Stalled!
Architect: Joel Sanders
Associate(s): Susan Stryker, Terry Kogan
Location: https://www.stalled.online/
Honorable mention
Category D: Practice-based or Academic Research, Curriculum or Applied Technology Development
Stalled! takes as its point of departure national debates surrounding transgender access to public restrooms to address the design consequences of an urgent social justice issue: the need to create safe, sustainable and inclusive public restrooms for everyone, irrespective of age, gender, religion and disability. Using an innovate methodology that assembles a cross-disciplinary research team of architects, transgender historians, and legal scholars, Stalled! explores the question of all gender restrooms from a cultural, political and legal perspective. Our mission is to create viable economical restroom guidelines and prototypes for retrofit and new construction projects that can be adopted and deployed across the United States.
"What was most impressive was their focus on complex cultural issues and how architecture can solve them." - Jury comment
Stalled! distinguishes itself from the considerable body of work generated by scholars, lawyers, activists and the media that does not cover this issue from an architectural perspective. In contrast, we regard public restrooms as a social justice issue that can be solved with innovative architectural solutions. Through a design lens, Stalled! advocates for the progressive use of architecture as a means to incite large initiatives surrounding public space, embodied experience, and social equity.
