Third Place Winner
Stoolbus
Design by
John Hobbie
John Hobbie
John Hobbie is an artist,a theme parkproduction designer and set designer for live theater. John has spent much of his life designing for theater and filling sketchbooks with drawings fromhis travels.His theater designs eventually led him to the theme park industry where he honed his skills designing landscapes and architectural forms.As John’s work continues to grow and evolve, he now uses his entertainment design skills to solve real world problems. His most recent project involves creating urban cool islands for cityscapes to protect people from extreme heat events. It will be published in the 2023 Journal of Digital Landscape Architecture.
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Winner’s Spotlight: An Exclusive Interview
Discover the story behind the victory — from concept to creation.
What is your design philosophy?
I have a simple design philosophy: make life better. But like Martin Scorsese says: Simple is hard. It takes time, effort and most importantly, caring, to create a good design that improves people’s lives. Design is a careful balance of technology and form, or art. I’m often reminded of a line from the Manuel of the Mustard Seed Garden (芥子園畫傳) from the 17th century Qing Dynasty; To paint with soul and no technique is deplorable, but to paint with technique and no soul is worse. I take this to heart and understand that to solve a problem, you must have knowledge, skills and love.
When I design something, the first step I take isto research the audience or end user.This step addresses many things like culture and demographics. Different cultures have different expectations and legal requirements. For instance, cars in Europe are designed to prevent injury to pedestrians at the expense of the car. While a car made in America is designed to withstand an impact with another vehicle making it that much more dangerous for pedestrians. But the USA isn’t a pedestrian culture and automobile design codes reflect this. This is why it’s important for me to have a full understanding of the audience I’m designing for.
The second step to my design process is to find a story that engages the user. Architecture, art, music, literature all tells our story, and designing a toilet is no different. Toilet design speaks to values, beliefs, and taboos. Toilets and relieving ourselves has symbolic meaning that is deeply woven into our language and behavior. In the case of my Stoolbus design, I chose the name, color, and form of the toilet as one that educates as well as fills a physical need. Like the rest of the world, the United States is coming to terms with climate change and the problems that industrialized farming has caused, from dead zones and algae blooms in the oceans andscorched soils casting particulates into the air.The Stoolbus is designed to compost human waste and return it to the earth as a natural fertilizer. And while it is important to impress upon people the need to be resilient in every, it is also important to educate them in an entertaining way. This is exactly what Brecht said of musical theater back in the 1930’s, The purpose of theater is to educate, but first you must entertain. Turning an educational experience into an entertaining one will produce a more positive response. And that is why I used a school bus theme, to encourage learning.
Finally, I ask if the design is good. By this I mean does it fit the needs of the people and make life better? This is a multifaceted question. Making life better might not be obvious. Some things may appear to be helpful to people in a direct way, but that may not be the case when you look at the impact of manufacturing. The true cost of production is often hidden or passed on to future generations. Asking these kinds of questions will help guide uscreating a better future.
Can you briefly explain your understanding of the topic and the source of ideas?
When I first looked at the topic of creating public toilets I first had to choose a location. Knowing that each city on earth will have a different problem to tackle, choosing my hometown Savannah seemed like the logical choice. Savannah hasa noticeable lack of public toilets for its citizens and tourists alike. There are only four public toilets for everyone in the city.
Second, I researched the end users, the local population and tourists. On any given day in Savannah there are thirty-eight thousand tourists looking for a place to go. So why does the city only have four toilets when there is such an obvious need? Surely having clean, safe, public toilets would lead to a more pleasant experience and in turn more tourists. The answer to why there are so few toilets lies in the fact that Savannah is very protective of its history. Nearly every square foot of Savannah is a historical building, cemetery plot, or private space. In order tocreate an architectural solution for public toilets would require a great amount of work to bypass historical protection building codes would be prohibitive.
The answer to overcoming building codes is to avoid building a structure. Instead, I combined the idea of “parklets”, small parks that fit within city parking spaces with autonomous vehicles designs like those created by Beep,inc.Savannah’s main source of income from tourism is through parking fees. And parking spaces are abundant everywhere in Savannah. By creating an autonomous vehicle that can park anywhere in the city seems to solve many problems at once; it bypasses restrictive building codes, makes itself available to any location in the city, and composts its waste for agriculture.
When and how you were first introduced to architecture?
I was first introduced to architecture through art school. I had visited many places and seen many kinds of buildings and structures prior to attending university. But until I went to school and had a brilliant professorexplain art history and put it in context, I never really understood the world around me. My understanding of art history, from how space is depicted in paintings to how it is organized through cityscapes, became something I have developed a lifelong interest in. We can look at architecture through time and see how economics, family relationships and religion have shaped our world. And with this hindsight, we can then look forward and create a better future.
What does architecture mean to you?
I once heard on a radio show that you can understand what a culture values most by looking at the tallest building in any given city. This seems to be true all the way from Stonehenge to the pharaoh’s pyramids, through to Renaissance churches and finally to today’s banks, where the skyscrapers are all financial centers. Architecture is a physical symbol of how we understand and represent space, what we value and believe. This is what architecture means to me.
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