WHEN a student at Sarah Lawrence College, visits her father and stepmother at their loft in TriBeCa, she times her showers carefully. Her father, , and stepmother, , are architects who designed their windowless bathroom with a glass wall that allows them to see through the loft's triple-height living room to the garden out back.

Of course, the glass wall-which makes the interior of the bathroom visible from other parts of the loft-can make things difficult for guests. But Ms. Marpillero-Colomina has the consolation of knowing she is at architecture's cutting edge.

As attitudes toward privacy change, the American bathroom is shedding its old skin. Taking the place of the hidden-away box are translucent cubes dropped right in the middle of the action, their thin walls made of glass or new light-transmitting acrylics and resins.

In a society where store clerks chat about their social lives in front of customers and college students survive co-ed bathrooms, privacy just isn't the concern it used to be.

For a couple with two young sons,designed a loftlike apartment on the Upper West Side with a bathroom sheathed in translucent blue glass. The bathroom sits between the kitchen and the master bedroom and reveals vague silhouettes.

'It's not about sex and seduction; quite the opposite,' said, explaining that the new bathroom makes open-plan living more fluid. Other homeowners want to take walls down completely. Some have been inspired by boutique hotels with risqué rooms. The Clinton Hotel in Miami Beach, advertising its accommodations as 'intimate and sexy,' has clear glass panels separating bed from bath. In Reykjavik, Iceland, the trendy Hotel 101 has curtainless showers and toilets in frosted-glass booths.

To keep two windowless bathrooms in a Lower Manhattan loft from inducing a sense of claustrophobia, a principal at Desai/Chia Architecture in New York, gave them ash wood walls dotted with rows of portholes. Their acrylic panes are less than four inches across and thus not terribly risqué. But they do reveal movements in shadow.

What's new is allowing the tub to be visible from more than just the bedroom. One of the first modern architects to push that envelope was who in the 1970's sunk a clear Plexiglas tub into the floor of his Manhattan town house, allowing views through the tub from the entry area below to the skylight above. Mr. the one-time Yale architecture chairman and well-known provocateur, who died in 1997, was seeing how far he could push transparency in a domestic setting. His friend and business partner, Ernst Wagner, acknowledges that the tub was almost never used.

More recently, the New York architect designed a shower with a clear glass wall open to the living room in a TriBeCa apartment for the architect Daniel Libeskind; his wife, Nina; and their teenage daughter. The glass brings morning sunlight into the bathroom and permits views, while showering, of the Lower Manhattan skyline. There is a privacy shade if needed, Mr. Gorlin said.

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