Johnny Loo is the portable restroom reimagined – a new vision for the often necessary but typically under-designed ‘portable-loo’.
With typical portable restrooms, the obvious portability gives them a feeling of disposability and placelessness that doesn’t yield any pleasure or appreciation in their use. For Johnny Loo, the concept was to ‘design out’ these traces of portability, creating something closer to a permanently grounded building with a greater feeling of ‘place’.
Where typical portable restrooms compel you to minimise your contact with the interior spaces, Johnny Loo’s interior materiality, services and detailing all invite you fulfil the ‘rest’ component of ‘restroom’.
Johnny Loo’s larger contribution is imagined as one of architectural advocacy – a small portable object which can be repeatedly and frequently deployed to new audiences who might otherwise not be exposed to architecture, hopefully allowing those audiences to walk away with a greater appreciation of architecture’s potential impact.