"Nearly 300 designers began work on their submissions for the competition of a lifetime: the opportunity to design a bathroom for one of the most famous architects of all time. The competition called on designers to imagine a new public restroom for the Gropius House, the family home of the late German architect Walter Gropius. Gropius founded the famed art and design school the Bauhaus (1919-1933), which defined an entire era of modernist design through its innovative approach to technology and almost reverent obsession with materials."
"His self-designed home is now preserved and made open to the public by Historic New England, a non-profit that oversees 127 privately owned historic properties in New England. On May 7, the organization announced Isabel Strauss as the winner of its call for submissions. The Gropius House's actual on-site restrooms are not available to the dozens of visitors that stop by every day, given the property's age. Instead, according to Vin Cipolla, CEO of Historic New England, visitors had to use a single porta-potty propped up against the property's visitor's center."
""Our visitor experience team estimates that about 4,000 people a year use the porta-potty," Cipolla says. "We're considering this a somewhat urgent matter." Last fall, Historic New England decided to share its bathroom design process with the public by turning it into a competition open to designers around the world. So how does one create a commode worthy of literally standing alongside Gropius' work? Strauss says the answer is all about materials."
"The bathroom competition came with a list of guidelines and two main goals: to represent research and reflection on Bauhaus design principles, and to offer a creative design solution to a decades-long infrastructure problem. Submissions needed to be situated as either an extension of the visitor's center, which is located inside what was once Gropius' garage, or a"
Nearly 300 designers began work in November 2025 to design a new public restroom for the Gropius House, the family home of Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus. Historic New England preserves the house and opened it to the public, but the original on-site restrooms are unavailable due to the property’s age. Visitors have relied on a single porta-potty, used by an estimated 4,000 people per year. Historic New England launched a global competition to address this urgent infrastructure problem while reflecting Bauhaus design principles. The winning design by Isabel Strauss emphasizes materials as the key to creating a commode worthy of the historic site.
Read at Fast Company
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