100% found this document useful (1 vote)

2K views343 pages

Disability, Space, Architecture - A Reader

The document is an introduction to a book titled "Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader" that brings together writings exploring the intersections between disability, architecture, and urban design; it discusses how the book opens up understandings of dis/ability and refusal of normalization of particular body types in built spaces, and suggests thinking differently about dis/ability can enable innovative architectural and urban design.

Uploaded by

Cheryl Rengkung

We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.

Available Formats

Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

100% found this document useful (1 vote)

2K views343 pages

Disability, Space, Architecture - A Reader

Uploaded by

Cheryl Rengkung

We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.

Available Formats

Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

You are on page 1/ 343

DISABILITY, SPACE, ARCHITECTURE

Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader takes a groundbreaking approach to exploring the

interconnections between disability, architecture and cities. The contributions come from
architecture, geography, anthropology, health studies, English language and literature,
rhetoric and composition, art history, disability studies and disability arts and cover
personal, theoretical and innovative ideas and work.
Richer approaches to disability – beyond regulation and design guidance – remain
fragmented and difficult to find for architectural and built environment students, educators
and professionals. By bringing together in one place some seminal texts and projects, as well as
newly commissioned writings, readers can engage with disability in unexpected and exciting
ways that can vibrantly inform their understandings of architecture and urban design.
Most crucially, Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader opens up not just disability but also
ability – dis/ability – as a means of refusing the normalisation of only particular kinds of
bodies in the design of built space. It reveals how our everyday social attitudes and practices
about people, objects and spaces can be better understood through the lens of disability,
and it suggests how thinking differently about dis/ability can enable innovative and new
kinds of critical and creative architectural and urban design education and practice.

Jos Boys trained in architecture and has worked as a journalist, researcher, academic and
community-based practitioner. As a non-disabled person she is particularly interested in
how architects and other built environment professionals can act creatively and responsively
as designers and policy-makers without misrepresenting or marginalising disabled people.
Her previous book, Doing Disability Differently: An Alternative Handbook on Architecture,
Dis/ability and Designing for Everyday Life, grew out of a series of collaborations between
disabled artists and architects, through a group she co-founded called Architecture-Inside
Out. Previously Jos has written extensively about feminism and architecture. She was co-
founder of Matrix, a feminist architectural design and research practice, and has been a
member of the TakingPlace art and architecture collective.
‘This diverse collection of essays proposes creative and critical ways of engaging in
disability studies within the field of architecture. From rethinking technologies and
design practices to reframing dis/ability across the theoretical and historical discourses
of architecture, it challenges dominant assumptions about the embodied occupation
of designed environments. Instead of simply framing disability as a problem to be
solved by way of regulations and universal spatial solutions, embodied dis/abilities
are explored as opportunities rather than impediments to design thinking and socio-
spatial awareness.’
— Dr Hélène Frichot, KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), Sweden

‘Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader is a critical and thought provoking collection

of essays broadening the potential of dis/ability studies for designers, educators
and academics. Seeking to radically relocate disability front and center within
architectural discourse, the Reader positions disability as a transformative place to
design and educate from. For the built environment to become more responsive
and inclusive, we must not only acknowledge but also conceptualize differently
the relationship between heterogeneous bodies and space as far more complex and
intersectional, providing a trove of under examined spatial potential.’
— Lori A. Brown, Professor, School of Architecture, Syracuse University, USA
DISABILITY, SPACE,
ARCHITECTURE
A Reader

Edited by Jos Boys

First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 selection and editorial matter, Jos Boys; individual chapters,
the contributors
The right of Jos Boys to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Boys, Jos, editor.
Title: Disability, space, architecture : a reader / edited by Jos Boys.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2017. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016036334| ISBN 9781138676428 (hb : alk.
paper) | ISBN
9781138676435 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315560076 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Barrier-free design. | Architecture--Human
factors. |
Architecture and society. | City planning--Social aspects.
Classification: LCC NA2545.A1 D57 2017 | DDC 725/.53--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036334
ISBN: 978-1-138-67642-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-67643-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-56007-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by HWA Text and Data Management, London
Dedicated to Tobin Siebers, who is sorely missed
CONTENTS

List of figures x
List of contributors xiii
Acknowledgements xix
Figure credits xxi

Introduction 1
JOS BOYS

Part I
Histories/narratives 7

1 Disabling the flâneur 13

DAV I D S E RLI N ( 2 0 0 6 )

2 The body, disability and Le Corbusier’s conception of the radiant

environment 22
RO B I M RI E (1 9 9 9 )

3 A critical condition 33
PAU L H U N T ( 1 9 6 6 )

4 Lying down anyhow: disability and the rebel body 42

L I Z C RO W ( 20 1 3 )

5 Blinding the power of sight 48

RO D M I CH A LKO ( 2 0 1 5 )
viii Contents

Part II
Theory and criticism 51

6 Disability aesthetics 57
T O B I N S I E B ERS (2 0 0 6 )

7 The body as a problem of individuality: a phenomenological disability

studies approach 67
TA N YA T I T C HKO S KY AND RO D MI CHALKO (2012)

8 Designing collective access: a feminist disability theory of universal

design 78
A I M I H A M R AI E ( 2 0 1 3 )

9 More than access: overcoming limits in architectural and disability

discourse 88
J . K E N T F I T ZS I MO NS (2 0 1 6 )

10 From steep steps to retrofit to universal design, from collapse to

austerity: neo-liberal spaces of disability 102
JAY DO L M AGE (2 0 1 6 )

Part III
Education 115

11 Including architecture: what difference can we make? 121

S T E FA N W H I TE ( 2 0 1 6 )

12 Diagramming for a dis/ordinary architecture 135

JOS BOYS (2016)

13 Un/shared space: the dilemma of inclusive architecture 155

M A RGA RE T P RI CE ( 2 0 1 6 )

14 The collapsing lecture 173

A A RO N W I L L I AMS O N ( 2 0 1 0 ) .

Part IV
Technologies/materialities 183

15 Where does the person end and the technology begin? 189
P E T E R A N DERBERG ( 2 0 0 6 )
Contents ix

16 The prosthetic imagination: enabling and disabling the prosthesis trope 194
S . L O CH L A NN JAI N (1 9 9 9 )

17 Electric moms and quad drivers: people with disabilities buying,

making, and using technology in postwar America 198
B E SS W I L L I A MS O N ( 2 0 1 2 )

18 Pissing without pity: disability, gender and the public toilet 213
DAV I D S E RLI N ( 2 0 1 0 )

19 Disability and the promises of technology: technology, subjectivity

and embodiment within an order of the normal 227
I N GU N N M O S ER (2 0 0 6 )

Part V
Projects and practices 235

20 Deaf Space 241

T O DD B Y RD (2 0 0 7 )

21 Along disabled lines: claiming spatial agency through installation art 247
A M A N DA C ACHI A ( 2 0 1 6 )

22 The Ramp House: building inclusivity 261

T H E A M C M ILLAN WI TH KATI E LLO YD THO M AS (2016)

23 Resistant Sitting 272

S O PH I E H A NDLER (2 0 0 8 )

24 Notes on an inclined plane – Slope : Intercept 278

S A R A H E N D REN (2 0 1 6 )

References 287
Index 310
FIGURES

1.1 Helen Keller (left) and her companion, Polly Thomson, window-shopping
on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, Paris. Originally published in Le Soir
(Paris), 31 January 1937 14
1.2 Disabled veterans of the First World War demonstrating for increased
pensions and benefits on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, Paris. Photograph
taken ca. December 1934 16
2.1 Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation, Marseille, completed in 1952 29
2.2 Contemporary photo of workers’ housing at Pessac, built 1925: showing an
example of how Le Corbusier’s standardised design has been altered 30
4.1 Liz Crow (2012–13) Bedding Out, a live durational performance 47
6.1 Paul McCarthy 1977, Hollywood Halloween, performance, Los Angeles, CA 61
6.2 Paul McCarthy, 1973, Plaster Your Head and One Arm into a Wall, performance,
Pasadena, CA 63
6.3 Judith Scott, Untitled, 1989. 30 × 11 × 6 inches. Collection de l’Art Brut 64
6.4 Judith Scott in action 1999. Oakland Studio, Creative Growth Center 65
9.1 View of a path through Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,
Stelenfeld, Berlin, Germany 90
9.2 View across Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Stelenfeld, Berlin,
Germany 94
9.3 SANAA (2010) Plan of Rolex Learning Center, Lausanne, Switzerland 96
9.4 Interior views of Rolex Learning Center showing constantly changing slopes 99
10.1 Stairs at Brunel University, UK 107
10.2 Ed Roberts Campus Ramp 110
11.1 Summary table of correlation between kinds of knowledge, models of
difference and WHO Age-friendly City and Communities guidance 126
11.2 Adaptation of Robin Evans’s 10 relationships of projection from
“Projection and its analogues: The Arrested Image” in Evans, R. (1995)
The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries. MIT Press p367 128
List of ﬁgures xi

11.3 Diagram of relationship between architectural discipline and society 130

11.4 MSA projects inclusive urban design method from presentation to the
Belgian Ageing Studies programme, 2010 131
11.5 The Pankettes Choir, 2012 132
11.6 Old Moat: Age-friendly action plan detail, 2012 133
11.7 Old Moat: Age-friendly action plan workshop, 2012 133
12.1 Examples of diagramming development process and effects on design 138
12.2 ‘Cripping the Grid - 1’, Generating architectural proportions based on a
wheelchair user 142
12.3 ‘Cripping the Grid - 2’, Absurdist attempt to generate architectural form
from the movements of a wheelchair user 143
12.4 UN Studio (1999) ‘Program and Movement’ diagram for Arhem Station,
Netherlands 146
12.5 ‘Having a Body’: table outlining some of the characteristics of everyday
materials and spatial embodiments 149
12.6 Adapted diagram for Arhem Station, as example of mapping differential
perceptions and experiences of space 150
12.7 Thomas Carpentier (2011) The Measure(s) of Man: graduation design
project from the Ecole Speciale d’Architecture, Paris 152
12.8 Thomas Carpentier (2011) Re-interpretation of the Modulor by
Le Corbusier 154
13.1 Accessible entrance sign on a university campus 155
13.2 Accessible entrance sign on a university campus, showing inaccessibility 158
13.3 Front entrance to university campus building 159
14.1 Aaron Williamson (2011) ‘Flannel’ ‘Parlour Principia’ performance
evening, Swedenborg House, London, May 13 (duration 1 hour) 174
14.2 Aaron Williamson (2015) Demonstrating the World. Performances at
Rainham Sheds and Experimentica Festival, Chapter, Cardiff 181
17.1 Faucet turners in “Homemaking,” Toomey J Gazette 1968, 18 206
17.2 “Mouthsticks,” Toomey J. Gazette Spring 1960, 8 207
17.3 Para-Car, in “Equipment,” Toomey J Gazette, 1968, 54 210
18.1 Contemporary (ca. 2010) photograph of wall-size display map for
multi-user public restrooms, Kyoto, Japan 216
18.2 Contemporary (ca. 2010) photograph of the interior of single-user
accessible toilet stall, Hamburg, Germany 219
18.3 Bathroom queue for ladies and disabled, London Chelsea Flower Show,
May 2004 222
18.4 Contemporary (ca. 2015) photograph of signage for a single-user
“All Gender” toilet at San Diego International Airport, USA 224
20.1 Examples from the DeafSpace Design Guidelines 246
21.1 Corban Walker (1997) Trapezoid, Ridinghouse Editions, London, March
6th – April 19th (catalogue) 250
21.2 Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, c. 1487, pen and ink with wash over
metal point on paper 252
21.3 Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, 1887–1965) Le Modular 1945 253
xii List of ﬁgures

21.4 Wendy Jacob (2007) Between Spaces, Wolk Gallery and Rotch Library, MIT,
September 20, 2007 255
21.5 Wendy Jacob (2005) Line, Cambridge, Performance at 21 Bowdoin St,
Cambridge, Massachusetts 256
21.6 Wendy Jacob with Stefano Micali (2009) Explorer’s Club, Boston, MA 257
21.7 John D. Schiff (1907–1976). Installation View of Exhibition ‘First Papers
of Surrealism’ Showing String Installation. 1942. Gelatin silver print.
7 5/8 × 10 inches (19.4 × 25.4cm) 258
22.1 Greta with one of the development models for the Ramp House 263
22.2 Development model with comments inscribed on the surfaces 264
22.3 Chambers McMillan Architects (2011). Interior view, Ramp House,
Portobello, Edinburgh 2011 270
23.1 Cushioned Bollard: technical drawing. Ageing Facilities: diagram from
Resistant Sitting: The Pensioner’s Alternative Street Furniture Guide 276
23.2 Cushioned Bollard; completed project 277
24.1 Claude and Naad Parent with guests, in their Neuilly house, 1973 281
24.2 Sara Hendren; suite of objects for ramp design 282
24.3 Ramps configured for skateboarding 283
24.4 Ramp configured for single-step entrances 284
24.5 Homepage, www.slopeintercept.org 285
CONTRIBUTORS

Peter Anderberg graduated from Lund University, Sweden, and then undertook his PhD
in Rehabilitation Engineering at the Center for Rehabilitation Technology (CERTEC),
part of the Department of Design Sciences, Faculty of Engineering at Lund. His doctoral
research – exploring the impact of the internet on people with significant mobility/
physical impairments – brings together a theoretical background in disability studies and
a critical engagement in the social model of disability, the independent living movement,
and rehabilitation engineering and design processes. Peter is currently senior lecturer
at Blekinge Institute of Technology Karlskrona, Sweden, with responsibility for applied
health technology studies.

Todd Byrd serves as lead writer and editor at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC,
USA, which provides higher education for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. His role
supports research and international affairs, and ensures that the written output of the
university’s Research Support and International Affairs (RSIA) unit and its programme
specialists is timely, clear and effective. He supervises staff and students who are involved
in the unit’s writing for websites or print publications for campus or external readership,
and provides editing assistance to scientific personnel who are writing research grant
xiv List of contributors

proposals. He was previously a contributor to the university’s newspaper, and involved in

its DeafSpace project.

Amanda Cachia is an independent curator from Sydney, Australia, and is currently

completing her PhD in Art History, Theory and Criticism at the University of California,
San Diego, focusing on the intersection of disability and contemporary art. She is the 2014
recipient of the Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars in Disability Studies, issued
by the Society for Disability Studies (SDS). Amanda held the position director/curator
of the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, from 2007 to 2010, and has
curated approximately forty exhibitions over the last ten years in various cities across the
USA, England, Australia and Canada. She serves on the College Art Association’s (CAA)
Committee on Diversity Practices (2014–2017).

Liz Crow is an artist-activist, based in Bristol, UK, who works with performance, film,
audio and text. Interested in drama, life stories and experimental work, she is drawn to the
potential of storytelling to trigger change. Liz’s work has shown at Tate Modern and the
Smithsonian Institution, as well as on television and at festivals internationally. Through
a four-year National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA)
fellowship, she explored ways to combine her creative practice and political activism. Liz
is a graduate of the Skillset Guiding Lights scheme where she was mentored by Peter
Cattaneo (The Full Monty), an Associate of the Centre for Cultural Disability Studies at
Liverpool Hope University, UK, and is currently a doctoral candidate on a practice-led
PhD at the University of the West of England.

Jay Dolmage is an associate professor of English at the University of Waterloo in Ontario,

Canada. He is the founding editor of the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies. His book,
Disability Rhetoric, was published in 2014 by Syracuse University Press and won a PROSE
award from the American Publishers Association. His essays on rhetoric, writing and
disability studies have appeared in several journals and edited collections, including
Cultural Critique, Disability Studies Quarterly and Rhetoric Review. Jay grew up in the disability
rights movement in Canada and remains committed to promoting greater access within
higher education and across society.

J. Kent Fitzsimons is an architect, associate professor at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure

d’Architecture et de Paysage de Bordeaux, France, and director of the PAVE research laboratory
(Profession Architecture Ville Environnement). He teaches architectural design, architecture
theory and research seminars. His architectural research considers the relationship between
social phenomena and the notions of lived experience deployed in architectural design, with
a focus on body-based issues such as life phases, gender and impairment. At the urban scale,
he is interested in spatial practices and their representation in public policy, with particular
attention to mobility and urban form.

Aimi Hamraie is assistant professor of medicine, health and society at Vanderbilt

University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. They are a feminist historian and epistemologist
List of contributors xv

whose work focuses on the intersections of disability, design and technoscience. Aimi’s
essays on universal design, disability history and the politics of access appear or are in
press in Disability Studies Quarterly, Hypatia, Foucault Studies and Age Culture Humanities.
Their forthcoming book, entitled Building Access: Disability, Universal Design, and the Politics
of Knowing-Making (2017), focuses on the history of universal design in the US and argues
that the concept and practice of universal design took shape as an epistemological and
material intervention.

Sophie Handler is a research–practitioner, currently based in Manchester, UK. She

works at the intersection of urban theory, social policy and creative practice. She has
spent the last ten years exploring the spatial politics of ageing through participative urban
interventions, creative writing, research and policy development. She is author of The
Fluid Pavement (2007) (a large print psychogeographic novel on ageing), an Alternative Age-
friendly Handbook (for the socially engaged practitioner) (2014) and is chair of the Royal Institute
of British Architects (RIBA) working group on Research and Ageing. Her practice-based
work operates under the platform Ageing Facilities.

Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher and professor based in Cambridge,

Massachusetts, USA. She makes material and digital artworks, writes and lectures on
adaptive and assistive technologies, prosthetics, inclusive design, accessible architecture
and related ideas. Her work has been exhibited in the US and abroad and is held in the
permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and her writing and design
work have appeared in the Boston Globe, The Atlantic Tech, FastCo Design and on National
Public Radio (US), among others. She teaches socially engaged design practices, adaptive
+ assistive technologies, and disability studies for engineers-in-training in her role as
assistant professor at Olin College. She writes and edits the Abler website.

Paul Hunt was an extremely influential British disability activist, renowned as co-founder
with Vic Finkelstein of the Union of the Physically Impaired against Segregation (UPIAS)
when he wrote a letter to The Guardian in 1972 inviting disabled people to join in campaigning
against discrimination. UPIAS was the first organisation to reject ‘compensatory’ and
tragic or medical approaches to disability. As an alternative, UPIAS developed attention to
the social and structural barriers that oppress people with impairments, rendering them
‘disabled’, what is now usually called the social model of disability. The group developed
a Fundamental Principles of Disability manifesto, as well as being important in the
Independent Living Movement and other campaigns for disability rights.

Rob Imrie is visiting professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths,

University of London, UK, and director of an European Research Council (ERC) project
on universal design. His research is focused on disability, design and embodiment with
an interest in exploring the shaping of design through the intersections of the sensual
nature of body–environment interactions. With a background in geography, sociology and
planning studies, Rob has written extensively on disability and the built environment.
xvi List of contributors

S. Lochlann Jain is an associate professor in the Anthropology Department at Stanford

University, USA, and is an expert in medical and legal anthropology. Her most recent book,
Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (2013), reads across a range of material to explain how a
national culture that simultaneously aims to deny, profit from and cure cancer entraps us in
a state of paradox – one that makes the world of cancer virtually impossible to navigate for
doctors, patients, caretakers and policy-makers alike. The book has won numerous prizes.
Lochlann is currently researching urban planning and transportation and experimental
methods in anthropology.

