Start your journey on east side of campus with a visit to the Burwash Dining Hall handicapped men’s room. There, on the inside of the snowy-white stall door, you can find a charming marker-painting of a bird on a ledge. A surprisingly delicate and beautiful work of bathroom-art scribbling, you may still feel slightly self-conscious when the bird won’t stop looking at you.
Victoria College, it turns out, is a veritable cornucopia of charming stall etchings. Make your way to the girls’ stalls in Old Vic, where you can find a caricature of an obese man with skinny legs (rendered in the evocative medium of white-out), provocatively drawn near an old “Drop Fees” sticker.
Trinity College bathroom art is more conceptual. After you’ve worked your way through Vic, head over to the ladies’ room next to the dining hall at St. Hilda’s for a spirited, poetic back-and-forth exchange about reality. The use of artfully-placed prose against a spare stall backdrop, this work challenges us to rethink the parameters of what we would normally consider “visual art.”
Looking for a (wash)room with a view? The venerable Hart House second floor ladies’ room offers a picturesque survey of the building’s outdoor quad. Scope out frisbee locations, admire the hedge-cutting guy, or simply contemplate the infinite beauty of the good old sunshine, all whilst relieving oneself.
When you go to the bathroom, are you ever in the mood for a feeling of Kafkaesque disorentation? The restrooms in the Munk Centre Basement offer vivid, black-and-white chequered floors that will make you feel like you’re playing an existential chess game. Set against the white-tile walls, the bathroom appears at once both tastefully minimalist and garishly challenging.
Finally, at the corner of Hoskin and St. George, why not visit “your Catholic home on campus” (Newman Centre, for those heathens not in-the-know) and consider the infinite grace of the good Lord’s artistic and architecural skills? The gorgeous, old-fashioned wood-panneled bathroom comes decked with a classy faux-marble sink, gorgeous mirror with roccoco frame, and, best of all, a glass window of a ship on a beautiful aqua-blue ocean. As with the best Catholic Rennaisance art, the Newman Centre’s bathroom confirms the long-lost eleventh commandment, “More shalt be more!”
Burwash men’s
Munk Centre
Old Vic men’s
Old Vic basement
Pratt Library
Pratt Library
Newman Centre
Newman Centre
Hart House
The Varsity office. The door doesn’t lock, so we hold it shut with empty water jugs.
