Planning a changing- and wash house for unclear staff composition 1

[MartinLe]

This is more of an architectural question, but maybe one of you has seen a clever solution.

At a wwtp or mine or many other industrial installations, a typical wash house looks like this: Shared "Clean/white" locker room, access to showers and short hallway to shared "dirty/black" locker room, showers also have access to "dirty" locker room. so the workers undress at start of shift, get their work clothes from the "dirty" locker room, vice versa at end of shift.

This setup is sensible but how many workers will use the wash house will really affect the floor plan. When planning an installation, you need to know if you the workers will be only men, only women, or the rough proportion so the locker rooms, showers etc. are sized accordingly.

In my limited observation (from small and large wwtp), small plants where built a decade or three ago with only men in mind. The few women with blue collar jobs on wwtp I've seen so far all worked on larger plants, or at least from larger plants that had an extra wash house.

My question is, when building or planning a new installation, is there a clever architectural solution that allows flexibility over the decades a plant will be in operation? The only Idea I have is to build several smaller wash houses (not one for 45 workers, but three for 15-18 each) to allow some flexibility, though that costs in terms of complexity and space (more hallways etc.)

This question is not for a concrete project I'm working on. I'm just wondering, if operators mean it when the say they want more women in vocational training etc. (and many oeprators say this), how would a smart accomodation look like?

 

[MotorCity]

Typically when facility design is based on gender specific arrangements, the client should provide a head count/shift count and men-to-women ratio.

 

[MartinLe]

Yes. But what if the client does not know the men to women ratio confidently? Or plans to change it down the road, but can't say how sucesful that will be? Is there a smarte solution than potentially oversizing wash houses?

 

[EdStainless]

Perhaps if you designed it as a long building with various lockable partitions you could change the ratio of usage.
I have see toilets where there is a bank of stools that can be opened either to the mens side or the womens side.
This is common in conference centers where one event may be attended by 90% women and the next 90% men.

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P.E. Metallurgy, Plymouth Tube