Katie Lloyd Thomas is a senior lecturer in architecture at Newcastle University, UK,

where she co-directs ARC, the Architecture Research Collaborative, and is an editor of
the international journal arq. Her research is concerned with materiality in architecture
and with feminist practice and theory, with a particular interest in how technologies and
building have the capacity to transform relations, as explored in ‘Between the Womb and
the World: Building Matrixial Relations in the NICU’ in Architectural Relational Ecologies,
edited by Peg Rawes (Routledge, 2013). Katie edited Material Matters (2007) and with Tilo
Amhoff and Nick Beech, Industries of Architecture (2015).

Thea McMillan is design director at Chambers McMillan Architects based in Edinburgh,

Scotland. Their Ramp House won the 2013 Chairman’s Award for Architecture, Scottish
Design Awards amongst others. It was exhibited at The Lighthouse, Glasgow, and has
been extensively published in the architectural press. Thea co-led first year architecture
at the University of Edinburgh for seven years, and was co-chair for the consultation
and engagement group at Edinburgh’s new Royal Hospital for Sick Children, where she
instigated a programme of architectural engagement workshops with children hospital
users and their siblings and advised on design. Her aims are to make architecture accessible
to all through communication and engagement.

Rod Michalko recently retired from teaching sociology and disability studies at the
University of Toronto, Canada. He is author of numerous articles and books, including a
co-edited book with Dr Tanya Titchkosky titled, Rethinking Normalcy (2009). Almost all of
Rod’s work originates in his blindness and is explored at the intersections of narrative and
disability theory. He is author of The Mystery of the Eye and the Shadow of Blindness (1998),
The Two-in One: Walking with Smokie, Walking with Blindness (1999) and The Difference that
Disability Makes (2002).

Ingunn Moser is professor and principal at VID Specialized University, Oslo, Norway. She
has published extensively on disability, subjectivity and embodiment in relation to new
technologies and material environments. Her more recent research deals with elderly care
and dementia care in particular, and also in relation to new technologies and other material
conditions and built environments.

Margaret Price is an associate professor of rhetoric/composition and disability studies at The

Ohio State University, Columbus. Her book, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and
List of contributors xvii

Academic Life (2011), won the Outstanding Book Award from the Conference on College
Composition and Communication. She is a member of the Black Disability Studies
Coalition and coordinator of the website Composing Access (http://composingaccess.net).
She is now at work on a book titled, Crip Spacetime.

David Serlin is associate professor of communication and science studies at the University
of California, San Diego, USA. His books include Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in
Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2004), Imagining Illness: Public Health and
Visual Culture (editor; 2010), Keywords for Disability Studies (co-editor; 2015) and Window
Shopping with Helen Keller: Architecture and Disability in Modern Culture (forthcoming).
He is a member of the editorial collective for the Radical History Review, an editor-at-
large for Cabinet, and a founding editor of the online journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory,
Technoscience.

Tobin Siebers was professor of English language and literature, and art and design at the
University of Michigan, USA, and also co-chair of the University of Michigan’s Initiative
on Disability Studies. He was author of two seminal volumes, Disability Aesthetics (2010)
and Disability Theory (2008), as well as a wide range of other papers in disability studies.

Tanya Titchkosky is a professor at the University of Toronto, in the Department of Social

Justice Education. Making use of her lived experience of dyslexia and her commitment
to interpretive sociology, Tanya’s work examines how the meaning of disability is
made in relation to the built environment, knowledge production and other forms of
interaction and cultural production. She is author of three books: The Question of Access:
Disability, Space, Meaning (2011); Reading and Writing Disability Differently: The Textured Life
of Embodiment (2007); and Disability, Self and Society (2003). With Rod Michalko, she has
co-edited Rethinking Normalcy: A Disability Studies Reader (2009).

Stefan White is a Senior Enterprise Fellow at the Manchester School of Architecture

(MSA), Manchester, UK. He directs the centre for Spatial Inclusion Design-research
(cSIDr) alongside the post-graduate MSA Projects atelier (MSAp). An architect with a
specialism in social and environmental sustainability, his research and practice explore the
ethics of design.

Aaron Williamson is an artist whose interdisciplinary engagement with performance, objects,

place and space is inspired by his experience of becoming deaf and by a politicised, yet
humorous sensibility towards disability. During the last twenty years he has created over 300
performances, interventions, videos, installations and publications, for galleries, museums
and festivals. A monograph, Aaron Williamson – Performance, Video, Collaboration, was published
by the Live Art Development Agency in 2007. His awards include: the Helen Chadwick
Fellowship at the British School at Rome; Artist Links, British Council, China; Three-Year
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Fellowship, Birmingham Institute of Art
and Design, University of Central England (UCE); Adam Reynolds Memorial Bursary;
Acme Studios Stephen Cripps Award; in addition to project funding through Arts Council
xviii List of contributors

England, the British Council, Henry Moore Foundation and Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.
Williamson holds a DPhil in critical theory from the University of Sussex (1997).

Bess Williamson is assistant professor, art history, theory and criticism at the School of Art
Institute of Chicago, USA. She is a historian of design and material culture, focusing on
social and political concerns in design, including environmental, labour, justice and rights
issues as they shape and are shaped by spaces and things. Her current book project, Designing
an Accessible America, traces the history of design responses to disability rights from 1945
to recent times. Her writing has appeared in Winterthur Portfolio and American Studies, with
reviews in Design and Culture and Design Issues.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editor and publisher gratefully acknowledge the following for permission to reproduce
written material in this book.
David Serlin (2006) Excerpt from ‘Disabling the Flâneur’, Journal of Visual Culture 5: 2,
193–202, 206. Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications.
Rob Imrie (1999) Excerpt from ‘The Body, Disability and Le Corbusier’s Conception
of the Radiant Environment’, in Butler, R. and Parr, H. (eds) Mind and Body Spaces:
Geographies of Disability, Illness and Impairment, London and New York: Routledge, pp 25–
45. Reprinted by permission of Routledge.
Paul Hunt (1966) ‘A Critical Condition’, originally published in Hunt, P. (ed.) Stigma:
The Experience of Disability, London: Geoffrey Chapman, pp 1–10. Reprinted by permission
of Judy Hunt and The Disability Archive UK, University of Leeds Centre for Disability
Studies. Available for free download at http://disability-studies.leeds.ac.uk/files/library/
Hunt-critical-condition.pdf.
Liz Crow (2013) ‘Lying down Anyhow: Disability and the Rebel Body’, in Swain, J.,
French, S., Barnes, C. and Thomas, C. (eds) Disabling Barriers – Enabling Environments, 3rd
edition, London: Sage. Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications.
Rod Michalko (2015) Originally presented in draft at the Canadian Association of
Cultural Studies conference at McGill University in Montreal, 2011. By permission of
the author.
Tobin Siebers (2006) ‘Disability Aesthetics’, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory
(JCRT) 7: 2, Spring/Summer, 63–72. Reprinted by permission of Jill Siebers.
Tanya Titchkosky and Rod Michalko (2012) ‘The Body as a Problem of Individuality:
A Phenomenological Disability Studies Approach’, in Goodley, D., Hughes, B. and Davis,
L. (eds) Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan. Reprinted by permission from Palgrave Macmillan.
Aimi Hamraie (2013) Excerpt from ‘Designing Collective Access: A Feminist Disability
Theory of Universal Design’. Reprinted from Disability Studies Quarterly (DSQ) 33: 4
(online). Open Access Journal available for free download from http://dsq-sds.org/article/
view/3871/3411. Reprinted by permission from the author.
xx Acknowledgements

J. Kent Fitzsimons (2016) ‘More than Access: Overcoming Limits in Architectural and
Disability Discourse’. This chapter was developed from an unpublished paper delivered
at the Disability and Public Space conference in Oslo, Norway, in April 2011. A slightly
different version of the discussion of Peter Eisenman’s Memorial may be found in J. Kent
Fitzsimons, ‘Seeing Motion Otherwise: Architectural Design and the Differently Sensing
and Mobile’, Space and Culture 15: 3, August 2012. Printed by permission of the author.
Aaron Williamson (2010) ‘The Collapsing Lecture’, in Butt, G. (ed.) Performing/Knowing,
Birmingham: ARTicle Press. Printed by permission of the author and ARTicle Press.
Jay Dolmage (2016) ‘From Steep Steps to Retrofit to Universal Design, From Collapse
to Austerity: Neo-Liberal Spaces of Disability’. This chapter was developed from a 2012
conference presentation for the Society of Disability Studies (SDS). Earlier work towards
it is published in Dolmage, J. (2008) ‘Inviting Disability in the Front Door’, in Tassoni, J.
and Reichert-Powell, D. (eds) Composing Other Spaces, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, pp
121–144. Printed by permission of the author.
Peter Anderberg (2006) ‘Where Does the Person End and the Technology Begin?’
Excerpt from doctoral thesis, ‘FACE: Disabled People, Technology and the Internet’,
Center for Rehabilitation Technology (CERTEC), Division of Rehabilitation Engineering
Research, Department of Design Services, Lund University. Available for free download
at: http://www.arkiv.certec.lth.se/doc/face/Anderberg_Peter_FACE-doctoral_thesis.pdf.
Reprinted by permission from the author.
S. Lochlann Jain (1999) Excerpt from ‘The Prosthetic Imagination: Enabling and
Disabling the Prosthetic Trope’, Science, Technology and Human Values, Winter 24: 1, 31–33,
38–40. Reprinted by permission from Sage Publications.
Bess Williamson (2012) ‘Electric Moms and Quad Drivers: People with Disabilities
Buying, Making, and Using Technology in Postwar America’, American Studies 52: 1, 5–29.
Reprinted by permission from American Studies Journal.
David Serlin (2010) ‘Pissing without Pity: Disability, Gender, and the Public Toilet’,
in Molotch, H. and Norén, L. (eds) Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, New
York: New York University Press, pp 167–185. Reprinted by permission of New York
University Press.
Ingunn Moser (2006) ‘Disability and the Promises of Technology: Technology,
Subjectivity and Embodiment within an Order of the Normal’, Information, Communication
& Society, 9: 3, 373–395. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis.
Todd Byrd (2007) ‘Deaf Space’ in Gallaudet Today: the Magazine, Spring. Reprinted
by permission of Gallaudet University. Also available for free download from: http://
www.gallaudet.edu/university_communications/gallaudet_today_magazine/deaf_space_
spring_2007.html.
Amanda Cachia (2016) ‘Along Disabled Lines. Claiming spatial agency through
installation.’ Some of this content appears in ‘The Alterpodium: A Performative Design
and Disability Intervention’ in Design and Culture: Journal of the Design Studies Forum, Vol. 8,
No. 3, Routledge/Taylor & Francis.
Sophie Handler (2008) ‘Public Seating’. ‘Resistant Sitting: The Pensioner’s Alternative
Street Furniture Guide’ Project Report, London: RIBA/Ice McAslan Bursary. Reprinted by
permission of the author.
FIGURE CREDITS

Chapter 1
Figures 1.1 and 1.2: From the collection of David Serlin.

Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 and 2.2: Photographs by Colin Bisset.

Chapter 4
Figure 4.1: © Matthew Fessey/Roaring Girl Productions. By permission of Liz Crow.

Chapter 6
Figures 6.1 and 6.2: © Paul McCarthy. Courtesy Paul McCarthy and Hauser & Wirth.
Figures 6.3 and 6.4: Leon A. Borensztein. With thanks to the CGAC.

Chapter 9
Figure 9.1: Photograph by Stephan Czuratis (Jazz-face), Creative Commons https://
commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1288384.
Figure 9.2: Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net). Creative Commons https://
commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32824026.
Figures 9.3 and 9.4: Drawing and photographs reprinted by permission of SANAA.
xxii Figure credits

Chapter 10
Figure 10.1: Photograph by Ken MacLeod.
Figure 10.2: Photograph by Will Henderson-Nold. Reprinted by permission of Ed Roberts
Campus.

Chapter 11
Figures 11.1, 11.2, 11.3 and 11.7: Table, drawing and diagrams by Stefan White.
Figure 11.5: Collage by Kat Timmins, Manchester School of Architecture.
Figures 11.6 and 11.7: Diagrams and photograph by Stefan White.

Chapter 12
Figures 12.2 and 12.3: Sketches by Thomas Carpentier.
Figure 12.4: Diagram reprinted by permission of UN Studio.
Figures 12.5 and 12.6: Table and sketch by Jos Boys.
Figures 12.7 and 12.8: Architectural drawings by Thomas Carpentier. Figure 12.8 reprinted
with permission of Fondation Le Corbusier.

Chapter 13
Figures 13.1, 13.2 and 13.3: Photographs by Margaret Price.

Chapter 14
Figure 14.1: By permission of Aaron Williamson.
Figure 14.2 (top): Photograph by Manuel Vanson. Reprinted by permission of Aaron
Williamson.
Figure 14.2 (bottom): Photograph by Warren Orchard. Reprinted by permission of Aaron
Williamson.

Chapter 17
Figures 17.1, 17.2 and 17.3: Re-printed by permission of Post-Polio Health International.

Chapter 18
Figures 18.1 and 18.2: Photographs licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Figures 18.3 and 18.4: Photographs by David Serlin.
Figure credits xxiii

Chapter 20
Figure 20.1: Reprinted by permission of Hansel Bauman.

Chapter 21
Figure 21.1: Photographs by courtesy of Corban Walker.
Figure 21.2: From the Collection of Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.
Figure 21.3: © ARS, NY. Photographic credit: Banque d’Images, ADAGP / Art Resource,
New York.
Figures 21.4, 21.5 and 21.6: Photographs by courtesy of Wendy Jacob.
Figure 21.7: Gift of Jacqueline, Paul and Peter Matisse in memory of their mother
Alexina Duchamp. 13-1972-9(303) Philadelphia Museum of Art. Marcel Duchamp:
© Succession Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York 2016. Photographic Credit: The Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, New
York.

Chapter 22
Figures 22.1 and 22.2: Photographs by Thea McMillan.
Figure 22.3: Photograph by David Barbour.

Chapter 23
Figures 23.1 and 23.2: Photographs by Verity-Jane Keefe.

Chapter 24
Figure 24.1: Reprinted by permission from Ehrmann Estate and with thanks to Chloe
Parent. © DACS 2016.
Figures 24.2, 24.3, 24.4: Photographs by Justin Knight.
INTRODUCTION

Jos Boys

Disability sits in a peculiar position within architecture and urban design. Whilst readers
and anthologies already exist that explore architecture and other identities of difference
– such as gender (Matrix 1984, Weisman 1994, Massey 1994, Agrest et al. 1996, Hughes
1998, Borden et al. 1999), sexuality (Colomina 1992, Sanders 1996, Betsky 1997) and race
(Lokko 2000, Barton 2001, Wilkins 2007) – disability as a concept, and disabled people as a
constituency, continue to be assumed as completely separate from social or cultural politics.
Within the discipline of architecture disability remains predominantly framed by design
guidance and building regulations on the one hand, and by a ‘common sense’ language of
accessibility and inclusive/universal design on the other. Neither of these approaches is
wrong. What is extraordinary is that both because of and despite these existing framings,
disability has somehow remained consistently stuck in a non-historical, atheoretical and –
most crucially – seriously underexplored category in relationship to building design practices.
It is invisible in both avant-garde and mainstream architectural theories and discourses,
just as it is a persistent absence in critical and cultural theory more generally (Davis 2002,
Davidson 2008). Perhaps this illustrates just how deeply disability remains widely avoided,
compared to other disadvantaged identities. Unlike gender, race or sexuality then – and
the feminist, post-colonial and queer studies which underpin associated scholarship and
debate – it seems that we assume ‘disability’ to be unable to bring any kind of criticality or
creativity to the discipline of architecture.
This Reader, then, is long overdue. It aims to break new ground by refusing to think of
disability as an obvious and straightforward category – as mostly a design problem demanding
a design solution. Rather, the many different contributors to this book understand disability
and ability as ambiguous and relational; as shaped as much by everyday social and spatial
practices as by specific impairments; and as a potentially powerful means to critically and
creatively investigate, speculate about, and generate designs for built space. In fact, a big
claim underpins these texts across their diverse perspectives and approaches – a belief that
starting from disability can open up innovative and unexpected understandings across the
2 Jos Boys

whole range of architectural education and practices; its histories and theories; its attitudes
towards, and deployment of, technologies; and in its design processes and practices.

What can architecture learn from disability?

To begin to do this, Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader introduces students, educators
and practitioners of architecture, planning and other built environment disciplines to some
important emerging work that tries to think differently about disability and ability – dis/
ability – and built space. In fact a rich seam of theoretical and critical thought already exists,
but seems to have had almost no impact on architectural and related discourses, a huge gap
for the subject. Through the developing field of disability studies, disability arts practice
and disability activism, there are now many scholars, artists and advocates examining
how disability intersects with social, spatial and material practices. Many of these studies
and projects have a direct relevance to architecture. Most immediately this is because
recent design thinking has increasingly re-centred the body. There has been a renewed
interest in theories such as phenomenology, materialism, post-humanism and Deleuzian
philosophy that help us to think harder about embodied experiences and what these mean
for the design of built space. In moving away from modernist architecture and its dreams
of a universal user (see Imrie this volume) there has been much concern with how to
articulate bodies-in-space in a more sensual, dynamic and non-deterministic manner.
Here, disability studies is both critiquing assumptions about what kinds of bodies matter in
contemporary theories and commentaries, and opening up innovative kinds of critical and
creative investigation of dis/ability as an embodied experience (Boys 2014, see also Serlin,
Chapter 1, this volume). This is a wide-ranging engagement, intersecting with many of
the theoretical frameworks currently influencing architectural thinking, as well as offering
new insights into how social, spatial and material practices operate between and across
dis/ability, race, sexuality, gender and class (see, in particular, Titchkosky and Michalko,
Hamraie, White, and Serlin (Chapter 18), this volume). In addition, with contemporary
shifts towards bio-mimicry, intelligent building and augmented reality in architecture,
understanding the shifting inter-relationships between bodies and technologies are also
becoming central. Here too, critiques and engagements with dis/ability can open up new
ways of thinking (see Jain, Bess Williamson, Moser, and Serlin (Chapter 18), this volume).
Architecture and urban design can also learn by thinking differently about dis/ability
through acknowledging, and engaging with, the considerable expertise of disabled people – as
scholars, activists and as especially experienced users of built space. As Tobin Siebers puts it:

disabled people have to be ingenious to live in societies that are by their design
inaccessible and by their inclination prejudiced against disability. It requires a great
deal of artfulness and creativity to figure out how to make it through the day when
you are disabled, given the condition of our society.
(From interview with Mike Levin, 2010 online)

Rather than, as too often happens, disabled people being treated as passive users of
buildings and services, we need to realize that starting from the many diverse perspectives
Introduction 3

and experiences of disability and impairment offers something powerful back to architects
and other built environment professionals. Taking notice of the narratives of disabled people
themselves (see for example, Hunt, Crow, Michalko, Aaron Williamson, Anderberg, and
Byrd this volume) offers new and creative ways of articulating how built space works from
the perspective of ‘unruly bodies’ (Mintz 2007) and ‘misfits’ (Garland-Thompson 2011)
rather than assumed normal and unnoticed forms of embodiment.
This is not only in terms of working towards more inclusive design improvements, but
also about revealing architecture’s deepest assumptions about what is valued and noticed,
and what is marginalized and forgotten, in the processes of design. There are now many
writers and artists specifically exploring inter-relationships between dis/ability, space and
aesthetics in ways that connect very directly into debates and projects currently going on
within architecture and other built environment disciplines (see Siebers, Dolmage, Price,
and Cachia this volume). Some of this work is coming out of architectural education
and practice itself, as well as from associated design fields. There is clearly an emerging
interest in going beyond the reductivist logic of design guidance and building regulation,
providing some productive explorations of what can happen when you start explicitly
from differently abled bodies in built space (see Fitzsimons, White, Boys, McMillan and
Lloyd Thomas, Handler, and Hendren this volume).

