We love a place that’s been hiding in plain sight. Under the Trocadéro Gardens in Paris, just across the river from the Eiffel Tower, there’s a tunnel that was closed to the public for years. The city used it as storage for its cleaning crews.
Now it’s open again, as a public bathroom, and a really nicely done one!
The tunnel was built for the 1937 world’s fair, and at the end of the Second World War American soldiers scratched graffiti into its flint walls. French studio Chartier-Corbasson Architectes kept all of that and added very little. There’s brushed stainless steel and rust-colored Corten, set against the pink concrete and flint that were already there.
The rule seems to be that everything new is steel and everything old is stone. The stalls are one long run of brushed stainless panels with flush doors, set down the middle of the passage between the original flint walls.
The studio says the steel is there to make you notice the flint and concrete, and it works. Thin lines of warm light run along the edges, so the metal picks up a soft glow and the stones across the aisle are lit from above.
The gates might be our favorite part. They’re made of thin vertical Corten slats, and at the bottom the slats bend outward and turn into benches. So the thing that locks the building at night is also where you wait for your friends! When the sun comes through, the slats lay stripes across the floor.
Then look up. The tunnel’s original domed skylights were refitted with custom glass blocks laid out in rings, and the sinks below repeat the circle, round stainless basins on pedestals that look a bit like small fountains. By the entrances, more basins are sunk straight into a long steel counter set against the flint.
We also like how little was forced. Nothing was dug out or added on. Where the old tunnel had curved niches, the architects fitted stalls into them and put a curved steel door on the front. The stall doors along the main passage open on alternating sides, so people can walk through in both directions.
The dull jobs got attention too, with steel gutters to catch the water that seeps down from the gardens and natural ventilation for a room with no windows. Most of it was built somewhere else and carried in, so a very busy park never had to become a construction site.
Roger Lardat designed the original tunnel for the 1937 fair. Its second life is one piece of a much bigger plan to rework the gardens around the Eiffel Tower, which Chartier-Corbasson won in 2019 with the London landscape studio Gustafson Porter + Bowman. It’s shortlisted for a Dezeen Award this year in the heritage category.
We’d love to see more cities give the humble public restroom this much care. Tokyo already does, and you can see how in our look at the Tokyo Toilet project. Next time you’re near the Trocadéro, go find the pink concrete arches.
Via Dezeen. Photos: Romain Meffre and Yves Marchand.
