, a carefully detailed structure was created. The entrances are discreetly located at the two ends, so that no direct view of the sanitary facilities is possible from the park paths. An additional cleaning room in the park toilet for storing cleaning utensils is located behind a screen door. The supporting structure consists of a timber stud construction and was fitted with color-treated solid wood three-layer panels as bracing elements and “facade”. An all-round concrete base protects the panels from splashing water.

Inside, the wooden panels remain natural, and a tiled surface up to 1.20 meters high ensures easy cleaning. The façade elements are joined together using painted steel profiles. The architects have not hidden their screw pattern, but used it as decoration and as a fine façade structure. It is above all the junctions that the architects have borrowed from Vienna’s public conveniences. A wide roof overhang of 95 centimetres serves as a shelter for visitors when it rains. The roof itself was given an elaborate standing seam covering made of copper.

It is to be hoped that so much carefully detailed beauty will be preserved by considerate users of the park toilet.

The Architekturzentrum Wien has devoted itself to contemporary Austrian architecture in its “Hot Questions – Cold Storage” exhibition. Who makes the city? And how do we want to live? You can read the answers here.