About this anthology

The contributors to Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader come from a wide range of
disciplines including architecture, geography, anthropology, health studies, English
language and literature, rhetoric and composition, art history, disability studies and
disability arts and performance. They produce work in diverse ways, from the personal to
the theoretical, offering a range of perspectives and attitudes, which this anthology hopes
to reflect in its overall selection of pieces. This has not aimed to be comprehensive, but
instead to capture the flavours of an emerging set of intersections between and across
disability, space and architecture.
The most immediate aim has been to bring together in one place some important and
relevant texts and projects about dis/ability and built space, as well as expanding the field by
commissioning new writing. Disability studies is an increasingly strong area of study, but
one that remains fragmented and under-recognized, with its scholars spread worldwide
and across many different university departments. Disabled artists who make creative work
exploring aspects of dis/ability – like people interested in disability within architecture –
are also often invisible or marginalized within these disciplines. The uneven global spread
of scholars, artists and activists is equally expressed in where the reprinted pieces were
originally published, often in non-mainstream or unexpected journals and publications.
Nonetheless, there is clearly an expanding body of innovative and engaging work going
on, which I hope will be as appealing and enlightening to you, the reader, as it was for me
when I first discovered it. There are also, without a doubt, many important examples left
out; and hopefully many more to be written and created. Some seminal publications are
also listed in the ‘recommended reading’ section at the end of this introduction, to enable
readers to place the pieces here in their broader context.
4 Jos Boys

Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader is divided into five parts – histories/narratives,

theory and criticism, education, technologies/materialities and projects and practices.
This is partly to demonstrate the considerable potential of dis/ability in asking interesting
questions across the whole discipline of architecture; and partly to make it easier for readers
to engage with preferred areas of interest. However, many of the pieces also ‘cross-over’ in
their concerns, so these divisions can also be ignored, if preferred.

1 Histories/narratives aims to open up new spaces in architectural history, theory

and design by introducing a number of both interpretative and personal disability
histories. In a variety of ways these each critically engage with both assumptions of
what constitutes a ‘normal’ body and what it means to start from disabled perspectives
and experiences of impairment.
2 Theory and criticism explores some approaches that enable disability, space and
architecture to be thought about together in innovative and challenging ways. It
illustrates some of the kinds of critical and creative critiques that starting from dis/
ability can offer to architectural and design theory and criticism.
3 Education offers examples of where rethinking dis/ability beyond design guidance
and building regulations has the potential to generate alternative ways of teaching
architectural design and of imagining different kinds of built space.
4 Technologies/materialities explores the critical and creative disruptions enabled by
starting from dis/ability when thinking about augmented bodies and smart spaces and
materials. Rather than be seduced by ‘cyborg’ technologies, the selected pieces reveal
the more complex and nuanced understandings that come from both investigating the
more ‘debased’ technologies usually associated with disabled people, and by taking
notice of disabled perspectives on living with prosthetics.
5 Projects and practices brings together examples of work that illustrate some of the
vibrant new projects being undertaken at the creative intersections between dis/ability
and built spaces.

One final note. Most of the writers and practitioners here follow one of the central tenets
of disability studies – research and practice must be more than an academic endeavour: it
must also aim to improve the position of disabled people in society. Whilst architecture
as it is taught and practised also has a strong underlying social commitment, this usually
remains too vague and generalized to have any recognizable mainstream impact. This is
particularly true of dis/ability that – as I noted at the beginning of this introduction –
remains under-theorized and under-developed, across both mainstream and radical and
community-based architecture. This concern for real change and improvement is also
an aim of Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader. By enabling easy access to a previously
unknown or ignored body of work, the ultimate intention is to open up debate, and to
generate new kinds of conversations, attitudes and approaches. By offering productive and
interesting ways of engaging with dis/ability, all the contributors to this anthology hope
to increasingly make it a normal part of architectural discourse and practices, rather than
something to be avoided, feel awkward about, or ‘contain’ within the category inclusive
design, or a merely regulatory demand. Longer term, the intended impact on the discipline
Introduction 5

is not only about making more accessible places (although this remains essential), but also
about rethinking the very shape of architecture itself – finding ways to shift attitudes and
approaches to disability and ability, and expanding explorations of what the critical and
creative implications of this might be for architectural education, scholarship and practice.

David Serlin (2006)

Excerpt reprinted from Journal of Visual Culture (2006)
5: 193–206, pp 193–200, 206.

On 29 January 1937, an editor for Le Soir, one of Paris’s many competing daily newspapers,
made arrangements to photograph Helen Keller window-shopping on the fashionable
avenue des Champs-Élyseés. Keller, the world’s most famous – and, arguably, most
photographed – deaf-blind person, visited Paris during a brief tour of Europe before
preparing for her historic journey to Japan in the spring. The following morning, on 30
January, Keller and Polly Thomson – Keller’s assistant for over two decades and primary
traveling companion after Anne Sullivan’s death just three months earlier in October 1936
– took breakfast at the Hotel Lancaster on the rue de Berri and went out promenading
on the avenue, stopping long enough for one of Le Soir’s photographers to preserve the
moment for posterity (Figure 1.1). Later that day, Keller recorded the event, with self-
conscious delight, in the journal that she kept of her daily activities: ‘Polly and I walked
out with [the photographer] and he took pictures of us on the Champs-Élysées beside a
shop window resplendent with Paris hats and gowns…Seeing everybody here in the pink
of fashion doesn’t tend to lull my feminine vanity’ (Keller 1938, 164).
In the photograph, Keller and Thomson stand side by side in front of a boutique window
showcasing a selection of belted and embroidered dresses, patterned chemises with cravats,
and form-fitting cloche hats in delicate, light fabrics, suggestive of the coming spring, which
stand in enormous contrast to the textured, heavy winter coats worn by the two passers-
by. Their apparent delight in and longing for the consumer goods that have captured
their attention is marked not only by the message that Keller communicates directly into
Thomson’s hand, the paleness of which is centered against the backdrop of their black
winter coats, but also by the reflections of both women mirrored in the window’s glass that
seem to haunt the shop’s interior and our reception of the event. Indeed, the sumptuous
display behind glass serves as a kind of visual analogue for Keller herself, who experiences
the clothing in the shop window not through tactile means but through virtual projection
as mediated through Thomson’s gaze and subsequent description. Keller, who was fifty-
seven when the photograph was taken, clearly had more than a passing interest in clothes,
14 David Serlin

FIGURE 1.1 Helen Keller (left) and her companion, Polly Thomson, window-shopping on the
Avenue des Champs-Élysées, Paris. Originally published in Le Soir (Paris), 31 January 1937
Photograph from the collection of the author

which gave her the space to engage the tactile pleasures of the phenomenological world
while simultaneously satisfying her own ‘feminine vanity.’ The day after posing for Le Soir’s
photographer, for instance, Keller described in her diary a visit to the atelier of the grande
couturieuse Elsa Schiaparelli, who was only too happy to have her material creations linked
to the world’s most famous deaf-blind person, a person who wanted to be recognized as
disabled but also irreducibly female. ‘I was sorry that [one of Schiaparelli’s dresses] could
not be made for me in a day,’ she wrote disappointedly, ‘but my hands were crammed with
loveliness as one robe after another appeared’ (Keller 1938, 169).
One could also argue that, for all of its putative playfulness, the photograph’s two
mutually constitutive subjects – the two women on the one hand and the boutique’s goods
on the other – are divided practically down the middle, suggesting a symbiosis of theme and
form as well as a distinct separation, if not a potential gulf, between its two halves. Such a
division is not an insignificant insight into Keller’s own biography. As Kim E. Nielsen has
argued, representations of Keller in the popular media during the course of her life tended
to embody the dialectic between nineteenth-century gestures of sentimental womanhood
and twentieth-century instantiations of the New Woman. Images of Keller equivocate
between the ‘publicly pitied deaf and blind young virgin’ and ‘the politically safe, but
Disabling the ﬂâneur 15

glorified, superblind saintly spinster’ (Nielsen 2004, 50). Nielsen argues that, trapped within
this gendered logic of comprehensibility, Keller frequently tempered her public persona
by fulfilling expectations of what the public wanted her to be and, when necessary, taking
the appropriate measures to distance herself from other disabled people in order to assert
claims to a more normative subjectivity. Keller’s desire to be seen as special and on her
terms, however, was not incompatible with the editorial goals of a daily newspaper like Le
Soir, which sought to present Keller and Thomson as special yet also infinitely capable of
performing the predictable rituals of female conspicuous consumption. Is it not unseemly,
then, to ask: for what audience(s) was this photograph intended, and for what purposes? If
the photograph is simply a news item lifted from daily life in Paris during the late 1930s, then
what, exactly, is newsworthy about it, and what elements of urban culture does it document?
Perhaps the photograph’s explicit commercial power and unapologetic consumerism
– both the convention of window-shopping and the adaptation of Keller and Thomson
within it – capture the imagination precisely because they confirm the promise of a certain
kind of normative subject position that under the right circumstances the disabled person,
for whom Keller serves metonymically, might perform in public. As Rosemarie Garland-
Thomson has written, ‘Realist disability photography is the rhetoric of equality, most
often turned utilitarian…Realism domesticates disability’ (Garland-Thomson 2002, 69).
Unlike photographs of disabled figures in the urban milieu such as Paul Strand’s famous
Blind Woman (1917), for instance, a watershed moment in a genealogy of ‘high’ modern
figurations of disability, the image of Keller and Thomson might have functioned somewhat
differently within early-twentieth-century French popular media (Mirzoeff 1995, 51–53).
The blind figure in traditional eighteenth and nineteenth-century French art, as Nicholas
Mirzoeff has argued, was almost always gendered male, though exceptions – as in the
case of the female ‘blind justice’ – conceded more to mythological tropes than to social
realities. A categorical icon in the pantheon of Western cultural fantasies, from Tiresias
onward, of the blind person whose judicious inner eye can ‘see’ beyond the superficial
distractions of the external world, such figures were used in the political iconography
of the early republic to demonstrate the Enlightenment triumph of humanist reason in
order to build a new egalitarian society that would replace old aristocratic corruption. Well
into the twentieth century, however, the blind were far more accustomed either to social
isolation in institutions far from the public view or, in more dire circumstances, survival
through street begging, than the metaphorical insight endowed upon them by artists and
philosophers. Indeed, if there is common thread within disability history in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, it is not that people with physical and cognitive impairments
went traipsing down the Champs-Élysées but instead were deliberately segregated from
their fellow citizens, occupying domestic or rehabilitative or institutional spaces where
they might be cared for (if they were cared for at all), and routinely excluded and often
prohibited from public spaces. The vaunted promises of French republican values, in other
words, rang hollow for the disabled and instead barred them from cultural recognition
and political participation except, perhaps, for those whose wealth or status effectively
neutralized the reductive equation of bodily difference with social incompatibility.
The most obvious, and most regularly sustained, exception to this disparity between the
promise of republican values and the exclusion of the disabled was provided by photographic
16 David Serlin

representations of les mutilés de guerre (disabled war veterans), the wholesale bombardment of
which French newspaper readers and newsreel viewers had become accustomed to in the
interwar years (Figure 1.2). One news photograph, taken approximately two years earlier in
December 1934, depicts a demonstration by disabled veterans of the First World War who
are marching down the sidewalk of the Champs-Élyseés and waving French flags to attract
the attention of pedestrians and automobile drivers. The powerful iconographic value of this
procession of middle-aged veterans moving slowly across cold, wet pavement on canes and
crutches, many sporting berets and decorations in deference to their military service as well
as mustaches often cultivated to conceal battle scars, makes a dramatic visual contrast with
the elegant, beaux arts shapes of the storefront façades, apartment buildings, and shiny sedans
that seem to be moving, as if with teleological certainty, in an entirely different direction. This
is a markedly different strategy for representing disability than that used in the photograph
of Keller and Thomson. In early-twentieth-century France, wounded veterans were seen as
symbols of enormous personal sacrifice to the nation-state, and as such occupied an esteemed
position in the social hierarchy of disability since their bodily difference was equated with
tropes of patriotic citizenship and domestic care giving (Panchasi 1995; Sherman 1999).
Furthermore, French war veterans with disabilities – the image of which is crystallized by the
amputee in the foreground perched resignedly on crutches – were at the forefront of what
might be called anachronistically a disability rights movement, forming extensive networks

FIGURE 1.2 Disabled veterans of the First World War demonstrating for increased pensions
and benefits on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, Paris. Photograph taken ca. December 1934
Photograph from the collection of the author.
Disabling the ﬂâneur 17

of military fraternities and mutual aid societies, demanding improved pension and health
benefits from the French government, and organizing protest marches on symbolic (and
tourist-heavy) thoroughfares like the Champs-Élyseés (Prost 1992).
Perhaps this is why, in the end, the photograph of Keller and Thomson remains so
striking. It presents a gendered alternative to displays of bodily difference by forging
connections between the public representation of disability and its heretofore-unrealized
corollaries in the realms of paparazzi, fashion, and documentary photography that so
characterized visual culture in Paris during the 1930s. The image of Keller and Thomson
challenges the male-defined public culture of disability by invoking the kind of gendered
images of consumption and urban pleasure with which the French public was well
acquainted during the interwar years including the New Woman, the androgynous
garçonne, and the single working girl (Roberts 1994; Stewart 2001; Chadwick and Ladimer
2003). Yet the photograph’s deliberate blurring of the visual codes of window-shopping
with the visual codes of public disability also has the effect, intentional or otherwise, of
distinguishing Keller not only from disabled veterans but also from images of women that,
historically, saturated the French popular imagination. Indeed, the photograph depicting a
deaf-blind woman window-shopping may have been a point of ironic juxtaposition with
the complex public iconography of the Parisienne, the single girl-about-town who inhabited
fin-de-siècle urban culture as memorialized in the graphic poster art of Henri de Toulouse-
Lautrec, which combined coquettish playfulness and robust sexuality two decades before
the emergence of the New Woman (Nesbit 1992).
Rather than codifying – and, to some degree, essentializing – the differences between
the masculine terrain traversed by protesting veterans and the feminine terrain traversed
by Keller and Thomson, perhaps it would be more productive to see the two women and
the parade of men as independent but dialectically linked actors within the complex and
highly contested epistemological terrain of urban modernity. In other words, how might
we make space for Helen Keller, veterans, and other disabled urbanites in the voluminous
literature on the flâneur?
Scholarship devoted to the enduring significance of flânerie, from its historical origins
in early-nineteenth-century Paris to its most well-known iterations by Charles Baudelaire,
Walter Benjamin, and a host of writers and critics throughout the twentieth century, is
something of a cottage industry in contemporary visual and cultural studies as well as
within historical studies of modern and postmodern urban cultures (Baudelaire 1972;
Benjamin 1978; Buck-Morss 1991; Tester 1994; White 2001). Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson,
for instance, has argued that the flâneur is not a singular urban type but a multivalent urban
icon, developing from the lazy, unproductive figure of the 1830s to the mid-century mock-
artist to the famously perambulating gadfly-about-town of the 1870s to the anachronistic
figure of urban modernity whose primary association with enclosed shopping arcades
Benjamin so lovingly delineated in writings that overlapped chronologically with Keller’s
appearance on the streets of Paris (Ferguson 1994). Such shifting tides of meaning across
a century and a half track a constant recalibration of the flâneur from aloof observation to
conspicuous consumption. The phenomenological inspiration derived from flânerie has
played a central component in genealogies of modern experience that can be traced to late-
nineteenth-century urban visual spectacles such as window displays, wax museums, and
18 David Serlin

early cinema (Crary 2001; Charney and Schwartz 1996; Friedberg 1994; Schwartz 1999).
In all of these scholarly explorations, however, there is a constant and, arguably, almost
tacit commitment to the normative elements of the flâneur’s physical experience – betrayed
implicitly by what some critics have rightly insisted as modernism’s tendency toward
ocularcentrism or the ‘hegemony of vision’ – that is not factored into discussions of flânerie
nor, for that matter, the codes of urban modernity that are assumed to crystallize around
certain kinds of acts (observing, shopping, collecting) or sensorial experiences (listening,
moving, gazing) associated with the flâneur’s body (Levin 1993). Despite its adoption
within a range of academic disciplines and theoretical approaches, scholars continue to
preserve the notion of the flâneur as a paradigmatic example of the modern subject who
takes the functions of his or her body for granted.
Certainly, there are more nuanced exceptions to this paradigmatic approach to flânerie.
As early as 1841, for example, Louis Hart’s Le Physiologie du flâneur implied that the flâneur’s
foppish caprice carried all of the sexual (and, often, homosexual) connotations of physical
and social difference found in nineteenth-century pseudoscientific tracts on physiognomy
and phrenology (Ferguson 1994, 26). A century and a half later, in the 1980s and 1990s,
feminist scholars in urban studies and visual culture studies carved out space for the flâneuse
in order to problematize the male privilege implicit in discussions of flânerie and inscribe
women’s place in the social etiologies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban modernity
(Parsons 2000; Pollock 1988; Wilson 2001; Wolff 1985). Yet even within such groundbreaking
studies, making claims for the flâneur or the flâneuse as agents of modern experience already
presumes that the codes of urban modernity – what really counts as urban and/or modern
– are organized around narratives of normative able-bodiedness. The shopping adventures
of Keller and Thomson and the protest activities of disabled veterans on the streets of Paris
in the mid-1930s may point to the different semiotic registers in which public definitions
of disability were communicated and understood in the popular imagination, but they also
point to the reasons why the liberal, autonomous subject of modernity must be able-bodied
for canonical understandings of flânerie to survive (Breckenridge and Vogler 2001). If we
define modernity only through a recognizable set of compulsory able-bodied acts such as
walking, looking, and hearing, then we exclude a sizeable proportion of the population, both
in historical perspective as well as in contemporary experience. In the literature on urban
modernity, disabled people – regarded by dominant discourses as tragic and dependent upon
paternalistic forms of care and attention – hardly ever get to drink absinthe, let alone relish
the opportunity to hold the crystal goblet.
Such limited interpretations of the urban subject clearly had little or no lasting effect on
Keller, a person who believed not only that one could experience modernity through senses
other than sight or hearing but that one could appear modern, act modern, feel modern, and
be modern without relying upon any of the meanings attached to bodily difference as either
proscribed by her contemporaries or codified retrospectively by historians of urban modernity.
Keller, for one, did not think that she herself was excluded from the boulevards of modernity.
As she wrote in her diary, on the same day that she posed for Le Soir, she and Thomson

went alone for a stroll…The air was soft, the moon was snowing its loveliness upon
the city. The traffic was at a low ebb. We went as far as the Rue Royale, passing
Disabling the ﬂâneur 19

