Smallest room: the quality of much street furniture is very poor. Here is a public lavatory that enhances a fine old city - Dubrovnik, Croatia

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 2002

As this magazine has emphasized for at least half a century, the things that have the most immediate impact on the quality of everyday urban life are small: letter and telephone boxes, paving, lighting, street furniture of all kinds, signs -- and public lavatories. Such things are particularly important in old cities, which ought to be treated with special care and thought, but so often are not, with crass standardized detailing forced on the streets by philistine planners and civil engineers.

For all the tourism, Dubrovnik remains one of the gems of European urbanity, and the old town within the fourteenth-century Venetian walls now seems scarcely touched by the awful violence that racked the Balkans in the 1990s. The tourists have returned, and they need to be catered for in a way that does not wreck the place they have come to see. The new public loo is just outside the Fishermen's Gate between the gridded streets of the colonial town and the harbour. As the architects say, 'It leans against the Austro-Hungarian port authority building' and at the same time, it creates a new pedestrian route between the city wall and the later structure.

To achieve the aims of the city reconstruction project, the plan had to be very long and thin and materials had to relate to the existing fabric. Local Dalmatian sandy limestone clads the in-situ structure, the stone cut smooth in contrast to the rough city wall across the new alley. The presence of the building is signalled only by an elegant curve sculpted in its prow. Two niches in the long wall house traditional drinking fountains -- devices that should be reintroduced in other cities, particularly in hot climates.

Inside, walls are clad in black stone from Angola; doors and fittings are stainless steel.

All is elegant and chaste, carefully honed to make a humble and unobtrusive but essential addition to one of the world's most cherished cities.

Architect

Nenad Fabijanic

Project team

Sonja Tadej, Maja Nevzala, Snjezana Huzanic

Photographs

Vrbica & Tosovic