What’s Happening: Artful public toilets by world-class designers are popping up around Tokyo, illustrating what’s possible when public money is used efficiently.

The Download: On the list of unpleasant human experiences, using a public restroom has to go right near the top. That’s especially true in Japan, where denizens rarely use them because they’re often dark, dirty, smelly, and even scary. “There are two concerns with public toilets located in parks—whether they’re clean and if there’s anyone hiding inside,” says Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, who was enlisted by the Nippon Foundation to design restrooms at Haru-no-Ogawa Community Park as part of the Tokyo Toilet Project. Clad in colorful transparent glass, each cube-shaped facility becomes opaque when the doors lock, guaranteeing privacy.

The Tokyo Toilet Project enjoyed somewhat of a viral media moment when Ban’s clever proposal was unveiled in 2020. Organized in partnership with Shibuya City and Shibuya Tourism Association, the initiative is revamping lavatories across central Tokyo by commissioning homegrown heavyweights like Tadao Ando, Toyo Ito, Kengo Kuma, and Sou Fujimoto, as well as international designers like Marc Newson. In doing so, it aims to bring Japan’s high-hygiene standards, artistic sensibilities, and emphasis on omotenashi (hospitality) to communal bogs.

Ban’s luminous loo marked the first of 17 planned facilities, which are still being unveiled piecemeal. The latest, envisioned by Tomohito Ushiro, replaces a drab red-brick block in Hiroo East Park with a pared-down concrete structure that puts on a wondrous light show. Affixed to the building’s rear wall, a light panel creates a series of continuously changing patterns—7.9 billion, the same as the world’s population when he designed it—so it always appears different to passersby. Ushiro, who founded the local firm White Design, approached the concept as art first, design second. “It’s always posing questions,” he says, expressing an underlying theme of “all people are the same, in the sense they’re all different.”

All of the bathrooms are unique, reflecting the ingenuity of the country’s creative talents. Nao Tamura’s sleek red-and-white restroom nods to origata, an ancient practice of decorative wrapping. Masamichi Katayama’s maze-like design consists of 15 interlocking concrete walls to monumental effect. The curves of Fumihiko Maki’s wavy, frosted-glass “squid toilet,” meanwhile, nod to Ebisu East Park’s famous octopus-shaped playground equipment.

Besides making great conversation fodder, the inventive program proves what’s possible when public money is used efficiently. Whether the glorious urination stations will be maintained to Japan’s hygiene standards remains to be seen, but the Nippon Foundation plans to post each facility’s maintenance status online and deck out the cleaning staff in uniforms by Kenzo creative director Nigo, hoping the old maxim “dress for success” rings true.

In Their Own Words: “The bathroom is a place where we address physical needs universal to all mankind, regardless of our age, nationality, religion, skin color, or sexual identity,” Tamura says. “As we come into an era of increased awareness, our communal spaces need to evolve to accommodate our infinitely diverse needs.”

Surface Says: It seems San Francisco, which recently drew ridicule for proposing a single public toilet with an eye-watering $1.7 million price tag, could learn a lesson or two from Tokyo.

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Hem often forgoes the flashy for the subtle, but the Swedish purveyor of pared-down future classics has never been afraid to play. That approach informed the brand’s first foray into outdoor furniture, a clean-lined range of stackable chairs by Philippe Malouin that debuts today. Deriving its name from the chop saw the British designer used to create a monolithic range of furniture for Salon 94 Design, the Chop Collection is formed from welded metal pipes for a pristine, rust-free existence. Don’t let the slight bend of the back fool you—its stainless steel profile ensures a weighty frame and maximum durability, even in the frigid depths of winter.

When: Until July 26

Where: The Museum of Sex, New York

What: Munson often plumbs the conflicting expectations surrounding the consumption of the female body. These ideas manifest in her playful selection of objects—bulbous breasts, crotch-clenching nutcrackers, and suggestive vessels—that appear in her prescient artworks and installations.

For the Catskill artist’s inaugural outing at Manhattan’s most sex-positive museum, she presents an expanded iteration of her ongoing Pink Project: Bedroom, a riotous cave of mass-produced objects marketed towards girls and women—“found detritus that’s both seductive and repulsive at the same time,” Munson says. (It’s also an olfactory trip thanks to Marissa Zappas’s perfume oil, evoking scents of plastic doll heads, makeup powder, and strawberry candy.) By confronting us with the many everyday plastic things acquired, revered, or discarded, Munson continues to carve out space for a complex type of pleasure.

For furniture and lighting designer A. Jacob Marks, good design and fine workmanship are inextricable. In 2001, the self-trained designer established Skram, a studio whose offerings across furniture and lighting are rooted in a sense of timelessness intended to confront the environmental devastation wrought by throwaway culture.

Defining timelessness, especially in design, is no easy task, but Skram accomplishes that through the use of natural materials including wood, metal, leather, and stone, establishing a dialogue between rectilinear and curvilinear forms, and embracing the art of hand-finished workmanship. Considering the studio is going 22 years strong—having accrued multiple accolades in the process—we’d say that approach has served them well.

New & Notable is a cultural catchall that highlights interesting new products and projects from our brilliantly creative members of The List. With new releases, events, and goings-on, these moments indicate their power to move the needle within and beyond realms like architecture, design, fashion, and art.

Dubai does not suffer from a lack of starchitect commissions, man-made islands, or opulent destinations, but Atlantis the Royal’s 795 guest rooms, 90 swimming pools, and 17 restaurants—eight of which are helmed by celebrity chefs—puts the property in an outrageous category all its own.

The five-star resort presides over the Persian Gulf on Palm Jumeirah, an artificial island shaped like a palm tree. With its gravity-defying Jenga-like architecture by Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF)—the global firm leaving its mark on the region with a new Abu Dhabi International Airport terminal as well as towers in Tel Aviv and Doha—the building is slated to become one of the city’s most high-profile destinations. That’s aided in part by its star-studded list of collaborators, including Michelin Star chefs José Andrés and Heston Blumenthal, and swanky amenities like 20-foot-tall Lasvit crystal lava trees, gold toothbrushes in each guest room’s vanity kit, and an on-site Valentino boutique.

Neal Aronowitz is a self-taught sculptor who finds inspiration in the natural world and the dynamic forms within it. After years of running Neal Aronowitz Stone & Tile, a successful stone and interiors business in New York City and Portland, he launched an art and design studio that focuses on hand-crafted bespoke furniture and lighting. The work of the studio continues with a passion for daring forms, material experimentation, and simple beauty.

Surface Says: Using an ultra-thin concrete fabric as his material of choice, Aronowitz sculpts statement furniture that evokes calligraphic brushstrokes—or perhaps a flying carpet. His pieces, especially the award-winning Whorl Console, appear to levitate gracefully and effortlessly, infusing airiness and emotion into a traditionally cold material.

This miniature shape-shifting robot can easily liquefy itself and reform.

Former obituary writer Adam McEwen now pens fake ones for celebrities.

Construction workers find a strange Hercules statue in a Roman sewer.

Here’s what Apple stores might look like in worldly architectural styles.