Maxim’s, looking in the shop windows which are the undoing of unwary mortals,
Polly noticing especially the jewelry, rare antiques, and Lalique glass. Everywhere
I recognized the odor peculiar to Paris – perfumes, powders, wines, and tobacco
agreeably blended…. This is the real Paris in winter, and the more I see of it the
better it pleases me…
(Keller 1938, 169)

As any connoisseur of modernist literature will confirm, engagement with the

phenomenological world through smell, taste, and touch was deemed a standard
component of urban flânerie, enabling one to experience modern cityscapes through
senses other than sight and sound (Hammergren 1994). Anthony Vidler has argued that
the august pronouncements of Le Corbusier, the French avatar of modernist architecture
during the early twentieth century who claimed that the disorderly and unhealthy body
was an analogue to the disorderly and unhealthy city, were merely products of fantasy that
held bodily difference and thus social difference in thrall (Vidler 1992). Yet such fantasies
have not prevented scholars from writing about the experiences of the disabled in cities like
Paris, when they are considered at all, as examples of the perceived incommensurability
between disorderly bodies and rectilinear architectural experiments, Art Deco façades, or
the ironic pre-postmodern reveries of the flâneur. Keller’s pleasurable tactile and olfactory
sensations of the modern city help reconstitute elements of her biography, especially for
the ways in which touch and smell functioned in her immediate environment and enabled
her to negotiate geographical and physical spaces as well as social and political ones (Fuss
2004; Feld 2005).
Perhaps the willful exclusion of disabled bodies from the literature on flânerie has
something to do with how the embodied experience of disability challenges and even
thwarts cultural expectations of the firm division between public and private spheres. Victor
Burgin has written that, ‘The flâneur who turns the street into a living room commits an
act of transgression which reverses an established distinction between public and private
spaces…[and makes visible] the survival of precapitalist social forms that had not yet
succumbed to the modern segregation of life into public and private zones’ (Burgin 1996,
145). Burgin’s observation echoes that of Benjamin, who wrote in 1936 that the flâneur has
a tendency to ‘turn the boulevard into an interieur,’ and that ‘The street becomes a dwelling
for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as the citizen is in his
four walls’ (Benjamin 1978, 37). One could argue that this is precisely what the body
of the disabled flâneur does when it circulates or is visibly represented in public spaces.
The disabled flâneur visibly alters perceptions of public space by exposing that which
has typically pertained to the ‘interieur’ – visible bodily differences as well as the invisible
effects of institutionalization or, in more contemporary circumstances, networks of care
giving and mutual support – to the outside world in ways that are anathema to narratives
of modern autonomy. The routine institutionalization of people with mental or physical
disabilities certainly contributed to the limitation of some disabled bodies in public space,
especially those regarded as social dangers, whereas different categories of impairment may
have been supported by different categories of freedom. In the mid-1930s, the disabled
body of the veteran was a highly visible, and highly gendered, component of the French
20 David Serlin

public sphere, sustained by correlations between male bodily sacrifice and the impassioned
defense of French civility under duress. In one account published in a French journal for
war veterans in 1917, for example, an officer riding on the Paris metro observes a disabled
ex-serviceman board the metro car. Noticing that none of the passengers are willing to
vacate their seats for the veteran, the officer accosts a ‘young man of robust appearance’
and implores him, ‘Come on, young civilian, give up your seat to this wounded man.’
The young man tilts his hat deferentially to the officer and awkwardly replies, ‘Excuse me,
Captain, but I have lost a leg’ (Prost 1992, 30).
The nuanced negotiations between private and public spheres that disabled bodies
endured in the 1930s took multiple forms, emboldened not only by the sensorial
experiences identified with urban modernity but through the innovations of space-time
compression identified as hallmarks of technological modernity. As Rebecca Scales has
written, ‘In 1928, just a few years after the first radio broadcast from the Eiffel Tower,
two new radio charities, Radio for the Blind and Wireless at the Hospital, took up the task of
distributing free radios to invalids and the blind, with the goal of putting these “brave
and poor people into contact with exterior life” and ending their “isolation” in the private
sphere’ (Scales 2006, 2). By 1939, Theodor Adorno recognized radio technology as making
possible a kind of aural flânerie, thereby identifying airspace as one in which virtually all
citizens could spatially perambulate and discover new narrative experiences of modern
life (Buck-Morss 1985, 105). The disabled person that emerges from isolation to ride
across urban space via city streets, underground trains, or radio waves inverts the perceived
distinction between private and public by using his or her private body as the crucible in
which he or she forges public identity, and thus challenges the presumption that disability
is the antithesis of modernism’s programmatic functionalism.
For scholars of modernism, the multiple urban subjectivities of the disabled remain
largely unintelligible because the dynamic textures of sensory and psychic experience
are too regularly subordinated to, and held captive by, the valorized gaze of the flâneur.
Even with the best of intentions, such a critical predilection effectively naturalizes the
presumptive link between modern subjectivity and the privileges of the visual. One
could argue that an ocularcentric epistemology follows directly from the canonical work
on bodily difference provided by early- and mid-twentieth-century photographers, such
as August Sander and Weegee, who sought out both formal and informal methods for
documenting urban typologies (Serlin and Lerner 1997). In French visual culture of the
1920s and 1930s, images of racial and ethnic types, homeless men, itinerant families,
and those with bodily differences were regularly exploited by the camera and spanned
a range of both commercial products and avant-garde experiments, used to demonstrate
either humanist narratives of endurance in the face of adversity or else, in the case of the
surrealists, used to explore the uncanny textures of the urban unconscious (Walker 2002).
In this context, the image of Keller and Thomson window-shopping in late January 1937
represented both an epistemological challenge to the ocularcentric conventions of flânerie
as well as a distinct shift in the generic conventions used to depict bodily difference. For
some, the photograph may have suggested that the reveries associated with conspicuous
consumption could be no longer naturalized as the exclusive purview of the able-bodied,
and that such reveries might be indulged by anyone, regardless of bodily difference, perhaps
Disabling the ﬂâneur 21

even by a famous deaf-blind female tourist. The photograph confirms the presence of
a disabled female body that was not only capable of promenading openly on a famous
Parisian thoroughfare but one whose subjective experience as an autonomous modern
subject who derives pleasure from window-shopping had the capacity to transform the
meaning of disability in the popular imagination.
2
THE BODY, DISABILITY AND
LE CORBUSIER’S CONCEPTION OF
THE RADIANT ENVIRONMENT

Rob Imrie (1999)

Excerpt reprinted from R. Butler and H. Parr (eds) (1999)

Mind and Body Spaces: Geographies of Disability, Illness and
Impairment, London and New York: Routledge, pp 25–45.

Proportion is the commensuration of the various constituent parts with the whole.
For no building can possess the attributes of composition…unless there exists that
perfect conformation of parts which may be observed in a well formed human body.
(Vitruvius 1960)

One of the critical contexts for the perpetuation and reproduction of social inequalities is
the built environment (Crowe 1995; Knox 1987; Laws 1994a, 1994b). For disabled people
in particular, the built environment is often encountered as a series of hostile, exclusive and
oppressive spaces. Examples abound of discriminatory architectural design, including steps
into shops and public buildings, inaccessible transport, and the absence of colour coding and
induction loops. Indeed, most housing in the United Kingdom is not wheelchair accessible,
yet for the House Builders Federation (1995) this is barely an issue. As they state, ‘if a disabled
person visits a homeowner, it is to be expected that they can be assisted over the threshold’
(HBF 1995:1). Moreover, in the 1997 British general election, 75 per cent of polling offices
were inaccessible to people in wheelchairs, while few contained the technical aids to permit
visually impaired and/or blind people to mark their vote on the polling papers. In Lefebvre’s
(1968) terms, such representations of space project the dominant values of specific body-
types, that is, the ‘able-bodied’, or bodies characterised by a ‘statically balanced symmetrical
figure with well defined limbs and muscles’ (McAnulty 1992:181).
Ableist bodily conceptions underpin architectural discourses and practices, and there
is evidence to suggest that the specific mobility and/or access needs of disabled people
The body, disability and the radiant environment 23

rarely feature in the theories and practices of designers or architects (Davies and Lifchez
1987; Hayden 1981; Weisman 1992). In this sense, one of the sources and sites of disabled
people’s marginalisation and oppression in society relates to architects and architecture
(also see Dickens 1980; Imrie 1996; Knesl 1984; Knox 1987). In particular, architectural
conceptions of the body are premised upon abstract theories of the self, or what Lester
(1997:481) refers to as ‘a largely disembodied self which is held to be outside of time,
space, outside of culture and gender’. Yet, as Lester (1997) comments, the presumption of a
disembodied self is impossible and what generally has been presented through the context
of architecture, art, and other mediums is less a body in a neutered state but one infused
with (male) gender, class, and the embodiment of health and normality (see Probyn 1993).
In this chapter, I develop the proposition that modern architectural conceptions of
architectural form and the built environment are simultaneously ableist and disablist
by ignoring and/or denying the multiplicities of the human body. I suggest that such
conceptions are premised upon a decontextualised, disembodied, ideal of the body which is
at the core of disabled people’s oppression within the built environment. In pursuing such
themes the chapter is divided into three. The first part is a brief discussion of architectural
modernism and the emergence of what some have referred to as disembodied architecture
(Colomina 1994; Gray 1929; Grosz 1994, 1995; Mumford 1968; Whiteman et al. 1992). In
the second section, I relate such ideas to a consideration of the architectural theories and
practices of one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century, Le Corbusier.
How, for example, did Le Corbusier conceive of the human body and of its possible
multiplicities and how did such conceptions of body/mind inform, if at all, his architecture
and approaches to urbanism and urban planning? I conclude by discussing the possibilities
for the development of non-ableist, embodied, architectural discourses and practices.

Modernity, technology and decontextualised/disembodied architecture

The theories and practices of architects in Western society are underpinned by what Grosz
(1995:127) refers to as ‘epistemic domains where the neutrality, transparency, and universality
of the body is all assumed’. Such epistemic conceptions are connected to modernist values
which have been highly influential in twentieth-century architecture (Le Corbusier 1900,
1925a, 1967; Sullivan 1947; also, see Ward 1993). For Sullivan (1947), for example, such
values involved the search for a ‘true normal type’ and for universal laws of human habitation
and behaviour. Underpinning this was the propagation of an engineering aesthetic based on
the idea that pure, distilled, design could be produced which was fixed and absolute, singular,
transcontextual, and grafted from the essence of the human being. Such essentialism has
its roots in classical ideas where the body was conceived of in naturalistic terms or what
Grosz (1995) refers to as the cause and motivation for the design of cities (also see Colomina
1994; Frampton 1980, 1991; Sennett 1994). Indeed, as McAnulty (1992:182) notes, ‘the
unified body of the Vitruvian image was taken as the model for classical architecture’ in that
buildings were to replicate its order, harmony, and proportions.
[…] The essentialist depiction of such bodies is of geometric proportion and symmetry,
or, in this instance, of a body seemingly able-bodied, taut, upright, male, an image projected
as self-evidently invariable, normal, vigorous and healthy. The body (to be built for) was
24 Rob Imrie

conceived of, in classical terms, as being constituted prior to its projection into the world,
comprising what McAnulty (1992:182) refers to as a ‘figural self sufficiency’. In this sense,
the body was posited as a purity, prior to, and beyond, socialisation or culture (on this theme
see, for example, Bordo 1995; Grosz 1995; Shilling 1995). Such bodies were either seen as
being reducible to organic or technical and instrumental matter, that is, machine-like or,
as Grosz (1995:8) notes, ‘merely physical, an object like any other’. Thus, such bodies are
without sex or gender, or class or culture. They are, in Hall’s (1996) terms, objective entities
to be dissected, manipulated, treated, and utilised as instruments and/or objects.
Such conceptions, in informing the values and practices of architects, are also premised
upon a body assumed to be an organic system of interrelated bits, pieces of matter alike in
functioning and form. For architects, the body, as somehow inert, passive, and pliable, is
a pre-given which permits its (geometric) proportions to define the possibilities of design
and building form. The body, then, as pre-formed, fixed, and known, has led some to
refer to the ideas and practices of architects as necessarily leading to the production of
‘standard-fit’ design, that is, decontextualised, one-dimensional, architecture (Colomina
1994; Grosz 1995; Tschumi 1996). Thus, as Gray (1929, in Nevins 1981:71) commented,
in referring to the rise of the abstractions of modern or avant-garde architecture:

avant-garde is intoxicated by the machine aesthetic… But the machine aesthetic is

not everything… Their intense intellectualism wants to suppress everything which
is marvellous in life… Their desire for rigid precision makes them neglect the beauty
of all these forms… Their architecture is without soul.

For Gray (1929, in Nevins 1981), the machine aesthetic was premised on universalising
the essence of the body by a denial of the (contextual and contextualised) differences in
bodily experiences and form. As Ward (1993:43) suggests, the rationality underpinning
such meta-narratives ‘erases differences, standardises experiences, drains the world
of colour and texture, and precludes the richness and quality of life’. This, then, is a
world which seeks to normalise. Such conceptions of architecture and bodies are also
problematical for conceiving of buildings, bodies, and environments as discrete, rather
than constitutive, entities. Indeed, for Knox (1987:355) architecture, buildings, and the
wider built environment have been assigned the roles of independent variables ‘explaining
everything from people’s perceptual acuity to their social networks’. In this sense, form is
seen as shaping space and, in turn, space is conceived of as giving shape to social relations.
Such determinism was underpinned by what Gray (1929) referred to as the vain arrogance
of architects in their popularisation of the aesthestic, or form, over the (bodily) use of
buildings, so conceiving of the idea that the architect as artist is instilling critical capacities
into buildings. And, as Tschumi (1996) notes, bodies have been regarded as problematical
in the architect’s wider, critical, endeavours, in being seen in Platonic terms as impure,
degenerate and for their potentially disruptive influence on aesthetic and/or design
considerations (also see Frampton 1980; Ghirardo 1991).
A slippage between the categories of mind/body, art/craft, architect/craftsperson, purity/
impurity, etc., is important in supporting and sustaining the position of architects as artists or
purveyors of beauty and truth. For Le Corbusier, and others, there was little doubt as to the
The body, disability and the radiant environment 25

elevated status of the architect over those without the requisite critical capacities (Sullivan
1947). As Le Corbusier (1925a:137) stated: ‘architecture is there, concerned with our home,
our comfort, and our heart. Comfort and proportion. Reason and aesthetics. Machine and
plastic form. Calm and beauty.’ [T]he rationality of the avant-garde was sustained by the
conception of the architect as the mindful and ethereal purveyor of good taste, or as those
who were able to create the rational disposition of spaces beyond the contamination of the
earthy impurities of society. Yet, as Caygill (1990:261–2) notes, such claims, to represent
the wider world, necessarily depend on abstracting ‘from individual idiosyncrasies and
differences in order to reduce them to complexes of universal human needs and rights’.
While such conceptions have been difficult to sustain in the wider social sciences and
humanities, they still underpin many of the theories and practices of architects (see, for
example, accounts and critiques by Jencks 1987; Knox 1987; Venturi 1966; Wolfe 1981). The
abstract premises of modernism are, in Caygill’s (1990) terms, particularly problematical
for divorcing conceptions of building form (body) and design (mind) from its use. This,
for Caygill (1990), is implicated in the production of insensitive, decontextual, design. For
others, the limitations of the avant-garde are expressed through the materiality of designed
body-spaces premised on conceptions of standard body sizes and shapes, that is, the body as
objectification. However, for Merleau-Ponty, and other theorists, the body is not an object
per se ‘but it is the condition and context through which an embodied person is able to
have a relation to objects’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, quoted in Grosz 1995:5; also see Ghirardo
1991; Probyn 1993). In this sense, the body constructs, and is constructed by, ‘an interior, a
psychical and a signifying viewpoint, a consciousness or perspective’ (Grosz 1995:8).
However, such critiques, and reformulations of body/mind, have had little effect on the
writings and practices of most architects and there is no evidence to suggest that architectural
schools teach trainee architects about the problems and limitations of decontextual
conceptions of the body and architecture. Moreover, there has been little written about
the specificity of bodies in the ideas and practices of the more influential architects and
architectural traditions (although, for notable exceptions, see Colomina 1994; Tschumi
1996; Whiteman et al. 1992). Little or nothing has been documented about whether or not
architects and their practices are self-consciously sensitised to diverse conceptions of, for
instance, disabled bodies. In seeking to redress, in part, this research lacuna, the rest of the
chapter is a preliminary exploration of the writings of one of the most influential architects
of the twentieth century, Le Corbusier. The objective is twofold. First, by referring to the
earlier work of Le Corbusier, between 1924 and 1933, I provide a brief documentation of
the ways in which he wrote about, and conceived of, the human body. Second, I relate Le
Corbusier’s conceptions of the human body to examples of his architecture. […]
In documenting aspects of Le Corbusier’s writings and architectural practices, two
qualifications should be made. First, following Jencks (1987), the life of Le Corbusier was
characterised by significant changes in perspectives and modes of thinking. By the second
half of his career, from the early 1940s, Le Corbusier’s conceptions of the interrelationships
between body/mind and design had shifted to a degree that it is impossible to gauge any
temporal unity and/or consistency to his thinking on such matters. Second, Le Corbusier’s
writings are idiosyncratic and obscure, seemingly half-formed, yet full of detail and
contradiction. In this sense, this chapter is a small contribution to a wider research agenda
26 Rob Imrie

in which much remains to be done to excavate the meanings, materialities, and processes
of bodies in Le Corbusier’s architectural spaces.

