Ziggo Dome built restroom walls that move

Concert and event venues built with a fixed ratio of men's to women's restroom stalls face a mismatch problem baked into the building itself: a pop concert with a mostly female audience produces long women's-restroom lines and mostly empty men's stalls, while a different kind of event at the same venue produces the opposite mismatch — but the physical stall count on each side is fixed once the building is constructed, regardless of which event is happening that night.

Building enough stalls on both sides to handle the worst-case demand for either gender would mean permanently oversized restrooms most of the time, wasting valuable floor space in a venue where every square meter has a commercial use. The venue needed flexibility in stall allocation without duplicating the entire facility.

Architects Benthem Crouwel designed Ziggo Dome, a 17,000-capacity arena in Amsterdam completed in 2012, with a movable partition wall between the men's and women's restrooms, letting facility staff physically reallocate the split of stalls between genders for each individual event based on the expected composition of that night's crowd.

Made the restroom split a per-event choice: a movable partition wall lets staff reallocate stalls between genders for each crowd, avoiding both mismatch and wasted space.

Movable wall lets staff match stall counts to each event's expected gender mix, reducing lines and empty stalls.

Avoids building oversized restrooms for worst-case demand, saving floor space for commercial use.

Turns a one-time construction decision into a per-event operational choice, adapting to varying crowd compositions.

When demand splits vary predictably by context, build adjustable boundaries so capacity allocation becomes an operational choice, not a fixed structural one.

The venue can match its fixed restroom capacity to the actual demand mix of a given event rather than using the same static split for every show, reducing the mismatch of long lines on one side and empty stalls on the other that fixed-ratio restrooms produce elsewhere.