Cal Poly is home to hundreds of buildings with distinctive and sometimes unconventional designs. A hidden gem on campus has left students mystified for years.
The second floor of Cal Poly’s Graphic Arts building is home to what some call the weirdest bathroom on campus.
With a giant rounded sink in the center that disperses powdered soap, and a single stall inside a seemingly single-stall bathroom, the restroom has puzzled many people over the years. It’s even garnered the attention of the Instagram account dedicated to Cal Poly bathrooms. While some admire the facility’s quirks, others call it a waste of space.
Graphic communications senior Kylie Yarwood, feels that the bathroom can lead to confusion.
“It’s awkward that there’s one stall in there, and I never know if I’m supposed to lock the door to get in or the stall,” Yarwood said.
The mysterious restroom has left many with the question: why does it look like that?
According to the original blueprints for the building, the bathroom used to be attached to a men’s locker room. The basin was meant as a hands-free way to wash ink off hands so that it wouldn’t get on the faucet.
Graphic communications professor Ken Macro explains the history behind the design.
“The building was built in the late fifties, early sixties, and it was the printing engineering school,” Macro said. “And so it was predominantly men, predominantly white men who were part of this program. So they had to build a space over there that was a shower, for the men, and the reason for that is we had linotype machines, and we had letterpress machines and we had all types of binder equipment and ink labs so they would get, you know, dirty,”
The bathroom’s appearance is in part the result of several attempts to expand the capacity of the building over the years, offices now fill the space that used to contain showers.
As for the dry soap, Macro says that borax was used because it was cheap, easy to refill and was strong enough to break down the ink.
Macro also had an explanation for the sticker on the side of the sink that states:
This is Not a Urinal. Don’t Even Think About It.
“We were having a discussion with some graduates, and somehow the wash basin came up and they were like ‘What’s that? Oh, I thought that was a urinal.’” Marco said. “And then everybody gasped and so we immediately have to put a sticker or something on there, so we had a student do it and I think they put on there, don’t even think about it.”
The bathroom can be found on the second floor of building 26.
