"Designs at the Venice Architecture Biennale are rethinking the modern flush for a water-strained world.
"Visitors to the Finnish pavilion at 2023’s Venice Architecture Biennale are greeted with an unlikely sight at a festival typically devoted to the avant-garde and newfangled: a no-flush #outhouse toilet.
"While the structure, known as a #Huussi, may seem a bit primitive to some, it’s long been a popular toilet design in rural parts of #Finland because it requires no connection to water supplies: It processes waste not by flushing it away, but by converting it to compost in a hay-filled container. It’s a design that’s making a comeback because it saves water and recirculates waste back into the #ecosystem — both essential goals in a world where many areas are drying out thanks to #ClimateChange, and where as much as 30% of urban #water supplies are used to flush human waste. Our modern toilet practices are likely to become unsustainable within the next few decades; by 2050 it’s estimated that up to five billion people could be facing #watershortages.
"Toilet composting could also fuel an alternative to the carbon-heavy manufactured #nitrogen#fertilizer and mined #phosphorus widely used in farming today. Chemical fertilizers also deplete carbon from one of the few places we want to retain it — in the soil itself, where it fosters vital microbial activity.
"Some designers in Finland are looking to the recent past for more sustainable, hygienic solutions for sewage, while others are using more modern technologies to reduce or eliminate the need for water. Part of what the exhibit at the Venice Biennale, open until Nov. 26, highlights is that these toilet designs are far less offensive to our modern olfactory sensibilities than many might assume. Here are some of the ways that architects and planners are rethinking toilet systems to help them fit into a circular economy, reducing the excess water and pollutants that billions of us literally flush down the toilet."
This sort of thing has to be an important part of the future, everywhere. Regulators need to get the hell out of the way in the places it isn't currently allowed, so people can start building.
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