Spatial perfectibility, Le Corbusier and the radiant environment

The architect Le Corbusier was characterised by Mumford (1962:34) as a ‘crippled genius’
who ‘warped the work of a whole generation, giving it arbitrary directives, superficial
slogans, and sterile goals’. Others have noted the one dimensional conception of the body
propagated by Le Corbusier, the portrayal of people as asexual, and his pre-occupation
with the establishment of an ‘able bodied’ standard in order to face what Le Corbusier
characterised as the problem of perfection (Colomina 1994). Le Corbusier was influenced
by modernism and the emergent avant-garde of the 1920s and with the search for what
Tschumi (1996) refers to as the specificity of architecture. Such specificity, for Le Corbusier
(1927:220), was conceived of, in part, as an art of geometric volumes or, as he argued,
‘there is nothing but pure forms in precise relationships’. Le Corbusier was influenced
by classical design and by the desire to conceive of architecture as a ‘process based on
standards’ (1980:37). Such standards were, for Le Corbusier, based upon the ‘truths and
emotions of a superior mathematical order’ (1927:221).
Le Corbusier rejected what he saw as the disequilibria of curved lines and jagged edges
for what he characterised as ‘the classical equilibrium of rectangles and pure volumes’
(1980:23). His inspiration was connected to the specificity of precision. Such precision,
for Le Corbusier (1980:18), was evident in classical architecture:

the Parthenon, the Indian Temples, and the cathedrals were all built according
to precise measures which constitutes a code, a coherent system: a system which
proclaimed an essential unity.

Le Corbusier was, as Jencks (1987:112) notes, ‘propelled by a single vision of technology

as a progressive force which, if guided by the right ideals, might reinstate a natural and
harmonic order’. Underpinning such conceptions of architectural form and process was
purism, a system of thinking which was concerned about ‘the laws of natural selection
which inevitably produces the pure forms of standardised objects’ (Le Corbusier 1925a:74).
Purism was also obsessed with the typical or, as Curtis (1986:50) argues, ‘the purist thought
that neither the human figure nor landscapes were relevant to their aims…they wished to
portray familiar everyday objects and to raise them to the levels of symbols by extracting
their most generalised features’. Thus, purism was important in leading Le Corbusier to
a distillation of the body’s essence, of a thing, and of conceiving the body in ideal-typical
terms. Such conceptions are evident in Le Corbusier’s writings and, as he notes:

the establishment of a standard involved evoking every practical and reasonable

possibility and extracting from them a recognised type conformable to all functions
with a maximum output and a minimum use of means and workmanship and
material, words, forms, colours, sounds.
(Le Corbusier 1980:27)
The body, disability and the radiant environment 27

The idea of a type is also evident in La Peinture Moderne, where Le Corbusier (1900:83)
develops the notion that ‘mechanical evolution leads at once towards the universal and the
geometrical culminating in the slogan that man is a geometrical animal’. For Le Corbusier
(1900:83) such geometric specificity could be related to the search for the human type or
a form of ‘universal symbolism that would be trans-historical’ (also see Jencks 1987; King
1996). As Le Corbusier (1925a:72) suggested:

to search for the human scale, for human function, is to define human needs.
They are not very numerous; they are very similar for all mankind, since man has
been made out of the same mould from the earliest times known to us…the whole
machine is there, the structure, the nervous system, the arterial system, and this
applies to every single one of us exactly and without exception.

Such conceptions of the body were recurrent in the writings of Le Corbusier in the
1920s and early 1930s. Throughout this period, Le Corbusier’s conceptions of the body
were derived from the Newtonian idea of the body as a machine, that is, in Sennett’s
(1994:7) terms, ‘a closed system, mechanical, with all of its parts rigid and pre-given to
interaction’. For Colomina (1994:136), Le Corbusier conceived of the body as a ‘surrogate
machine in an industrial age’. Indeed, there are clues in Le Corbusier’s writings which
support Colomina’s contention, that is, of the body as analogous to a type reducible to
specific, interlocking, mechanical parts.
Thus, as Le Corbusier (1925a:76) intimated:

If our spirits vary, our skeletons are alike, our muscles are in the same places and perform
the same functions: dimensions and mechanism are thus fixed…human limb objects
are in accord with our sense of harmony in that they are in accord with our bodies.

The fixity of the (physical) body for Le Corbusier reaffirmed the underlying essentialist
terms in which he wrote about the interconnections between bodies and architecture.
For instance, in referring to the human (bodily) organism as a machine, Le Corbusier
(1947:22) conceived of biology as the determinant of human need or, as he said: ‘since
all men have the same biological organisation, they all have the same basic needs’. As Le
Corbusier (1925a:71) suggested, the specificity of the body was ‘a man, a constant, the
fixed point’. The body, for Le Corbusier, was, therefore, a biology and/or a physiology
of parts which did not vary. For example, in a typical flourish, Le Corbusier (1925a:33)
comments about his conception of the standard body:

the climates, the suns, the regimes, the races, everything is classified in terms of its
relationship to man. A typical, standardised, normal man: two legs, two arms, a head.
A man who perceives red, or blue, or yellow, or green.

His architecture was, so some argue, based on a world which seemingly denied the
relevance of difference or the vitality of the knowing (individual) subject (see, for example,
Frampton 1980; Colomina 1994; King 1996; Wigley 1992). In an interchange between Le
28 Rob Imrie

Corbusier and an unnamed individual, Le Corbusier’s views, on the potentially complex

interrelationships between the body and architectural form, reinforced his belief in the
possibilities of generic solutions to fit the standard or constant-type. Thus, as Le Corbusier
(1925a:72) commented:

nevertheless, one of the big names of the 1925 Exhibition recently violently
disagreed; with his heart set on multifold poetry, he proclaimed the need of each
individual for something different claiming different circumstances in each case; the
fat man, the thin man, the short, the long, the ruddy, the lymphatic, the violent…he
sees the character of an individual as dictating his every act.

However, in dismissive terms, Le Corbusier (1925a:72) noted: ‘let us recognize the

practical impossibility of this dream of an individual sentient object, in all its intimate
multiplicity’. He reinforces this further on in the text when commenting that ‘in all things
that are in universal use, individual fantasy bows before human fact’ (76). For Le Corbusier,
then, the distillation of bodily essence was critical in developing systems of standards and
measures which, in turn, were to be used in designing the built environment. In rejecting
the individual sentient-object, Le Corbusier conceived of a world where the (standardised)
measurements of the body would be critical in giving shape to the objects, decorations,
and materials of everyday (human) use.

Reclaiming context and developing self-conscious embodied architecture:

concluding thoughts
One of the challenges for architecture and architects is to transcend what Grosz (1995:127)
refers to as ‘the standard assumptions, the doxa, the apparent naturalness, or rather, the
evolutionary fit assumed to hold between being and buildings’. Such assumptions underpin
many contemporary architectural ideas and practices and are rooted, historically, in the
theories and conceptions of influential architects and architectural traditions. Architecture
has also been beset by major tensions, or, as Crawford (1991:41, quoted in Imrie 1996:96)
suggests, ‘the restricted practices and discourse of the profession have reduced the scope
of architecture to two equally unpromising polarities: compromised practice or esoteric
philosophies of inaction’. For disabled people, such tensions have worked their way into
hostile and oppressive buildings and built environments, underpinned by self-serving
ideas which have failed to challenge the hegemonic position of key actors within the wider
design and building industries.
As this chapter suggests, architects’ conceptions of bodies in space, such as, for example,
those propagated by Le Corbusier, are connected to the estrangement of disabled bodies
in the built environment (Figure 2.1). However, it is difficult to derive any easy or definite
characterisation of Le Corbusier’s feelings and thoughts concerning architecture and the
body. In particular, some of his writings hint at conceptions of the human body which are
sensitised to the possibilities of flux, change, and difference. In one part of The Radiant City
(1933 (1967)), Le Corbusier conceives of the body as an interconnection between body/
mind, that is, the body as a holistic socio-psychological and biological entity:
The body, disability and the radiant environment 29

contingencies are the environment: places, peoples, cultures, topographies,

climates…contingencies should only be judged as they relate to the entity – man –
and in connection with man, in relation to us, to ourselves: a biology, a psychology.
(Le Corbusier 1967:1)

By the end of the 1940s, Le Corbusier (1948:38) was conceiving of body spaces in the
following terms:

society being in man’s image, the nation’s wealth in building must be similar to the
human body. Man is carried by a temporal flux in which he is immersed body and
soul; but the flow does more than carry him physically; it models and remodels him,
loosening this, allowing that to form, operating in a thousand linked ways.

These views seem to have stemmed from his recognition of the disruptive, contextually
specific ways in which clients and/or users of architecture were able to transform the meanings
and materialities of the architects’ design conceptions and intentions. Others have also noted
the disruptive interrelationships between architectural ideas and practices. For Colomina

FIGURE 2.1 Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, Marseille, completed in 1952. Also known
as Cité radieuse (Radiant City) and colloquially as La Maison du Fada (French – Provençal, “The
Nutter’s House”).
Photo: Colin Bisset (see also Bisset, C. (2015) Loving Le Corbusier Amazon Digital).
30 Rob Imrie

(1994:126), for instance, ‘a theory of architecture is a theory of order threatened by the very
use it permits’. Moreover, as Tschumi (1996) notes, architecture is never autonomous but
is necessarily constitutive as well as constituted by social processes. For Tschumi (1996), the
fluidity and erratic motions of bodies underpins the possibilities of new and unexpected
spaces being constituted in ways never anticipated by the architect. Le Corbusier, for instance,
recognised the limitations of the application of an architecture premised upon standards
determined by logical analysis and experimentation in noting the subversive nature of people’s
idiosyncrasies. As Le Corbusier (1925b, quoted in Banham 1960:270) argued:

but in practice things do not happen so; man’s sensibilities intervene even in the
midst of the most rigorous calculation…intervention of an individual task, sensibility,
and passion.

These comments were particularly directed at workers’ houses designed by Le Corbusier

in Pessac, south of Paris, in 1925 where he witnessed the inhabitants transforming the
geometric textures and forms of the dwellings (Figure 2.2). In interpreting Le Corbusier’s

FIGURE 2.2 Contemporary photo of workers’ housing at Pessac, built 1925: showing an
example of how Le Corbusier’s standardised design has been altered; in this case by filling-
in of the strip windows, and addition of window mouldings – so subverting, according to Le
Corbusier, the original design conceptions which underpinned the scheme.
Photo: Colin Bisset.
The body, disability and the radiant environment 31

contradictory feelings about Pessac, Jencks (1987:74–5, quoted in Imrie 1996:86)

comments:

Starting with the idea of resolving two incompatibilities like the individual and the
group, it was not surprising that Le Corbusier could end up, as at Pessac, by admiring
the way personalisation was destroying his own architecture. All the arguments for a
geometrical civilisation…were countered by the barbaric actions of the inhabitants at
Pessac, and yet, according to the supreme dialectician, these barbarians were still right.

However, Le Corbusier’s notion of ‘rightness’ was still circumscribed by the idea that
people, by transforming their living spaces, were somehow, in his terms, subverting and
undermining the ideals and purity of the architect. Tschumi (1996:123), in reinforcing Le
Corbusier’s observation on the interrelations between buildings and users, notes:

the human body has always been suspect in architecture: it has always set limits to the
most extreme architectural ambitions. The body disturbs the purity of architectural
order. It is equivalent to a dangerous prohibition… architecture, then, is only an
organism engaged in constant intercourse with users, whose bodies rush against the
carefully established rules of architectural thought.

Tschumi’s views are important for drawing attention to the intersections between bodies
and architecture and, in particular, to what he regards as the potentially violent relationship
between the two. For disabled people many dimensions of the built environment are
disruptive and violent precisely because buildings are underpinned by the embodied ideal
of a body which fails to conform with the complexities of bodily interactions in space.
Others, in recognising the complexity of such interactions, argue for some reconception of
the interrelationship between people and architecture in ways which recognise the fluidity
and transformative nature of bodies in space (Grosz 1995; Weisman 1992). For Weisman
(1992:32, quoted in Imrie 1996:91), for example, universal design offers a direction
given its recognition that the built environment should be ‘demountable, reasonable,
multifunctional, and changeable over time’. Likewise, Davies and Lifchez (1987) conceive
of buildings as much more than a physical, bodily, experience or a matter of logistics, but
as a quality of sociopsychological experiences.
This suggests that one pre-requisite for a non-ableist architecture is for architects to
confront the social psychology of design by considering the interactions between bodies/
minds in the context of specific building use. How do particular buildings and built
environments feel to different types of disabled people? Indeed, how do disabled people’s
feelings interconnect with their bodies’ experiences of movement and mobility in specific
types of places? What do architects know about this and where do they get their knowledge
from and in what form? Moreover, architects need to confront the ideology of art over
function and seek to privilege use over aesthetics or pretensions to poetics. This, then, calls
for a demystification and systematic critique of ideas and ideals within particular architectural
traditions, theories, and practices and for architects to (re)connect themselves to social and
economic concerns. This might involve asking who architecture is for, in what ways, and
32 Rob Imrie

with what effects, potentially sensitising architects and their clients to the possibilities of
architecture which is inclusive and emancipatory rather than exclusive and oppressive.
The democratisation of architectural and building practices is also connected to the
wider task of developing non-ableist design by moving beyond Le Corbusier’s conception
of the architect as above and beyond the client and/or user. Few architects in Britain are
registered as disabled people while the Royal Institute of British Architects has done little
to encourage architects to think about the specific architectural requirements of disabled
people (see Imrie 1996; also Knox 1987; Wolfe 1981). However, one also needs to look
beyond what Weisman (1992) refers to as failed architecture or prejudiced architects
towards the totality of structures framing the social oppression and marginalisation of
disabled people within the built environment. Architects are connected to wider cost and
material imperatives which inhibit or restrict the scope for design beyond prescribed limits
(see Knox 1987). In this sense, an explication of architects’ conceptions of bodies in space
is only part of a wider endeavour to understand the interrelationships between design
theory, practice, and people’s experiences of buildings and the built environment.
3
A CRITICAL CONDITION

Paul Hunt (1966)

Reprinted from P. Hunt (ed.) Stigma: The Experience of

Disability, London: Geoffrey Chapman, pp 1–10, http://
disability-studies.leeds.ac.uk/ﬁles/library/Hunt-critical-
condition.pdf.

All my adult life has been spent in institutions amongst people who, like myself, have
severe and often progressive physical disabilities. We are paralysed and deformed, most of
us in wheelchairs, either as the result of accident or of diseases like rheumatoid arthritis,
multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy and polio. So naturally this personal
experience forms a background to the views on disability that follow. I do not mean
to exclude altogether the large number of people who today are able to lead a more or
less normal life in the community; those with relatively light disabilities, or with such
handicaps as defects in sight, speech or hearing, epilepsy, obesity, heart disease, and so on.
I hope that much of what I say will be relevant to this latter group since they have many
problems in common with us. But apart from the obvious value of writing from my own
direct knowledge, it is also true that the situation of ‘the young chronic sick’ (as we are
officially and rather unpleasantly termed) highlights, or rather goes to the depths of, the
question of disablement. Our ‘tragedy’ may be only the tragedy of all sickness, pain and
suffering carried to extremes. But disabilities like ours, which often prohibit any attempt
at normal living in society, almost force one to consider the basic issues, not only of coping
with a special handicap, but of life itself.
Being cheerful and keeping going is scarcely good enough when one has an illness
that will end in an early death, when one is wasting away like some Belsen victim, maybe
incontinent, dependent on others for daily needs, probably denied marriage and a family
and forced to live out one’s time in an institution. In these circumstances the most acute
questions arise and the most radical answers are called for. I am not suggesting that all
of us with such devastating handicaps probe deeply into the meaning of life, nor that we
automatically gain great wisdom or sanctity. We have our defences like anyone else. But
it does seem that our situation tends to make us ask questions that few people ask in the
ordinary world. And it also means that to some extent we are set apart from, or rather have
34 Paul Hunt

a special position within, the everyday society that most people take it for granted they
belong to.
I want to look at this special situation largely in terms of our relations with others, our
place in society. This is essentially related to the personal aspect of coping with disablement,
which I hope it will at the same time illuminate, since the problem of disability lies not only
in the impairment of function and its effects on us individually, but also, more importantly,
in the area of our relationship with ‘normal’ people. If everyone were disabled as we are,
there would be no special situation to consider. This focus on the ways in which we are set
apart from the ordinary does not mean that I see us as really separated from society. In fact
the reverse assumption underlies everything I write. We are society, as much as anybody,
and cannot be considered in isolation from it. I am aware of the danger of concentrating
on the ways in which disability makes us like each other and unlike the normal, and thus
being trapped into the common fault of viewing people in terms of one characteristic to the
exclusion of all others. Disabled people suffer enough from that kind of thing already. But
whatever the differences between us, we do have certain sets of experiences in common.
In dealing with this aspect of our lives I have tried not to forget two others – our
uniqueness as persons and the human nature we share with the rest of mankind. I think
the distinguishing mark of disabled people’s special position is that they tend to ‘challenge’
in their relations with ordinary society. This challenge takes five main forms: as unfortunate,
useless, different, oppressed and sick. All these are only facets of one situation, but here it seems
worth taking each in turn. The first way in which we challenge others is by being unfortunate.
Severely disabled people are generally considered to have been unlucky, to be deprived and
poor, to lead cramped lives. We do not enjoy many of the ‘goods’ that people in our society
are accustomed to. The opportunity for marriage and having children, authority at home
and at work, the chance to earn money, independence and freedom of movement, a house
and a car – these things, and plenty more, may be denied us. Underprivileged as we are in
this sense, one point seems to be clear. If the worth of human beings depends on a high
social status, on the possession of wealth, on a position as parent, husband or wife – if
such things are all-important – then those of us who have lost or never had them are indeed
unfortunate. Our lives must be tragically upset and marred for ever, we must be only half
alive, only half human. And it is a fact that most of us, whatever our explicit views, tend
to act as though such ‘goods’ are essential to a fully human existence. Their possession is
seen as the key to entry into a promised land of civilized living.
But set over against this common sense attitude is another fact, a strange one. In my
experience even the most severely disabled people retain an ineradicable conviction that
they are still fully human in all that is ultimately necessary. Obviously each person can
deny this, and act accordingly. Yet even when he is most depressed, even when he says
he would be better off dead, the underlying sense of his own worth remains. This basic
feeling for the value of the person as such becomes fully operational, as it were, when those
with severe disabilities live full and happy lives in defiance of the usual expectations. An
increasing number of people do seem to overcome their misfortunes like this, and it is they
who present the most effective challenge to society. When confronted with someone who
is evidently coping with tragic circumstances, able-bodied people tend to deny the reality
of the adjustment. The disabled person is simply making the best of a bad job, putting
A critical condition 35

