The Gap Beneath the Door: How Culture Shapes What We Build

By Nathan Waterhouse · 2026-01-13

My sons and I were in Cancún over the holiday period when one of them asked me a question I'd never really thought about: "Dad, why can you see people's feet in the toilets here?"

He meant the American-style bathroom stalls. Those partition walls that hover a foot off the ground and stop well short of the ceiling. The doors with gaps wide enough to make awkward eye contact with someone walking past. Coming from the UK, where public toilets tend to be more enclosed, these "barn door" cubicles feel oddly exposed.

I gave some half-formed answer about cleaning and cost. But the question stayed with me. Why do American bathrooms look like this? And what does it tell us about how culture embeds itself into the most mundane objects we design?

From Comfort Stations to Surveillance Stalls

The American bathroom stall wasn't always this way. In the early twentieth century, public facilities in the US were designed with dignity in mind. The Brookline Comfort Station in Massachusetts, built in 1912, used covered vestibules and right-angle turns to ensure maximum privacy. You couldn't accidentally glimpse someone else, and they couldn't glimpse you. These were sanctuaries in the bustling urban environment, reflecting Victorian values where the body was something to be hidden.

The shift came surprisingly early. In 1904, Frank Lloyd Wright introduced ceiling-hung toilet partitions in his design for the Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo. His motivation was purely practical: suspended walls with open floor space made the toilets easier to clean underneath. It was a novel idea at the time. Within decades, it had become the American standard.

But cleaning efficiency doesn't fully explain the persistence of those gaps.

The Liminal Space

In the American imagination, the public restroom occupies a peculiar psychological space. Design anthropologists describe it as a "dangerous, liminal space," a potential site for illicit activities, from drug use to sexual encounters. The European view is quite different: the restroom is conceived as "a temporary private extension of the domestic sphere," entitled to the same privacy as a bedroom.

This difference in conception produces radically different designs. The American gap serves as a passive surveillance mechanism. Security personnel or other patrons can verify occupancy and activity, a practice colloquially known as "looking for legs." The visual permeability discourages lingering, increases throughput, and prevents the bathroom from becoming a shelter or a site of vice.

The design encodes a particular relationship between the individual and the institution. It says: you may have privacy, but not too much. We're watching, even here.

Compare this to Germany, where many public toilets are fully enclosed rooms with floor-to-ceiling walls. Or Japan, where some facilities include sound-masking devices (buttons that play flushing sounds or white noise) to provide acoustic privacy. These designs encode different assumptions: that bodily privacy is a right, not a privilege to be rationed.

The Practical Trinity

Of course, the American design isn't purely ideological. Three practical forces reinforced the cultural direction:

Economics. Less material means lower cost. Standardised partition systems using lightweight materials are cheaper and faster to install than custom floor-to-ceiling enclosures. When you're outfitting thousands of schools, office buildings and shopping centres, those savings compound.

Maintenance. The floating partition lets cleaners sweep and mop without opening every door. Water drains more easily. Damage is more visible. In a culture that often conflates visual cleanliness with moral order, this matters.

Safety. Those gaps allow you to check if someone has collapsed or needs help. Care and surveillance, intertwined.

These practical considerations aligned neatly with cultural anxieties. The design solved for efficiency, cleanliness, and control all at once. It felt like common sense. And that's precisely how cultural values get baked into design: not through conscious ideology, but through the accumulation of "obvious" practical choices that happen to reflect deeper assumptions.

Design as Cultural Fossil

Every designed object carries the fingerprints of its cultural moment. The values, anxieties and assumptions of a society get encoded into the things that society builds, often without anyone consciously deciding to put them there.

Take café chairs. In France, chairs on terraces face outward toward the street, arranged side by side. The design intent is observation: the flâneur watching the theatre of the city. It is a social, public act of seeing and being seen. Walk into an American coffee shop and you'll find something different. Tables face inward. Booths offer privacy. Individual seats come with power outlets. The design intent is productivity or private conversation. The coffee shop is a workspace or a pit stop, not a viewing platform.

