Project: 2007 - 1st prize in "KOŁO Bathroom 2007"
Execution: 2012
Investor: Kazimierz Dolny City Hall
Location: Kazimierz Dolny
Area size: 200m2
Design team: Piotr Musiałowski, Łukasz Przybyłowicz
Cooperation: Maciej Wilczek
The concept of the building was determined in an architectonic competition organised yearly by the Sanitec Koło company, a leading Polish manufacturer of sanitary fittings. The theme of the competition's first editions were bathroom interiors in housing and public utility buildings. Since 2006 the participants come up with public bathroom projects for places with heavy pedestrian traffic. The locations of said bathrooms are always linked to tourist attractive places and in 2007 the contest consisted of designing a free-standing public bathroom in Kazimierz Dolny. The most important requirement was to match the facility to the city's historic buildings while meeting technical and functional standards.
The bathroom was supposed to be built on a fenced plot of a waterworks plant, right beside the pumping station. The difficulty was to match a sanitary facility to the historic buildings present in Kazimierz Dolny. Considering the multiplicity of functions, the facility was designed as a group of three smaller buildings. The entire plot was fenced in with a picket fence, inspired by classic fences. In its northern part the fence changes into a roofing which integrates all of the project's elements. This way we visibly divided the plot into two parts, a public and a restricted area. The smaller buildings, finished with grey plaster, are hidden under an openwork framing. The entrance door, painted the same color as the plaster, is leveled to the external side of the wall. All of this ensures that the structure is devoid of any unnecessary details. Thanks to this, the play of light and shadow created by the wooden boards becomes clearly visible. The roofing is covered with patinated titanium zinc alloy-plated sheets of metal. We placed windows on the roof's surface, allowing more light to reach the interiors, but without making the rooms less intimate. The interiors themselves are bright, tidy and easy to maintain. Despite their small sizes, they seem to be quite spacious.