The COVID-19 pandemic has necessarily prompted a rethinking of many of the most fundamental aspects of daily life around the world, as people, businesses, and governments seek to retrofit the built environment in order to minimize the potential for future exposure. 

Everything from HVAC systems, office spaces, grocery stores, shopping areas, and universities will need to be rethought, experts argue, with wide-ranging and yet-to-be-known changes in store for how we live our everyday lives.

Another arena that is due to be seriously reconsidered is that of the public bathroom, where open toilet stalls and open-top toilets are known to generate unhygienic "toilet plumes" that aerosolize fecal matter and potentially, diseases within these spaces.

A recent Fast Company report delves into the approaches that some bathroom fixture manufacturers are taking while retooling their designs in response to the pandemic. As can be imagined, many of these approaches lean toward "touch-free" and "contactless" configurations for individual fixtures, but a more fundamental shift is also potentially underway: Single-stall toilets.

Over the last few years, universities, government buildings, and increasingly, commercial facilities have begun to embrace single-stall toilets due to lobbying from transgender and disability rights groups. These changes, slow to get off the ground but increasingly widespread, could take on new life as these same entities seek to limit the spread of disease within their facilities. 

Additionally, as the nationwide homelessness epidemic has intensified in recent years, cities around the country have begun to prototype new approaches of their own for public restroom designs. SmithGroup, for example, recently piloted a new self-cleaning bathroom pod in San Francisco. New York City is taking a similar, though less generous approach by deploying new, but smaller public bathroom designs. Meanwhile, countries around the world, like Japan, have strong public bathroom infrastructures already in place. 

For architects, the growing need to seriously reconsider bathroom designs from a variety of perspectives, including accessibility, gender preference, lactation, and now virus control, offers a potential site to explore and assert design toward useful and just ends. Are clients and municipalities up to the task of reconsidering these spaces? With COVID-19, they just might have to be.