Video about Miro Rivera Architects from Austin PBS station KLRU

The Lady Bird Lake Hike and Bike Restroom by Austin’s Miro Rivera Architects has been put on the shortlist for the first-ever World Architecture Festival’s award in the energy and recycling category. It joins 223 other buldings from 43 countries — a list that includes two in Kansas City (the Nelson-Atkins Museum and the Grand Ballroom in the Battle Convention Center, built over a continuously open six-lane freeway) as well as work by such renowned architects as Zaha Hadid and Lord Norman Foster (designer of the Winspear Opera House).

The small public restroom, which curls in on itself like a snail shell, sits alongside the hike and bike trail. It has already won a Texas Society of Architects award. The World Architecture prize will be announced in Barcelona in October.

Photo by Paul Finkel, Piston Design.