I shit you not: RISD

Last semester, I dedicated a good portion of my time to reviewing as many toilets as I could around campus, rating them on the basis of accessibility, cleanliness, stall type, and other features. These articles were focused on finding the best of many, but unfortunately, this came at the cost of being unable to recreate and narrate the true experience of using that bathroom. So here, I present to you a new series: I Shit You Not. This series aims to visit noteworthy bathrooms and bring to you a secondhand experience of those encounters. The bathroom deserving the first honors? A bathroom in RISD.A friend of mine came to me after reading the toilet reviews I’d written, raving to me about another allegedly fantastic bathroom that I simply had to review. This bathroom, they claimed, is nothing short of entering a palace of sorts. Okay, I said, so where can I find this bathroom?20 Washington Place, they said, it’s actually part of RISD.It was little surprise to me that it was a RISD bathroom. Knowing the Brown that I know, there’s no way that a bathroom would be so wonderful that someone would come raving to me about it. A bathroom so terrible, perhaps, but not a bathroom that someone would describe as a palace. I set off on this adventure down the hill, admiring the steep hill that I rarely had to climb and the colorful outfits that the art students had on. But it was a hot day, and I was already feeling sweat on my back. I grew skeptical as I continued down the hill, wondering if the bathroom was really that wonderful. My friend nudged me on, and I sure as hell didn’t want to climb back up the hill without getting what I’d come down for. After walking for a couple more minutes, I found the building, a large structure of brick and concrete, with a newfangled renovated section in the back. I didn’t expect to ever walk this far for a bathroom. I suppose that’s why they call them bowel movements. One thing to note is that the building the bathroom is in is actually really only accessible to RISD students, and you need an ID. I couldn’t actually figure out how to get in, until I saw the hordes of RISD students entering the building. I was able to jump into the building at the last moment, only to be transported into what I imagine a futuristic train station looks like.Turns out, it’s an administrative building. I kept walking through, looking for the bathroom, pretending as though I was supposed to be there, despite my lack of fashion sense.I was already stunned by the interior of the building, and at this point I had no idea what to expect from the bathroom. What I first noticed? There were no gender signs. There was no sign that indicated that the bathroom was for “men” or “women” or was a gender-inclusive one. I kept going, and I was greeted by, I shit you not, the most stunning bathroom I’ve ever seen.These pictures do not do this bathroom justice. This bathroom was a piece of art itself. It was something that I would imagine to be in a contemporary art museum, something that you aren’t really supposed to touch or use. I stood at the door for a solid minute or two, just staring around the bathroom, the silence and magic only broken by a man flushing the toilet and washing his hands. But the bathroom gets even more whacky. Each door present in the pictures leads to a stall, but it felt like a room of its own in a suite of toilets. I entered the stall with the odd red silo shape on the door. The room was stunning as well. It was covered from ceiling to floor in tiny red tiles. The frosted door provided the privacy that many public bathrooms lack (I’m talking about that tiny gap in the door through which you can sometimes make really awkward eye contact with a stranger...yeah). I was brought back to reality when I went to use the toilet paper, which, unfortunately, like (almost) all toilets on campus, are single-ply. I’ve officially given up on attempting to find decent toilet paper anywhere except my own bathroom, which is now stocked with multi-ply paper. My asshole thanks me profusely. I thought that every stall would be the same, but of course, RISD being RISD, nothing is as basic as I would think. I had an inkling that the image on the door had something to do with the stall, and my theory was quickly confirmed.They literally made a trapezoidal room. Never in my life did I imagine I would find a trapezoidal room, much less a trapezoidal bathroom stall covered in tiny blue tiles. The accessible stall is really well-built. It has its own sink, which is more accessible. The room is larger. I have only two issues about this bathroom. One qualm about this bathroom in terms of accessibility is that the doors are really heavy. The other is simply that brown is a terrible color to have in a bathroom. It’s just not a good look. I’m no artist, but I do have eyes.From this day on, I’ll be thinking about this bathroom every time I use the bathroom anywhere. I treasure its gender inclusiveness, its aesthetics, and its creativity. It also really helps that all the sinks and soap dispensers work, and that it’s new enough that nothing’s really been broken or trashed, although I did find a very small bit of graffiti in the corner of one of the stalls.Is it worth the fifteen-minute walk down and up the hill? No. It’s not practical to do that. Just use the bathrooms on campus. However, it is objectively a beautiful bathroom, a true toilet palace, a marvel of its time, and visiting this bathroom completely made my day. It’s worth a visit if you can, even just to examine it as an art piece.  Images via MJ Lee '22.