Neither arrangement is objectively "correct." They're expressions of different cultural priorities, frozen into furniture placement.

Japanese Genkan

Consider the Japanese genkan, the traditional sunken entryway found in almost every Japanese home. Upon entering, you step down into this recessed space, remove your shoes, then step up into the house. The change in elevation creates both a physical and psychological barrier between outside (soto) and inside (uchi).

This isn't merely practical. It's rooted in Shinto beliefs about purity and pollution. The outside world carries impurity that must not contaminate the home's sanctuary. The genkan also functions as a social buffer. A delivery person can stand there and conduct business without fully entering the private sphere.

Western architecture, with front doors opening directly into living rooms, lacks this gradient of intimacy. We lost it somewhere along the way, probably without realising.

The Open-Plan Office and Other Confidence Tricks

The bathroom stall is far from the only design that encodes cultural assumptions.

The open-plan office emerged from mid-century egalitarian ideals. No corner offices, no hierarchy expressed in square footage. The German concept of "Bürolandschaft" (office landscape) embraced open layouts to symbolise workplace equality. By the 2000s, tech companies championed the design as fostering collaboration and innovation.

But it also enabled surveillance of knowledge workers. You can see what everyone's doing. Are they working? Are they collaborating? The design makes these questions answerable at a glance. And when studies showed that open offices actually led to less face-to-face interaction (as people withdrew to find privacy), the culture shifted again. Now we're retrofitting quiet pods and "focus rooms." Design adapting to the backlash it created.

The suburban cul-de-sac encoded post-war American dreams of safety, separation from urban chaos, and the nuclear family as the primary social unit. Children could play in the street because there was no through-traffic. But it also encoded assumptions about car ownership, single-use zoning, and separation that we're still untangling today.

The smartphone's infinite scroll reflects a culture that prizes engagement over completion, novelty over depth. There's no natural endpoint, no moment where the content says "that's enough for today." The design assumes your attention is something to be captured, not protected.

In each case, the design didn't just respond to culture. It reinforced it. Open offices normalised surveillance. Cul-de-sacs made car dependency inevitable. And the infinite scroll trained us to expect endless stimulation.

When Culture Shifts, Design Follows

The relationship between culture and design is dialectical. Culture shapes design, but design reinforces culture. When we build a gapped stall, we reinforce the idea that privacy is secondary to security. When we build a car-centric city, we reinforce individualism.

But culture isn't static, and we're watching another shift happen right now. The "Stalled!" project, led by architect Joel Sanders, argues that the standard American stall, designed for a binary, able-bodied, speed-focused population, fails to meet the needs of a diverse society. The proposed solutions include floor-to-ceiling walls, communal washing stations, and the elimination of gender-segregated entrances.

Sanders' airport prototype uses one-way mirrors and acoustic dampening to transform the restroom from a site of surveillance into a space of wellbeing. It's design responding to a cultural moment that increasingly values inclusivity and dignity over efficiency and control.

The bathroom wars aren't really about bathrooms. They're about what kind of society we want to encode into our built environment.

A Question From a Toilet Stall

My son's question caught me off guard because I'd stopped seeing those gaps. They were just how bathrooms were. It took a child's fresh eyes to make the familiar strange again.

The designs we stop questioning are often the ones most worth examining. What have we normalised? What assumptions have calcified into "just how things are done"?

I think about this often in strategy work. When an organisation designs a process, builds a system, or creates a policy, they're encoding assumptions about what matters, who can be trusted, and how people should behave. Those assumptions may not be written down anywhere. They may not even be conscious. But they're there, shaping behaviour long after the original designers have moved on.

The next time you find yourself in a space that feels slightly wrong, or notice a system that seems to encode odd priorities, it might be worth pausing. Not to complain, but to excavate. What cultural moment produced this? What was it optimising for? And what might we design differently if we started from different assumptions?

Every gap beneath a door tells a story. We just have to remember to ask what it is.

What designed objects have you noticed that encode surprising cultural assumptions? I'd love to hear examples in the comments.