Concept → Reality · Rewritten

Axixa, the wall urinal that never reached the wall

In 2009 a Mexican designer drew a ceramic urinal in the shape of the stain it was meant to stop. It stayed on paper, while cities slowly built their own answers to the same problem.

The Design Blog editors

An Urilift pop-up street urinal in its raised position

An Urilift pop-up street urinal in Gothenburg. AI-retouched from an image by Albin Olsson, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Verdict 2026

Still a concept

Axixa stayed a concept: the wall-mounted ceramic urinal was published in 2009 and, as far as we could find, never installed on a street. Its premise, designing for street urination instead of against it, was already at work in Dutch pop-up urinals and later returned in the Uritrottoir in Paris.

  1. 2002London adds telescopic urinals that rise from the pavement at night, a type first developed and installed in the Netherlands.
  2. 2009Miguel Melgarejo’s Axixa, a ceramic wall urinal shaped like a urine stain, circulates on design and tech sites as a concept.
  3. 2012Melgarejo begins working on the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge at TU Delft, a sanitation project backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
  4. 2016Amsterdam installs the first retractable public urinal for women.
  5. 2018Paris trials the Uritrottoir, a waterless, straw-filled street urinal by the French studio Faltazi, and meets protests on the Île Saint-Louis.

What it was

In July 2009, a design proposal from Mexico made the rounds of tech blogs. Miguel Melgarejo, who had finished his industrial design degree in Monterrey the year before, had drawn a public urinal that looked like the problem it was meant to solve. Axixa was a ceramic fixture in the shape of the mark a stream leaves on a wall, to be mounted on the street side of a building. The name is a Nahuatl word for urinating.

The logic was blunt. Some walls get used no matter what the signs say. Rather than fight that with fines, Melgarejo proposed giving those walls a fixture that catches what would otherwise run down onto the pavement, and making the fixture resemble the stain it replaces. His own description called it a symbolic stain that keeps the street clean. Gizmodo filed it as a concept and doubted that shop owners would want one on their facade.

A public urinal can solve the hygiene and still fail on the question of who has to look at it.

What cities built instead

Axixa never left the portfolio. On Melgarejo’s website it sat in a section labeled concepts. He went on to study strategic product design at TU Delft, and from 2012 he worked on the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge there, a Gates Foundation program that developed sanitation for informal settlements in India. The interest in toilets turned out to be serious.

Cities, meanwhile, kept the problem and solved it with less poetry. The Netherlands had already developed telescopic urinals that rise out of the pavement for the night and sink out of sight by day. London added them in 2002, and by 2014 more than 200 were in use across five European countries. In 2016 Amsterdam installed the first retractable urinal for women.

Paris tried a different form in 2018. The Uritrottoir, by the French studio Faltazi, is a red box topped with plants and filled with straw instead of water. The straw is collected about every three weeks and composted. Three went in during a spring trial, and a fourth on the Île Saint-Louis, where residents and business owners protested against an open urinal in full view of the river.

What it means now

The street urinals that did get built share Axixa’s starting point. They accept that people will relieve themselves outside, mostly at night, and design for that instead of against it. Where they differ is visibility. The Dutch units hide underground by day. The Uritrottoir is dressed as a planter. Axixa wanted to be seen, a permanent mark on the wall.

Paris showed why that is the hard part. A urinal can be hygienic, waterless and even compostable, and still fail on the question of who has to look at it. Most designs also still serve men first. Melgarejo’s stain was a joke with a real argument inside it, and the argument, that public sanitation is a design problem and not only a policing one, has aged better than the joke.

The original post, summarized

Our 2009 post introduced Axixa as a public urinal concept by Mexican designer Miguel Melgarejo, a ceramic wall fixture shaped like a urine stain and meant to keep city streets cleaner. It is summarized here rather than republished.

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