Screeme,
Health codes vary from state to state (and city to city), but there is a minimum distance from the center of the toilet to the wall. IIRC it is 19", but am not too sure.
As to why all the toilets aren’t ‘roomy’, it goes something like this:
You must, by code have X amount of bathroom stalls. This is usually determined by area and type of building.
of the X stalls, Z number of stalls MUST be accessible.
My Texas Accesibility Code Book is very specific about requirements: You must have a 5’ turning radius, a specific clear space in front of sinks, etc
As architects, we must FIRST and foremost meet the demands of the accesiblity requirements.
Then everything else comes into play.
Often, the other stalls are shrunken to the bare requirement. Sometimes, because of wall types, etc (the list of reasons is very long, trust me), we can’t make the bathroom itself any bigger.
An example:
We once built a clinic. The doctor was very tall and wanted a particular counter higher up than normal. We had to tell him it couldn’t be done because of the accessibility requirements. He may, one day, hire a disabled employee and thus, that counter was not acceptable. So we had to build that counter at accessible heigth requirements, even though it was his own clinic and even if it would mean he had to stoop over to use it.
Sometimes, entire projects have been scraped because we couldn’t make them accessible.
If anyone has any questions about accessibility rights, in regards to architecture, let me know.
-Babs, intern architect.