a good face on it. There may be some truth in this. But when it becomes obvious that
there is also a genuine happiness, another defensive attitude is taken up. The ‘unfortunate’
person is assumed to have wonderful and exceptional courage (although underneath this
overt canonization there is usually a degree of irritation and hostility which comes to light
at moments of stress). This devalues other disabled people by implication, and leaves the
fit person still with his original view that disablement is really utterly tragic.
Such reactions appear to be caused by the need to safeguard a particular scale of values,
where someone’s sense of security depends on this being maintained. He almost wants
the disabled person to suffer, as a confirmation that the values denied him are still worthy
and important and good. If he shows no obvious sign of suffering, then he must challenge
people whose own worth seems to them to be bound up with their more fortunate position
in life.
So if those of us who are disabled live as fully as we can, while being completely
conscious of the tragedy of our situation – this is the possibility when one has an alert mind
– then somehow we can communicate to others an awareness that the value of the human
person transcends his social status, attributes and possessions or his lack of them. This
applies however much we recognize these ‘accidents’ as important, and however much
we regard the ‘goods’ I have mentioned as the normal elements in a full life. What we
oppose is only the assumption that makes them absolutely indispensible for a completely
human existence. Perhaps we can help prepare people for the almost certain day when they
themselves lose, at least in old age, some of the advantages that are so highly valued. But
anyway, those who implicitly believe that a man’s worth depends on his good fortune must
be building their lives on rather inadequate foundations, and they will perhaps find contact
with us a thought-provoking experience.
A second aspect of our special position in society is that we are often useless, unable to
contribute to the economic good of the community. As such, again we cannot help posing
questions about values, about what a person is, what he is for, about whether his work is
the ultimate criterion of his worth, whether work in the everyday sense of the word is the
most important or the only contribution anyone can make to society.
There is no doubt that we do put great stress on the individual’s economic contribution.
Most people are wrapped up in a workaday, utilitarian world, and regard anything not
visibly productive as expendable. Contemplation, philosophy, wisdom, the liberal arts, get
short shrift from the average man. Those who cannot work, such as the sick, aged or
unemployed, are subject to a tremendous pressure to feel useless, or at least of less value
than the breadwinner.
I am not indicting some abstract society for getting its priorities wrong; each of us shares
responsibility for the prevailing attitudes. Also I am far from saying that work, in the sense
of contributing to the wealth of the community, is unimportant. Of course willingness to
pull one’s weight is an essential part of a healthy and balanced outlook on life and other
people. But I am concerned that we should not elevate the idea of work in our minds to
the point where it dominates values that ought to transcend it. It is important not to do
this, if only because it causes the most acute suffering in those of us who cannot help being
parasites on the economic body. Obviously we who are disabled are deeply affected by the
assumptions of our uselessness that surround us. But it is vital that we should not accept
36 Paul Hunt

this devaluation of ourselves, yearning only to be able to earn our livings and thus prove
our worth. We do not have to prove anything.
If we have a basic willingness to contribute to the community, yet cannot do an ordinary
job, we may certainly contribute in less obvious ways; even, and perhaps especially, if these
seem insignificant beside the ‘real world of work’. Our freedom from the competitive
trappings that accompany work in our society may give us the opportunity to demonstrate its
essential elements. Also we can act as a symbol for the pre-eminent claims of non-utilitarian
values, a visible challenge to anyone who treats his job as a final end in itself. And we do of
course afford people the chance to be generous in support of the needy, thus enabling them
to give practical expression to their desire to go beyond the acquisitive instinct.
At the ultimate point we may only be able to suffer, to be passive through complete
physical inability. Just here we have a special insight to offer, because our position gives
us an extra experience of life in the passive aspect that is one half of the human reality.
Those who lead active lives are perhaps especially inclined to ignore man’s need to accept
passivity in relation to so many forces beyond his control. They may need reminding
sometimes of our finiteness, our feminine side in the hands of fate or providence. We are
well placed to do this job at least.
The next challenging characteristic of the disabled is that we are different, abnormal,
marked out as members of a minority group. Normality is so often put forward as the
goal for people with special handicaps, that we have come to accept its desirability as a
dogma. But even if one takes a common sense meaning for the word – being like most
people in our society – it is doubtful if this is what we should really fix our sights on. For
one thing it is impossible of achievement, at certain levels anyway. Obviously we cannot be
physically normal, are doomed to be deviants in this sense at least. Also we must be affected
psychologically by our disabilities, and to some extent be moulded into a distinct class by
our experiences. But more important, what kind of goal is this elusive normality? If it does
mean simply trying to be like the majority, then it is hardly a good enough ideal at which
to aim. Whether they are physically handicapped or not, people need something more than
this to work towards if they are to contribute their best to society and grow to maturity.
Of course there is a certain value in our trying to keep up with ordinary society, and
relate to it; but it is essential to define the sense in which this is a good thing. Once more I
am not rejecting in a sour-grapes spirit the many excellent normal goals that may be denied
us – marrying, earning one’s living, and so on. What I am rejecting is society’s tendency to
set up rigid standards of what is right and proper, to force the individual into a mould. Our
constant experience of this pressure towards unthinking conformity in some way relates
us to other obvious deviants and outcasts like the Jew in a gentile world, a Negro in a white
world, homosexuals, the mentally handicapped; and also to more voluntary rebels in every
sphere – artists, philosophers, prophets, who are essentially subversive elements in society.
This is another area where disabled people can play an important role.
Those we meet cannot fail to notice our disablement even if they turn away quickly and
avoid thinking about us afterwards. An impaired and deformed body is a ‘difference’ that
hits everyone hard at first. Inevitably it produces an instinctive revulsion, has a disturbing
effect. Our own first reaction to this is to want to hide ourselves in the crowd, to attempt
to buy acceptance on any terms, to agree uncritically with whatever is the done thing.
A critical condition 37

Feeling excessively self-conscious we would like to bury ourselves in society away from
the stares of the curious, and even the special consideration of the kindly, both of which
serve to emphasize our difference from the majority. But this very natural impulse has to
be resisted. We must try to help people accept the fact of our unavoidable difference from
them which implies that we are attempting to integrate it within ourselves too. However,
this does not mean just creating a comfortable atmosphere of acceptance around ourselves,
building up a circle of able-bodied friends who treat us right, and trying to leave it at
that. It is imperative that the effort should be followed through to the point where we,
and those we come into contact with, understand that it is not just a case of our minds
compensating for our disabilities, or something like that.
We can witness to the truth that a person’s dignity does not rest even in his consciousness,
and certainly that it does not rest in his beauty, age, intelligence or colour. Those of us with
unimpaired minds but severely disabled bodies, have a unique opportunity to show other
people not only that our big difference from them does not lessen our worth, but also that
no difference between men, however real, unpleasant and disturbing, does away with their
right to be treated as fully human.
We face more obviously than most the universal problem of coming to terms with the
fact of man’s individuality and loneliness. If we begin to accept our own special peculiarity,
we shall be in a position to help others accept even their own difference from everyone
else. These two acceptances are bound up together. People’s shocked reactions to the
obvious deviant often reflect their own deepest fears and difficulties, their failure to accept
themselves as they really are, and the other person simply as ‘other’. The disabled person’s
‘strangeness’ can manifest and symbolize all differences between human beings. In his
relations with more nearly normal people he may become a medium for reconciling them
to the fact of these differences, and demonstrate their relative unimportance compared to
what we have in common.
The fourth challenging aspect of our situation follows inevitably from our being different
and having minority status. Disabled people often meet prejudice, which expresses itself
in discrimination and even oppression. Sometimes it seems to us that we just can’t win.
Whatever we do, whether good or bad, people put it down to our being disabled. Meeting
this kind of attitude constantly can be depressing and infinitely wearing. You may produce
the most logical and persuasive arguments only to have them dismissed, without even the
compliment of counter-argument, as products of your disability. The frustrating thing is
that there is no appeal against this. If you point out what is happening you are assured it
isn’t, that you are imagining a prejudice which does not exist. And immediately you know
you are branded again as being unrealistic and impossibly subjective. So many people take
it for granted that what you say can be explained by a crude theory of compensation, and
therefore is of no account or self-evidently false. And they tell themselves that you can’t
really help having these ideas, poor thing.
One rather doubtful pleasure is to discover that this ‘poor thing’ attitude does not
survive a determined rejection of the able-bodied person’s assumption of inherent
superiority. He admits equality as a theory, but when you act as though you are equal
then the crucial test comes. Most people are good-willed liberals towards us up to this
point, but not all of them survive close contact with disability without showing some less
38 Paul Hunt

attractive traits. Of course it is not only the ‘fit’ who are like this. I know I have instinctive
prejudices against lots of people; against the able-bodied to start with. It is a basic human
characteristic to fear and put up barriers against those who are different from ourselves.
Without for a moment justifying any of its manifestations, it seems to me just as ‘natural’
to be prejudiced against someone with a defective body (or mind) as it is to have difficulty
in accepting the members of another racial group. Maybe it is invidious to compare our
situation with that of racial minorities in any way. The injustice and brutality suffered by so
many because of racial tension makes our troubles as disabled people look very small. But
I think there is a connection somewhere, since all prejudice springs from the same roots.
And there stirs in me a little of the same anger as the Negro writer James Baldwin reveals
in The Fire Next Time (1964) when I remember the countless times I have seen disabled
people hurt, treated as less than people, told what to do and how to behave by those whose
only claim to do this came from prejudice and their power over them.
In the hospitals and homes I have lived in one rarely sees any physical cruelty. But
I have experienced enough of other kinds of subtly corrupting behaviour. There are
administrators and matrons who have had people removed on slight pretexts, who try to
break up ordinary friendships if they don’t approve of them. There are the staff who bully
those who cannot complain, who dictate what clothes people should wear, who switch the
television off in the middle of a programme, and will take away ‘privileges’ (like getting up
for the day) when they choose. Then there are the visitors who automatically assume an
authority over us and interfere without regard for our wishes. Admittedly some of these
examples are trivial, and I have not mentioned all the excellent people who make any
sort of life possible for us. But still I think it is true that we meet fundamentally the same
attitude which discriminates against anyone different and shades off into oppression under
the right – or rather wrong – conditions.
In the wider community the similarity is even clearer. Employers turn away qualified
and competent workers simply because they are disabled. Restaurants and pubs give
transparent excuses for refusing our custom. Landladies reject disabled lodgers. Parents
and relations fight the marriage of a cripple into their family – perhaps with more reason
than with a black African, but with many of the same arguments. And it’s not hard to see
the analogy between a racial ghetto and the institutions where disabled people are put away
and given enough care to salve society’s conscience.
Of course there are vast differences between our situation and that of many other
‘downtrodden’ people. One of these is that we are not a potential threat to lives and
property. For this reason alone we can be hopeful that at least our freedom from open
discrimination can be achieved even though we shall never have sufficient power in the
community to ensure this. It also gives us a good chance of avoiding the ever-present
danger for those who are oppressed – that they will pay homage to the same god of power
that is harming their oppressors.
The elimination of prejudice is not really possible: a helpful social climate can only do
so much, and each individual and generation has to renew a fight that cannot be won. It
is true that we still have to solve the problem of means and ends; of whether, or rather
in what way, we should oppose evil. But perhaps precisely because violence and power-
seeking are not really practical possibilities for us, we are well placed to consider other ways
A critical condition 39

of achieving freedom from injustice. However, we should be careful that our weakness
here does not become an excuse for sterile resignation. One reason why we must resist
prejudice, injustice, oppression, is that they not only tend to diminish us, but far more
to diminish our oppressors. If you try to care about people you cannot be indifferent to
what is happening to those who treat you badly, and you have to oppose them. If this
opposition is to be by means of patience and long-suffering, then they must be directed at
the abolition of evil or they are just forms of masochism.
In this section I have not only been drawing an analogy between our position in
society and that of racial minorities, but also pointing out the connection between all the
manifestations of prejudice and discrimination. This connection means that although we
cannot directly assist the American Negro, for instance, in his resistance to oppression,
in one way we can help everyone who suffers injustice. We do this above all by treating
properly those we meet. There are always people we feel superior to or resent – the
mentally ill, the aged, children, those who patronize us or hurt us. If we do not try to treat
all these as fully human beings, then it is certain we would not be able to help the Negro
or anyone else in a similar predicament. Here, as in so many instances, it is true that what
we do is a symbol of what we would do. Not only can we do no more than to let an act
substitute for a more splendid act, but no one can do more. This is the reconciliation.
The last aspect of our challenge to society as disabled people is that we are sick, suffering,
diseased, in pain. For the able-bodied, normal world we are representatives of many of the
things they most fear – tragedy, loss, dark and the unknown. Involuntarily we walk – or more
often sit – in the valley of the shadow of death. Contact with us throws up in people’s faces
the fact of sickness and death in the world. No one likes to think of such which in themselves
are an affront to all things, our aspirations and hopes. A deformed and paralysed body attacks
everyone’s sense of well-being and invincibility. People do not want to acknowledge what
disability affirms – that life is tragic and we shall all soon be dead. So they are inclined to
avoid those who are sick or old, shying from the disturbing reminders of unwelcome reality.
Here I would suggest that our role in society can be likened to that of the satirist in
some respects. Maybe we have to remind people of a side of life they would sooner forget.
We do this primarily by what we are. But we can intensify it and make it more productive if
we are fully conscious of the tragedy of our situation, yet show by our lives that we believe
this is not the final tragedy. Closely involved with death and dark in the unconscious and
subconscious, though really distinct, is the idea of evil. An almost automatic linkage is
made not only between a sick body and a sick mind, but also undoubtedly between an evil
body and an evil mind, a warped personality.
There is a definite relation between the concepts of health and holiness. So many of
the words used about health are moral ones – we talk of a good or bad leg, of being fit and
unfit, of walking properly, of perfect physique. And disabled people find that the common
assumption of good health as a natural thing often comes over to us as an ‘ought’, carries
with it undertones of a moral failure on our part. ‘If only you had enough will-power...’ is
the modern-dress version of the idea that we are possessed by an evil spirit.
Then there are traces of a desire to externalize evil, to find a scapegoat, in attitudes
to the sick. Sometimes people are evidently trying to reassure themselves that they are
‘saved’, justified, in a state of grace. I do not mean just the feeling of gaining merit from
40 Paul Hunt

charitable works, but rather a satisfaction got from their ‘good’ selves juxtaposed with the
‘unclean’, the untouchables, who provide them with an assurance that they are all right,
on the right side. No doubt this process works the other way too. Our experience of
subjection as sick people may give us a sense of being holy and predestined in contrast to
our condescending, prejudiced fellow men. But such attitudes, whether in ourselves or
others, have to be constantly resisted and rooted out. They are simply products of our own
fears and weaknesses, and any temporary security they give is false and dangerous.
I have dealt briefly with five interrelated aspects of disabled people’s position as a
challenge to some of the common values of society: as unfortunate, useless, different, oppressed
and sick. A paradoxical law runs through the whole of the situation I have been describing.
It is that only along the line of maximum resistance to diminishment can we arrive at the
required point for a real acceptance of what is unalterable. We have first to acknowledge
the value of the good things of life – of prosperity, usefulness, normality, integration with
society, good health – and be fully extended in the search for fulfillment in ordinary human
terms, before we can begin to achieve a fruitful resignation. Nowadays many disabled
people will have nothing to do with resignation as it used to be understood. Thriving in a
climate of increasing public tolerance and kindness, and on a diet of pensions and welfare,
we are becoming presumptuous. Now we reject any view of ourselves as being lucky to be
allowed to live. We reject too all the myths and superstitions that have surrounded us in
the past. We are challenging society to take account of us, to listen to what we have to say,
to acknowledge us as an integral part of society itself. We do not want ourselves, or anyone
else, treated as second-class citizens and put away out of sight and mind. Many of us are
just beginning to refuse to be put away, to insist that we are part of life too. We are saying
that being deformed and paralysed, blind or deaf – or old or mentally sick for that matter
– is not a crime or in any meaningful sense of the words a divine punishment. Illness and
impairment are facts of existence, diminishment and death are there to be thought about
and must be taken account of in any realistic view of the world. We are perhaps also saying
that society is itself sick if it can’t face our sickness, if it does not overcome its natural fear
and dislike of unpleasantness as manifested by disability.
We are asking of people something that lies a lot deeper than almsgiving. We want an
extension of the impulse that inspires this, so that it becomes a gift of self rather than the
dispensing of bounty (material and other kinds) from above. To love and respect, treat
as equals, people as obviously ‘inferior’ as we are, requires real humility and generosity.
I believe that our demand to be treated like this is based on a truth about human beings
which everyone needs to recognize – which is why we have a particularly important
function here. But there is also no doubt that acquiring and maintaining such an attitude
runs contrary to some of people’s most deep seated impulses and prejudices. The quality
of the relationship the community has with its least fortunate members is a measure of its
own health. The articulate person with a severe disability may to some extent represent
and speak on behalf of all those who perhaps cannot interpret their predicament, or protest
for themselves – the weak, sick, poor and aged throughout the world. They too are rejects
from ordinary life, and are subject to the same experience of devaluation by society.
This linkage with other ‘unfortunates’, with the shadow side of life, is not always easy
to accept. For the disabled person with a fair intelligence or other gifts, perhaps the greatest
A critical condition 41

temptation is to try to use them just to escape from his disabledness, to buy himself a
place in the sun, a share in the illusory normal world where all is light and pleasure and
happiness. Naturally we want to get away from and forget the sickness, depression, pain,
loneliness and poverty of which we see probably more than our share. But if we deny
our special relation to the dark in this way, we shall have ceased to recognize our most
important asset as disabled people in society – the uncomfortable, subversive position from
which we act as a living reproach to any scale of values that puts attributes or possessions
before the person.

Note
Paul Hunt was founder of the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) in
1972, which invited disabled people to form a group to confront disability issues, based on the ideas
developed in work, like this essay, written whilst he was living in an institution. UPIAS was one of the
first Disability Rights organisations in the UK. It challenged the charitable model of disability support,
and argued for recognition of disabled peoples’ own expertise and rights of self-determination. The
group were instrumental in developing the terms ‘medical’ and ‘social model’ of disability and in
making new differentiating definitions between impairment and disability. You can find the UPIAS
Founding Statement here: http://disability-studies.leeds.ac.uk/files/library/UPIAS-UPIAS.pdf
The campaigning that developed from these initiatives, as well as equivalent organisations in
other countries, formed the basis of government legislation improving accessibility for disabled
people in the UK, the US and elsewhere.
4
LYING DOWN ANYHOW

Disability and the rebel body

Liz Crow (2013)

Chapter 12, reprinted from J. Swain, S. French, C.

Barnes and C. Thomas (eds) (2013) Disabling Barriers
– Enabling Environments, 3rd edition, London and
New York: Sage, pp. 85–91.

In this chapter, I begin with a short autobiographical piece about lying down in public
places. This is followed by an exploration of the influences involved in the process of Lying
Down Anyhow.

We sip from glasses of orange juice and half-pint lagers on a cool afternoon in
autumn, a gentle rise and fall of conversation, and I nudge off my shoes to lie upon
the cushioned window seat. From behind the bar, the landlord hurls himself towards
me, his face as livid as the velvet beneath me. “Get up, get up, get out. This is a
respectable establishment.”

