MISSION
Stalled! is a direct response to the moral panic triggered by court cases seeking to overturn President Obama’s Title IX protections guaranteeing trans individuals access to sex-segregated public toilets that align with their gender identity. In March 2018 the Trump administration rescinded these protections and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case of Gavin Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board.

Stalled! was formed in 2015 to address the design consequences of this pressing social equity problem. The project assembles a cross-disciplinary research team that includes architect Joel Sanders, transgender historian Susan Stryker, and legal scholar Terry Kogan to explore this question from a cultural, political and legal perspective.

Stalled! shifts the terms of this debate by treating this as a challenge that can be addressed through design alternatives that do not accept sex-segregated bathrooms as a given. While most debates cast this as a transgender issue alone, our work casts a wider net by developing inclusive guidelines that take into consideration ALL people--of different ages, genders, religions and disabilities. Our mission: the creation of viable economical restroom prototypes for retrofit and new construction projects that can be adopted and deployed across the United States.

We are committed to tackling this topic through three design, legal and educational initiatives: developing Best Practice Guidelines for all-gender restrooms in light of legal, economic, and practical considerations; amending the International Plumbing Code (“IPC”)—the model code that governs most construction in the United States to allow for all-gender, multi-user restrooms, and raising the awareness of the design community and institutional and government stakeholders.

In addition to responding to this timely architectural problem, Stalled! treats restrooms as a means to generate a larger conversation about the relationship between environmental design, the human body and social equity. The controversies surrounding transgender bathrooms is just one example of the way civil liberties of people includingwomen, African-Americans, Muslims, immigrants, the disabled and the LBGTQ community to name a few, are imperiled both in this country and around the world by denying people safe access to public space.

ABOUT STALLED! ONLINE
Rather than compile three years of research into a traditional print publication, we decided to disseminate our findings into Stalled! Online, an open-source website that makes our work accessible to a wider audience. Stalled Online is a dynamic platform. New material created by our team will be updated on a regular basis including three new essays—U.S. Restroom Politics, Typology and Ergonomics, and Amending Building Codes - that will be posted in the coming weeks. We will also be uploading material submitted by outside contributors in the future. We welcome your feedback and invite you to submit comments HERE.  

JOEL SANDERS
Joel Sanders is the Principal of his New York based studio JSA as well as Director of Post-Professional Studies and Professor at Yale School of Architecture. Editor of STUD: Architectures of Masculinity and Groundwork: Between Landscape and Architecture, Sanders’s writings and practice have explored the complex relationship between culture and social space, looking at the impact that evolving cultural forces (such as gender identity and the body, technology and new media, and the nature/culture dualism) have on the designed environment. JSA projects have been featured in international exhibitions and the permanent collections of MoMA, SF MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. The firm has received numerous awards, including six New York Chapter AIA Design Awards, three New York State AIA Design Awards, three Interior Design Best of Year Awards, two ALA / IIDA Library Interior Design Awards and Design Citations from Progressive Architecture.

SUSAN STRYKER
Susan Stryker is Professor Emerita of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. She is founding executive co-editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, co-editor of the Duke University Press book series ASTERISK: gender, trans-, and all that comes after, author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution (2008, 2017), co-editor of the multi-volume Transgender Studies readers, and co-director of the Emmy-winning documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria (2005). A collection of her essays, When Monsters Speak, edited by McKenzie Wark, is forthcoming from Duke in 2024. Dr. Stryker is currently working to complete a book manuscript, Changing Gender, under contract to Farrar Straus Giroux.

TERRY KOGAN
Terry Kogan is a Professor of Law at the University of Utah., He has spent the last decade considering issues surrounding the legal and cultural norms that mandate the segregation of public restrooms by sex. Terry has written extensively on bathrooms and gender segregation from a legal perspective. His latest scholarship, Public Restrooms and the Distorting of Transgender Identity (North Carolina Law Review, Volume 95, Issue 4, forthcoming) addresses North Carolina House Bill 2, which requires that public restroom access be based on biological sex, rather than gender identity. Most recently, he has submitted an amicus brief for the U.S. Supreme Court transgender restroom case – G.G. v. Gloucester City School Board.

SEB CHOE
Seb Choe is a designer at JSA where they have been Project Manager for Stalled! since June 2017, coordinating design prototypes, lectures, workshops, publications, fundraising, relationships with institutional partners, as well as Stalled! Online and Stalled! The Video. A recent Columbia University graduate with a B.A in Architecture, Seb works at the intersection of design, activism and education with groups like the Mohawk Valley Collective, the Rikers Education Program and The Architecture Lobby to reimagine relationships of power in the built environment. Seb produces and performs experimental music and video propaganda in Brooklyn, NY as Broken Spear.

CAITLIN BAIADA
Caitlin Baiada is a recent graduate of the Yale School of Architecture and has been a primary contributor to Stalled!'s historical, theoretical, and contemporary research. Her architectural investigations focus on contextualism from a social and environmental justice perspective. Before Yale University, she worked as an Architectural Designer and Project Manager on a number of hospitality and residential projects at Joel Sanders Architect and Rafael de Cardenas / Architecture at Large. In 2012, Caitlin received a Master of Arts in Sustainable Design Studies from Cornell University, and additionally holds a Bachelor of Science from Cornell in Design and Environmental Analysis (Interior Design).

EDWARD WANG
Edward designed prototypes for inclusive airport and institutional restrooms. He was the lead designer on the Gallaudet University renovation project and was a key member of the research and proposal team for the early phases of Stalled!. Edward is a graduate of Yale University and is completing his graduate degree at Harvard. He is currently working on a multi-sensory garden installation with Nice One and a proposal to pedestrianize a section of Hong Kong's Des Voeux Road. He is based in Toronto.

MARCO LI
Marco Li is Senior Associate at JSA and was the project manager for the Gallaudet University renovation project. A graduate of the UCLA School of Architecture and Urban Design, Marco has served as a lead designer on several award-winning academic, institutional, and residential projects at JSA. His designs have addressed adaptive re-uses of existing spaces, multi-functioning institutional programs, cultural diversity, and high-end residential detailing.

RESEARCH AND DESIGN
Abena Bonna
Antonia Caba
Brenna Thompson
Caitlin Thissen
Cat Garcia Menocal
Catherine Shih
Charles Kane
Clara Dykstra
Clement Nespoulous
David Langdon
David Wezdenko
Francesca Carney
Quemuel Arroyo
Sam Velasquez


FUNDING
AIA Arthur W. Brunner Grant
B.W. Bastian Foundation
New York State Council on the Arts, Independent Projects Grant
Yale/Hewlett-Packard Blended Reality Research Grant
Yale School of Architecture Faculty Grant
Yale Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking
Yale WGSS FLAGS Award


SUPPORT
The Architectural League of New York, Rosalie Genevro, Director
AIA New York's Diversity and Inclusion Committee, Vanesa Alicea, Danei Cesario
Center for Architecture, Ben Prosky, Executive Director
Design Trust for Public Space, Susan Chin, Executive Director, Rosamond Fletcher, Director of Programs
Double Forte, Maggie Zeman, Joe Kowalke, Kelly Fallon
MoMA, Martino Stierli, Chief Curator of Architecture and Design
Storefront for Art and Architecture, Eva Franch i Gilabert, Chief Curator and Executive Director
S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah
Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale
University of Chicago Law School, Mary Anne Case, Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law
Van Alen Institute, David van der Leer, Executive Director
Yale School of Architecture, Deborah Berke, Dean