In deepest Maida Hill, Studio Weave has provided a public toilet block encased in reclaimed stone. The project represents the final phase of Maida Hill Market improvement works – funded by Westminster City Council, with help from the Mayor of London’s Good Growth Fund - and involved replacing outmoded underground toilets with three fully accessible cubicles, one wheelchair friendly, brought conveniently to grade.
Explore this reclaimed stone public toilet by Studio Weave
On paper, the project is unimpeachable. It responds to, and serves to highlight, an all too familiar problem in the city. One that the architecture practice's director, Eddie Blake (Studio Weave is co-led by Blake, founding director Je Ahn, and director JJ Cliff), is on a mission to redress. According to the British Toilet Association, nearly 40% of public toilets have closed in the last decade. This has been put down to poor accessibility and high maintenance costs. Plus the absence of viable, replicable, low-cost alternatives. Enter the Maida Hill lavatories.
Like all good work, the project answers its brief in a way that poses interesting questions about how we might elaborate on a similar commission next time. Chiefly, here, it tackles material and procurement. The stone was sourced from the dismantling of a former corporate headquarters in Broadgate. Large-format slabs of pink Finnish granite and plain Norwegian larvikite were split, recut, and reassembled in their new location. Transplanted from the heart of the financial district to the site of the original, grassroots economic activity of a neighbourhood market square.
This ‘trickle-down’ trajectory of the material, from private to public, is telling. The stone is of an exceptionally high quality, far exceeding the spec of what would ordinarily be committed to this kind of project. It’s all about ‘cost-efficient public luxury,’ say the architects, in what sounds like several contradictions in terms. But it works.
Once supported on a steel frame, the slabs are now stacked like a heavy house of cards. To this end, the architects benefited from a close collaboration with The Stonemasonry Company and Webb Yates, who were the structural engineers on the project (both parties are serial collaborators with Amin Taha’s Groupwork, a pioneer in building with stone in the capital, so have experience in working with the material).
The ‘architecture’ is independent of its contents, which, like a mollusc, may be extracted, leaving the shell intact. Once shucked, the ‘automated public conveniences’ within, a high-spec ‘total toilet solution’ by Swedish company Danfro, may be upgraded and replaced. The stone is detailed so as to be demountable also. The building is built to last, but needn’t.
Perhaps the most notable, noticeable thing about the building is its refusal simply to fit in. London is awash with buildings born of facade studies, and concessions to type. But this project is refreshingly blunt in its approach. It is not so much a patchwork as a skin graft. It takes the flayed facades of other buildings to make a mask for its own.
The standards of so-called civilised society may be judged by the state of its public provisions – the availability of toilets, bins, and benches – and the durability of a culture by its ability to accommodate unusual and not straightforwardly appealing things. On both counts, this is an eminently interesting little building.