***

When I lie down, it is clean mountain air, cool water in blistering summer, soft rains
of release. Sit up, and I am fragile as ice, a light breeze might shatter me. Sitting up,
I am beyond my body; lying down, cradled by gravity, I creep back in to occupy my
self.
In the privacy of home, I move from bed to sofa, sofa to floor, pillow, rugs and
hardwood boards. I lie down wherever I happen to be, with the ease of twenty years’
practice, freely.
But in the world outside, I am censored. I seek out-of-the-way spaces: corridors
and empty classrooms, fields and first aid rooms and once, even, a graveyard. I wait
to be alone, tuck myself from sight and then, only then, as though it is a thing of
shame, I recline.
Lying down anyhow 43

To be a part of the social world, I must sit: brace myself, block body from mind,
steel will. To lie down is to absent myself from ordinary spaces. I wonder how many
of us there are skulking in the in-between spaces. And I wonder at how such an
everyday action, a simple thing born of necessity, became a thing to conceal. What
taught us our shame?

***

“Lie down on the job” and we purposely neglect our work. “Let something lie” and
we decline to take action. A “layabout” slacks and skives and shirks. The English
language tells me my shame. Is that why, when I look around, I see lying down in
public places only in the merest snatches and swatches of life, as though those of us
who lie down have been written out?
Work hard enough, and I may recline, guiltless, in the green of summer parks or
bake on sun-kissed beaches. With degrees of censure, young enough, slim enough,
pretty enough, I can enter a young love’s tryst, entwined on grassy banks. I can
child’s play Sleeping Lions and make angels in the snow, or pose as death on a yoga
mat until body and self dissolve.
Ill enough, and I can lie down on doctor’s couch or in hospital bed, a properly
licensed space. In extremis – grand mal and hypo, knife attack and heart attack – I
can make the street my bed; although, mistaken for drunk or overly-dramatic, my
saviour might just “let it lie” and cross over the road.
Human beings do not, apparently, much lie down and, if they must, then they
tempt accelerated demise. In the annals of research, lying down is all let-this-be-
a-warning treatises on the dangers of bedrest, of bone demineralisation and blood
clots. Yet for me, lying down is my holding together; far from demise, this is my way
to life.
In well-earned leisure, in pleasure, play and extremes, we may lie down in public
places. In carefully controlled circumstances, we will not be judged for idleness and
sloth. But why is it, as adults, to lie down amongst others, we must either be productive
or chasing death? It is as though, in permitting ourselves to lie down in carefully
sanctioned spaces, we have become convinced of our autonomy, when all we have
proved is the strength of its prohibition.
Out in the urban jungle, edgy young designers create street furniture to dissuade
the populace from lying down: benches divided by armrests, rails for perching,
seats which revolve to prevent extended idling (Lockton 2008). New laws in
multiple cities around the world make it an offence to lie down in public places. If
Westminster Council prevails, lying down could cost me £500 (Bullivant 2011); in
San Bruno it could earn me six months in jail (Municipal Code 2011). This is not,
you understand, a bid to address the social costs of homelessness, just to move on,
design out, that which does not conform. Lying down in public spaces is no longer
merely invisible; it is to be disappeared.
It seems it will take a brave woman to undertake public lying down. I intend to be
her. I will not be disappeared.
44 Liz Crow

I vowed to write lightly because I am writing of something so simple: of stretching

out my legs, reclining my body, resting my head, amongst people. Lying down, for
me, is lightness. But this is not light. To lie down, in social spaces, is not a simple act
of physiology; it is a statement. In the midst of codes that say you do not do this, to lie
down in public is confrontation.
Perhaps if it did not matter so much, it would be easy.
Still, I worry about the small things.
To lie down in front of others feels so exposed. The bed exists in private space;
it is sleep and sex, intimacy and guard let down. In public, reclined, I have so much
body; it unfolds and unravels on the horizontal plane, taking up more than its share
of space. It flaunts itself, “look at me,” and eclipses face and mind. I watch myself
through the eyes and ideas, the anxieties and judgements of others; danger lurks in
being misread. And I wonder: shall I keep my boots on or tuck them neatly to one
side? There is no guidebook.
Lying down in public places demands portion control, dress sense and, in summer
months, attention to the calluses on my feet. If I am to become a poster girl for the
disappeared, I’d like to look my best.
The absence of a guidebook could yet become my freedom. If the rules cannot
be kept, then they are there for the breaking. And so I shall search for better ways.

***

Tying my bootlaces by the front door, I glance up and see anew a picture that has
hung so long it had blended to invisibility. A black-and-white engraving from the
1893 Graphic celebrates the fashionable seaside resort of Brighton where wealthy
society brought ailments for salt-water cures. A gentleman, pale faced in bowler hat
and waxed moustache, reclines upon a bath chair. His arm rests languidly upon the
furs that swathe him and his fingers grip tight upon a cigarette. Well-wishers smile
and hang upon his every word: a lady admirer takes him by the hand, a gentleman
rests an arm tenderly on the hood of the chaise, and a large dog stands sentinel. He
is, the title tells us, An Interesting Invalid, and, though the chair’s canopy frames him
like a halo, he better describes a more fabulous, dissipated, dolce vita of invalidism.
Perhaps this is a sensibility to aspire to.
Closer to nirvana, the Reclining Buddha rests his head upon a lotus flower. He
lies feet together, long toes aligned, adorned in offerings of oranges and marigolds.
In Thailand, the Buddha lies vast in stone, wrapped Christo-like in saffron folds
(Visbeek 2009), which billow in the breeze. There are four “respect-inspiring
forms” (Tophoff 2006) in Buddhism, and the fourth of these is lying down. A lighter
expression of being, it shifts us “out of the way of the Way” (Vassi 1984), so that we
may more readily find the path to an authentic self. Is there revelation in this for
me? Lie down and I am freed from the distraction of physicality to reoccupy my self;
transcending the tethers of the social world, I find there are other ways to be.
The reclining figures of Henry Moore survey the landscape with a gaze that is far-
seeing. Rooted in this earth, organic, monumental, they cast aside the myth of beauty
Lying down anyhow 45

to embrace the energy, barely contained, of the static form. His figures rise from stone
so embodied, so absolutely present, they almost breathe. I read of the themes of the
sculptor’s work – truth to the material, form-knowledge, resurrection (Wilkinson
2002) – and I smile. I respond to my own materiality, shaping myself to its truth and
find, for me, that lying down is life restored. And, just as the figures echo the contours
of the Yorkshire in which they belong, when I lie down, I come home.
Moore would “give everything” to chisel figures “more alive than a real person”
(Wilkinson 2002), though few could outdo the cojones of Frida Kahlo. All passion and
flesh, she painted her very self. From her bed, reflecting her gaze in a ceiling-mounted
mirror, she described the play of gravity on the contours of a body lying down. I see
her now, muddying the bed sheets with oil and turpentine, lust and rebellion hand-
in-hand. Always one for the grand entrance, she is photographed lying in state at the
opening of a solo show, the paintings hastily rearranged to accommodate her bed
(Herrera 1983) until Frida herself became a work of art. No fears holding her back.
Even after she had left the room, her bed remained.
When he was ill, Christopher Newell would have his bed wheeled to the front of
the tiered lecture theatre in Hobart Hospital, from where he would address future-
doctors on the ethics of their profession, urging his audiences to “dare to encounter
the muckiness of everyday ethical decision making” (Newell 2002). As associate
professor, he lay down with authority, and he lay down knowingly. He unfolded
and unravelled his body amongst people in a bid to move his students from “other
to us” (Newell 2006) to bring them to a point of knowing deep down the humanity
of those they would meet in their later professional lives. He lay down for both his
comfort and his campaign.
In the sand dunes of Kijkduin, on the North Sea coast of the Netherlands, lies a
crater, 30 metres across, entered through an underground passage (Frank 2011). At
its core lies a bench of stone built for lying down, in sculpture that can only ever be
appreciated prone. Supporting the whole of the body, it tips the head back until your
gaze is cast upwards, beyond the circle of the crater’s rim, from where you fall up up
up into a canopy of sky. We believe we know the sky, arched above us in the everyday,
but Turrell’s sculpture of light wraps it, traces its edges, and the world looks different
from here.
I vowed to write lightly because lying down, for me, is lightness and Turrell’s
Celestial Vault begins to uncover a lighter way. When I gaze up, does his sky fall in upon
me, or does it fall away? Does it threaten to come hurtling down, or can I reach up to
touch it? When I lie down, transgressing my society’s norms, should I brace myself for
disapproval or shall I lean towards it in curiosity and embodied exploration? Is lying
down an act, or is it a process of discovering the people who surround me? There are
many ways to be in the world.
And now I remember. I lay down another time in public. In Covent Garden,
cobbles unyielding, I dragged a large foam cushion behind me. Oh, this time it was
good. We were a festival of artists with rebel bodies and an outsider view. For that day,
we occupied the space, discovering who we might be in a world that was ours. I lay
down amongst people and it felt just fine.
46 Liz Crow

So here is my choice: I can absent myself from the social world, or I can lie down
anyhow. If there is no guidebook, I shall write one for myself. I will not “take this
lying down”.
My guide is not about managing shame or the troubled body. My guide is about
seizing some small courage and breaking rules that cry out to be broken. It is about
laughing with the results and going back for more. And it’s about realising that, when
I push the boundaries, others find their courage too: that time, that conference,
where I sat on the floor and, two days later, amidst sighs and wry smiles, at least half
the people there had made themselves more comfortable too.
My guide shows me that lying down is not a simple act of physiology but my
marking out a place in the world. Sitting up is about my body, but lying down is a
declaration of liberty, the soft rain of release.
And so, I see it now; here is my freedom: I shall be fabulous in my dissipation,
delight in the earth-mother voluptuousness of a Henry Moore, get out of the way
of the Way in my drapes of gold and protest from the very heart of body and soul.
I shall be Frida Kahlo, has she no shame, brazen hussy, wearing her wounds with
pride. And my boots I shall tuck neatly to one side.
And every time I venture out and lie down, it will be a fanfare for the disappeared,
a toast to the rebel body, and I will say, we are here and we are here and we are here.

Lying Down Anyhow begins in the physicality of the body, the freedom that is, for me,
the act of lying down. Yet, when I ask why lying down in public is so very hard to do, it
transforms to a story about external codes and constraints, those emotional, social, political
and cultural influences that shape the body’s way of being. Lying Down Anyhow is less
the story of a troubled body than of its interface with the language, values and physical
structures that limit the possibilities of lying down in public places.
Those codes and constraints permeate my internal world, shaping my thinking and
behaviour. Internalising external sanctions and their attendant shame, I censor myself,
believing that lying down in public places cannot be done. But, when I question their
validity, I find there are other ways to respond. Lying Down Anyhow extends from a story
of why it is so difficult to lie down in public to a decision that the constraints cannot be
allowed to limit my life or the life of others; it is a decision not to be “disappeared”.
In changing my response, I shift to the role of activist. Since there is no guidebook,
I write my own, producing a counter-narrative to say beyond doubt that “we are here”.
I find myself in a process of freeing the imagination to new ways of being in the world.
Setting out to make sense of my own world, I find I am also drafting a map for others to
follow. My response is an antidote to the constraints and, even as they continue to hold me
back, I begin to reform them in return.
I tell a story of lying down despite the constraints, to spite the constraints. And whilst
such prohibitions become apparent only in collision with bodies which do not, or cannot,
conform, I realise that theirs is an influence exerted upon us all. Lying Down Anyhow begins
with my body but is, more truthfully, a tale for every body in a social world.
I begin to question whether this is a story of disability at all. In writing Lying Down
Anyhow, increasingly I find the difficulty of lying down in public to be a symbol of the
Lying down anyhow 47

universal constraints that impact upon us all. It is a symbol of the collective need to
find courage to break those myriad rules that cry out to be broken. Lying Down Anyhow
becomes a story of the larger human condition and our need for better ways of being in
the world.
In passing the text onwards, I ponder what it might set in motion. I hope there will be
readers who recognise their own experience in mine and, in doing so, find “some small
courage” too. Perhaps they will not lie down in public, but find from inside themselves
the capacity to confront other constraints that hold them back. In questioning who we are
and how we want to be, Lying Down Anyhow opens up possibilities for celebrating the rebel
body and finding a more curious way of living.

FIGURE 4.1 Liz Crow (2012–13) Bedding Out, a live durational performance (Salisbury Arts
Centre). Photo: Matthew Fessey/Roaring Girl Productions. By permission of the artist
Bedding Out was a durational performance which emerged from the current welfare benefits overhaul in the UK,
which threatens many with poverty and a propagandist campaign that has seen a doubling in disability hate crime.
The project had artist-activist Liz Crow taking her private bed-oriented life and placing it in the public arena
for all to see over a 48-hour period in order to show that what many see as contradiction, or fraud, is simply the
complexity of life. The work was livestreamed to 10,000 people in over 50 countries.
Members of the public were invited to participate in “Bedside Conversations”, gathering around the bed to
talk about the work, its backdrop and its politics, while those unable to attend in person were invited to take part
virtually, through social media.
5
BLINDING THE POWER OF SIGHT

Rod Michalko (2015)

It is easier, Fredric Jameson (2003) suggests, to imagine the end of the world than it is to
imagine a different one. Without treating what Jameson says as an empirical claim or a
stipulation, I will explore one of the possibilities that flows from what Jameson says. In doing
so, though, I will heed his call for us to imagine. Imagining Jameson’s words as a call, and thus
as a provocation, I will begin, to borrow from Thomas King (2003) “back in imagination.”
It is not that it is impossible to imagine a different world or to imagine difference, for
we sometimes do. While not impossible, imagining a different world is difficult, at least it
is more difficult than imagining the end of the world. Easier for us to imagine, the end of
the world comes more rapidly to us than does a different one. We seem to be closer to the
end than we are to difference. But, what is this temporal and spatial connection we have
to the end of the world and what makes our connection to a different world more distant
and thus more difficult?
It is easy to imagine the end of the world and, therefore, such an imagining brings with
it a sense of ease. Imagining a different world, in contrast, brings a sense of unease. We are
relatively at ease with an image of a world that ends and not so at ease with an image of a
world that is different.
Images of a different world may be disruptive and even scary. A different world, if it
is truly different, must surely disrupt the world we know as ours, the world in which we
now live. The science fiction genre, for example, has been disrupting and scaring us for
decades. Such images of different worlds, of course, rely upon a current understanding of
“a world” as a key source for the generation of disruption. Without a current image of the
world, a different one is impossible or, put differently, without sameness, no difference.
So different from the sameness of our current world, the science fiction world is scary. It
is not easy to imagine such a world, let alone to imagine living in it and, thankfully, the
category “fiction” gets us out of doing either. Nonetheless, the image of even fictional
worlds of difference often generates unease. Imagining a non-fictional world of difference
is not as easy as imagining a fictional one. It is very difficult to imagine living in such a
Blinding the power of sight 49

world, and a mere glimpse at such an image generates not only unease but trepidation and,
at times, even horror.
The end of the world is often more appealing than its continuation in difference. A
different world, and again, if it is truly different, means not only the end of the current one
(something relatively easy to imagine), but it also means living in difference (something
not so easy to imagine). A different world is difficult to imagine and living in it is even
more difficult to imagine and sometimes, even, unimaginable. The images of difference
and life in difference come to us, conjoined as they are with a veil of unease and we resort
to imagining the end of the world since…it is easier.
Let me try to illustrate what I have been saying. Sometime ago, I was having a beer in a
bar, a bar with which I am very familiar. At one point, I decided to move to the bar’s patio
to smoke a cigarette. I did what I normally do; I unfolded my white cane and proceeded to
locate the floor mat directly in front of the door. Finding the mat, I located the door and
passed through. With my cane in my right hand in front of me I moved slightly left and
found the second door. I moved through it and onto the patio. I moved to my left once
again and began to walk the three or four steps to where I knew I would find a wooden
ledge. I could then do what I always did – lean on the ledge, light and smoke a cigarette.
But, something happened that didn’t always happen, in fact, it had never happened
before. Cane in my right hand and with my left hand extended slightly forward and a
little to the left so that I could locate the sandwich board that always stood there, I took
the first step of the three or four that would lead me to the wooden ledge. Two steps later,
my left hand found the sandwich board and I proceeded to move the final couple of steps
to the ledge.
To my surprise, though, my left hand touched something; it was soft, clothing perhaps,
and I quickly withdrew my hand thinking that it might be a person even though no voice
came from what I had touched. Still, imagining that the unaccountable soft object might
be a person, I said “Sorry.” Framed in a nervous sounding laugh, the words “Oh, it’s okay,”
came from the soft object. Sure enough, it was a person whose voice I heard as that of a
woman. Laughing a little too, I again said that I was sorry and moved slightly to my right
to locate the wooden ledge.
To my surprise again, another voice – a voice I heard this time as male: “You’re good
to go straight out now,” he said. “I was coming out here for a cigarette,” I said, “are you
people smoking?” The male voice spoke – “No, no we’re going into the bar. We were just
waiting out of your way so you could get out.” I said that maybe they could move around
me and go into the bar and that I would lean against the ledge, pointing to it, and have a
cigarette. The woman laughed again, the man said “Great,” and I heard them move around
me to the bar. The man spoke once more, though, and I supposed that the two of them had
reached the first door of the bar and, since the man lowered his voice, I was quite certain
that he thought I wouldn’t hear what he said. “I could never be blind,” he said, but I heard.
Now, if I heard what the man said as an empirical claim, I could dismiss what he said as
simply wrong. He could, after all, “go blind”; anyone could. This means, however, that I
would have to hear “I could never be blind” as “I could never go blind.” But, he said that
he could never “be blind.” Perhaps only slightly, but there is a difference between “going
blind” and “being blind.”
50 Rod Michalko

What could “being blind” have meant to the man, given he could never be it? The man
couldn’t imagine “being blind,” at least it wasn’t easy for him to do so. “Going blind”
would be horrible – imaginable, but horrible – “being blind,” though, could never be, it is
simply unimaginable. And yet, the experience of “being blind” was exactly what the man
confronted on the patio of the bar. The unimaginable was right there in front of him. And,
the man could not imagine himself in what he confronted.
What was it that the man confronted? Blindness, of course, but also something else. He
confronted a “blind being,” a being… “being blind.” Going blind is one thing; being blind
is another. The former may be easier to imagine than the latter. The shudder that often
comes from imagining going blind lies in the unease of imagining being blind.
The man and the woman were headed toward the bar as I was coming out. What did
they see, or better, what did they imagine when they saw me? White cane, dark glasses – we
are looking at a blind man. But, what did they see – what did they imagine?
Surely, they imagined that I couldn’t see. I lacked sight. They, on the other hand, didn’t
since they saw me. They imagined that I didn’t see them and also imagined that I was
leaving the bar. They were in the way, though, and I would almost certainly bump them
with my white cane. The best thing that could be done, they imagined, was to get out of
my way. Move quickly to the right, out of my way, and let me proceed straight through the
patio, past the wooden ledge and out onto the sidewalk. Then, the unimaginable – I moved
left, headed directly for them, headed to where they were standing “out of my way.” Stand
still; don’t move; don’t speak; maybe he’ll move slightly right and find his way out. But he
didn’t; he touched her; stand still; don’t speak.
Anxious as they must have been, this experience wasn’t the end of the world for the man
and the woman, at least not the end of their world, but…it certainly was a different one. It
is easier to imagine blindness as the end of sight than it is to imagine it as a different way of
being, as a different world. The man and the woman looked at blindness, something they
could imagine, and when they looked at blindness that afternoon, they saw someone living
blindness, living difference, and this was not so easy to imagine. It is easier to imagine the
end of the world of sight than it is to imagine a different world of blindness. It is easier to
see the end of sight than it is to see blindness. The power of sight is blinded by its own limit.
Sight (the man and the woman) stand still, quietly, not speaking; sight stands vanishing
in the face of the end of sight and in the midst of the beginning of the difference of
blindness. Sight moves quietly out of the way of on-coming blindness and stands very still,
vanishing in the face of blindness and watching it move out-of-sight retreating to where
it belongs – into the end of the world of sight. Ghostly figures, unseen by one another,
blindness and sight stand together groping, one for an image of a different world, the
other, for an image of the end of the world. The latter is easier to imagine and, at times,
is so perhaps for both blindness and sight and is so when the power of sight is blinded by
its own end.
PART II

Theory and criticism

Much critical and cultural theory across the arts and humanities is currently examining
how to better conceptualise and articulate the intersections of individuals, society and
space as situated, embodied, specific, partial and dynamic. Theorists across a multiplicity
of disciplines such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Homa Bhaba, Karen
Barad, Felix Guttari and Gilles Delueze, Isabelle Stengers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and
Bruno Latour have been challenging earlier modernist framing of ideas within simplistic
binary relationships – man/woman, public/private, white/black, straight/gay – and shifting
away from concerns with representation and cultural meaning (what things say) to the non-
representational, to how life is performed (what things do). However, as many disability
studies scholars have shown, the ability–disability pairing has often remained unnoticed in
these theories or has simply been added ‘on the end’. Starting from dis/ability has enabled
interesting disruptions of some contemporary theoretical assumptions, as well as opened
up how to better conceptualise disability as situated and embodied (Davis 1995, 2002,
2014; Michalko, 2002; Corker and Shakespeare 2002; Kafer 2013).
Theoretical explorations of disability are not new; whilst in geography, in particular,
there have been explorations of disability and built space over many years (Imrie 1996,
2012; Imrie and Kumar 1998; Gleeson 1998; Butler and Parr 1999; Imrie and Edwards
2007; Chouinard et al. 2010). Studies of dis/ability have also overlapped with interrogations
of art practice and aesthetics, and of disability representation (Garland-Thomson 1996;
Siebers 2008, 2010; Haller 2010). One of the most renowned disability studies scholars in
this field, Tobin Siebers, writes here about disability and aesthetics, and in particular how
ideas about bodies come to be incorporated into art practices. He is particularly interested
in how some contemporary artists refuse only to imagine beauty through picturing ideal,
healthy bodies but instead explore dis/ability as a means of enriching and complicating our
ideas of the aesthetic.
Other theorists and activists from disability studies have been engaging directly with
space, and how this might be (re)conceptualised through dis/ability. In particular Tanya
Titchkosky, Rod Michalko, Aimi Hamraie, Jay Dolmage and Margaret Price interrogate
how built space works. This is through the social, spatial and material practices it perpetuates,
so as to make everyday assumptions about disability and ability seem normal and obvious
by the very concreteness of our surroundings, and by acting differently and differentially on
disabled compared to abled bodies.
In ‘The body as a problem of individuality: A phenomenological disability studies
approach’ Titchkosky and Michalko unravel how disability comes to be framed as a
problem in need of solution – a common assumption behind much accessibility design
guidance and regulation. They explore whose interests such an articulation supports; how
it enables ‘normal’ bodies (and their privilege) to remain unnoticed, whilst disabled bodies
are exposed only as ‘difficult’; and how it perpetuates particular ideas of individuality. In
this reading they turn to disabled students’ experiences of the university, as a means of
understanding the impact of such common sense framings. By articulating disability as
different from, and simultaneously outside, ‘normal’ life, choosing to study becomes a
problem of individual disabled students themselves, rather than a problem of the spatial
and educational organisation of the university. In important related work Titchkosky
shows how through such processes, disabled people come to be articulated as ‘includable
54 Theory and criticism

as excludable’ (2011: 39), that is, included at the level of appearance (for example in policy
papers or guidance notes) but ignored or marginalised in actual situations, and exposes
some of the ‘ordinary’ justificatory narratives that defend such an approach (2008, 2011).
For Titchkosky and Michalko, as for many of the other writers here, though, making
a critique of ableist framings, is only part of the story. This is because, as they say in their
chapter here ‘disability is ... ambiguity incarnate, a rupture in the clarity and unquestioned
flow of daily life, and thus almost a “natural” starting place for thinking about the workings
of culture’. Starting from disability, then, offers opportunities to trouble cultural theories
and practices more generally.
The concepts of inclusive or universal design (UD) and accessibility are also garnering
theoretical and critical attention. Rather than simplistically arguing for UD as a common
sense – often oppositional – model to ‘uncaring’ mainstream design, the other three authors
in this section, Aimi Hamraie, J. Kent Fitzsimons and Jay Dolmage instead explore how
to critically unpick the complexities and difficulties of ‘designing for the disabled’. In
‘Designing collective access: A feminist disability theory of universal design’, Hamraie is
concerned that UD is often implemented at the level of appearances as a marketing strategy,
rather than operating as it was intended by disability activists, as an important method of
social justice activism. Through intersecting feminism and disability studies, Hamraie argues
that treating UD theoretically and critically means more than just applying its principles;
it means ‘paying attention to how physical environments produce symbolic and material
access or exclusion through their interactions with and knowledge about bodies’. As with
Titchkosky and Michalko, the central problem is in assuming (and failing to acknowledge)
that building design starts from a normal body, framed as independent, mobile and
individual. Since this is set against disabled bodies as problematic dependencies, it also
implies a refusal to accept the fundamental interdependence of all bodies for sustenance,
community and care – that is, for what Hamraie calls collective access.
J. Kent Fitzsimons also critically engages with assumptions about access. In ‘More than
access: Overcoming limits in architectural and disability discourse’ he is interested in how
many ideas in contemporary architecture are potentially redefining what accessibility is
or could be. By critically reviewing schemes by Peter Eisenman and SANAA, he argues
that when access is taken purely functionally as a compensatory measure to help disabled
people be more ‘normal’ it actually acts to ‘distract from other aspects of the complex
relationships between space design and the experiences of disability’. By this he means that
being in built space is never just a matter of its functionality, of navigating mechanically
from one place to another, but is also imbued with meanings and encounters; and that
we need to think beyond such a limited assumption about the spatial ‘needs’ of disabled
people, as a means to start imagining bodies-in-space differently. By showing how – in
different ways – the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and SANAA’s
Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne disturb the common sense divisions in architecture
between functional circulation and meaningful design, Fitzsimons is able to open up the
idea of accessibility to both critical and creative questioning.
Jay Dolmage, in ‘From Steep Steps to Retrofit to Universal Design, From Collapse to
Austerity: Neo-Liberal Spaces of Disability’ puts this into a broader context, by examining
how accessibility and universal design are embedded in social, spatial and material practices
Theory and criticism 55

that already create ‘steep steps’ for disabled people. He too looks at the university as a
key site in enabling the privilege of some, and disabling others; and crucially how these
two processes are completely intertwined both historically and in contemporary space.
Dolmage also homes in on the underpinning logic of everyday building design that is
explored throughout this section. This is that ‘normal space’ is first created and then
retrofitted for disabled people. As he says, to

retrofit is to add a component or accessory to something that has been already

manufactured or built. This retrofit does not necessarily make the product function
better, does not necessarily fix a faulty product, but it acts as a sort of correction –
it adds a modernized part in place of, or in addition to, an older part. … [It] is a
sort of cure, but half-hearted, thus leaving many people with disabilities in difficult
positions.

Dolmage then explores his third metaphor – universal design. Like Hamraie he sees it
not as a design solution but as an important direction. It too, can be aligned and overlap with
retrofitting, can act as a easy cover for other policies that act against disabled people, and
does not always challenge the independent, mobile and individual (also neo-liberal) body.
He proposes that we might instead take the concept of collapse, not as a negative but as a
deliberate mode of action – ‘collapsing’ as a means to reclaim and re-inhabit the role and
nature of design in a neo-liberal world.
I started this section introduction by noting how usefully disability studies is critiquing
many of the critical and cultural theories that are currently impacting on architectural
discourses. It should be noted that disability scholars and activists are also exploring
connections between disability and feminism, queer studies, post-colonial and critical race
studies, and are generating emerging fields such as mad studies. This inter-sectionality
is developing understandings of some important interrelationships, as well as generating
creative and constructive scholarship and activism, which the pieces selected here cannot
fully express. For this reason, the recommended readings for the theory and criticism part
deliberately extends beyond disability studies, to include theorists for related areas who are
also engaging with the including/enabling and excluding/disabling aspects of built space.

Tobin Siebers (2006)

Reprinted from Journal for Cultural and Religious

Theory (JCRT) (2006) 7.2 Spring/Summer, pp 63–72.

Aesthetics tracks the emotions that some bodies feel in the presence of other bodies. This
definition of aesthetics, first conceived by Alexander Baumgarten, posits the human body
and its affective relation to other bodies as foundational to the appearance of the beautiful
– and to such a powerful extent that aesthetics suppresses its underlying corporeality
only with difficulty (1954). The human body is both the subject and object of aesthetic
production: the body creates other bodies prized for their ability to change the emotions
of their maker and endowed with a semblance of vitality usually ascribed only to human
beings. But all bodies are not created equal when it comes to aesthetic response. Taste and
disgust are volatile reactions that reveal the ease or disease with which one body might
incorporate another. The senses revolt against some bodies, while other bodies please them.
These responses represent the corporeal substrata on which aesthetic effects are based.
Nevertheless, there is a long tradition of trying to replace the underlying corporeality of
aesthetics with idealist and disembodied conceptions of art. For example, the notion of
“disinterestedness,” an ideal invented in the eighteenth century but very much alive today,
separates the pleasures of art from those of the body, while the twentieth-century notion of
“opticality” denies the bodily character of visual perception. The result is a non-materialist
aesthetics that devalues the role of the body and limits the definition of art.
There are some recent trends in art, however, that move beyond idealism to invoke
powerful emotional responses to the corporeality of aesthetic objects (Siebers 2000a,
2003). Andy Warhol’s car crashes and other disaster paintings represent the fragility of
the human body with an explicitness rarely found in the history of art. Nam June Paik,
Carolee Schneemann and Chris Burden turn their own bodies into instruments or works
of art, painting with their face or hair, having themselves shot with guns, and exhibiting
themselves in situations both ordinary and extraordinary. Other artists employ substances
thought to be beyond the bounds of art: food stuff, wreckage, refuse, debris, body parts.
Curiously, the presence of these materials makes the work of art seem more real, even
though all aesthetics objects have, because of their material existence, an equal claim to
58 Tobin Siebers

being real. And yet such works of art are significant neither because they make art appear
more realistic nor because they discover a new terrain for aesthetics. They are significant
because they return aesthetics forcefully to its originary subject matter: the body and its
affective sphere.
Works of art engaged explicitly with the body serve to critique the assumptions of
idealist aesthetics, but they also have an unanticipated effect that will be the topic of my
investigation here. Whether or not we interpret these works as aesthetic, they summon
images of disability. Most frequently, they register as wounded or disabled bodies,
representations of irrationality or cognitive disability, or effects of warfare, disease, or
accidents. How is disability related to artistic mimesis – or what Erich Auerbach called
“the representation of reality” (1953, Siebers 2004)? Why do we see representations of
disability as having a greater material existence than other aesthetic representations? Since
aesthetic feelings of pleasure and disgust are difficult to separate from political feelings
of acceptance and rejection, what do these objects tell us about the ideals of political
community underlying works of art?
What I am calling disability aesthetics names a critical concept that seeks to emphasize
the presence of disability in the tradition of aesthetic representation. Disability aesthetics
refuses to recognize the representation of the healthy body – and its definition of harmony,
integrity, and beauty – as the sole determination of the aesthetic. It is not a matter of
representing the exclusion of disability from aesthetic history, since such an exclusion has
not taken place, but of making the influence of disability obvious. This goal may take two
forms: 1) to establish disability as a critical framework that questions the presuppositions
underlying definitions of aesthetic production and appreciation; 2) to establish disability as
a significant value in itself worthy of future development. My claim is that the acceptance of
disability enriches and complicates materialist notions of the aesthetic, while the rejection
of disability limits definitions of artistic ideas and objects.
To argue that disability has a rich but hidden role in the history of art is not to say
that disability has been excluded. It is rather the case that disability is rarely recognized
as such, even though it often serves as the very factor that establishes works as superior
examples of aesthetic beauty. Disability intercedes to make the difference between good
and bad art – and not as one would initially expect. That is, good art incorporates disability.
Distinctions between good and bad art may seem troublesome, but only if one assumes
that critical judgments are never applied in the art world – an untenable assumption. My
point is only that works of art for which the argument of superiority is made tend to
claim disability. This is hardly an absolute formula, although some have argued it, notably
Francis Bacon and Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote that “There is no exquisite beauty, without
some strangeness in the proportion,” or André Breton, who exclaimed “Beauty will be
convulsive or it will not be at all” (Allan Poe 1978, Bacon 2007, Breton 1960).
Significantly, it could be argued that beauty always maintains an underlying sense of
disability and that increasing this sense over time may actually renew works of art that
risk to fall out of fashion because of changing standards of taste. It is often the presence
of disability that allows the beauty of an art work to endure over time. Would the Venus de
Milo still be considered one of the great examples of both aesthetic and human beauty if
she still had both her arms? Perhaps it is an exaggeration to consider the Venus disabled,
Disability aesthetics 59

but René Magritte did not think so. He painted his version of the Venus, Les Menottes de
cuivre, in flesh tones and colorful drapery but splashed blood-red pigment on her famous
arm-stumps, giving the impression of a recent and painful amputation. The Venus is one
of many works of art called beautiful by the tradition of aesthetic response that eschew the
uniformity of perfect bodies and embrace the variety of disability (Quinn 2004).
To argue from the flipside, would Nazi art be considered kitsch if it had not pursued so
relentlessly a bombastic perfection of the body? Sculpture and painting cherished by the
Nazis exhibit a stultifying perfection of the human figure. Favored male statuary such as
Arno Breker’s Readiness displays bulked up and gigantesque bodies that intimidate rather
than appeal. The perfection of the bodies is the very mark of their unreality and lack of
taste. Nazi representations of women, as in Ivo Saliger’s Diana’s Rest, portray women as
reproductive bodies having little variation among them. They may be healthy, but they are
emotionally empty. When faced by less kitschy representations of the body, the Nazis were
repulsed and launched their own version of a culture war: their campaign against modern
art stemmed from the inability to tolerate any human forms except the most familiar,
monochromatic, and regular. Specifically, the Nazis rejected modern art as degenerate and
ugly because they viewed it as representing physical and mental disability. Hitler saw in
paintings by Modigliani, Klee, and Chagall images of “misshapen cripples,” “cretins,” and
racial inferiors when the rest of the world saw masterpieces of modern art (Mosse 1991,
Seibers 2000b). Hitler was wrong, of course, not about the place of disability in modern
aesthetics but about its beauty. Modern art continues to move us because of its refusal
of harmony, bodily integrity, and perfect health. If modern art has been so successful, I
would argue, it is because of its embrace of disability as a distinct version of the beautiful.
The Nazis simply misread the future direction of art, as they misread many things about
human culture.
What is the impact of damage on classic works of art from the past? It is true that we
strive to preserve and repair them, but perhaps the accidents of history have the effect
of renewing rather than destroying art works. Vandalized works seem strangely modern.
In 1977 a vandal attacked a Rembrandt self-portrait with sulfuric acid, transforming the
masterpiece forever and regrettably (Domberg 1987, 1988, Gamboni 1997, Siebers 2002).
Nevertheless, the problem is not that the resulting image no longer belongs in the history
of art. Rather, the riddle of the vandalized work is that it now seems to have moved to a
more recent stage in aesthetic history, giving a modernist rather than baroque impression.
The art vandal puts the art object to use again, replicating the moment of its inception
when it was being composed of raw material and before it became fixed in time and space
as an aesthetic object. Would vandalized works become more emblematic of the aesthetic,
if we did not restore them, as the Venus de Milo has not been restored? My point is not
to encourage vandalism but to use it to query the effect that disability has on aesthetic
appreciation. Vandalism modernizes art works, for better or worse, by inserting them in an
aesthetic tradition increasingly preoccupied with disability. Only the historical unveiling
of disability accounts for the aesthetic effect of vandalized works of art. Damaged art and
broken beauty are no longer interpreted as ugly. Rather, they disclose new forms of beauty
that leave behind a kitschy dependence on perfect bodily forms. They also suggest that
experimentation with aesthetic form reflects a desire to experiment with human form.
60 Tobin Siebers

Beholders discover in vandalized works an image of disability that asks to be contemplated

not as a symbol of human imperfection but as an experience of the corporeal variation
found everywhere in modern life.
Art is materialist because it relies on the means of production and the availability of
material resources – as Marx understood. But art is also materialist in its obsession with
the embodiment of new conceptions of the human. At a certain level, objects of art are
bodies, and aesthetics is the science of discerning how some bodies make other bodies feel.
Art is the active site designed to explore and expand the spectrum of humanity that we will
accept among us.
Since human feeling is central to aesthetic history, it is to be expected that disability will
crop up everywhere because the disabled body and mind always elicit powerful emotions.
I am making a stronger claim: that disability is integral to aesthetic conceptions of the
beautiful and that the influence of disability on art has grown, not dwindled, over the
course of time. If this is the case, we may expect disability to exert even greater power
over art in the future. We need to consider, then, how art is changed when we conceive of
disability as an aesthetic value in itself. In particular, it is worth asking how the presence
of disability requires us to revise traditional conceptions of aesthetic production and
appreciation, and here the examples of two remarkable artists, Paul McCarthy and Judith
Scott, are especially illuminating.
Paul McCarthy is well known in avant-garde circles for his chaotic, almost feral, bodily
performances as well as his tendency to make art from food and condiments. One of the
most significant fictions of disembodiment in the history of art is, of course, the doctrine
of disinterestedness, which defines the power of an art work in direct proportion to the
urgency of the desires and appetites overcome in the beholder. Hunger, sexual desire, and
greed have no place in the appreciation of art works, despite the fact that these appetites
are constant themes in art. McCarthy challenges the classic doctrine of disinterestedness
in aesthetic appreciation by revealing that it censors not only the body but also the disabled
body. He refuses to prettify the human body, reproducing the logic of the nineteenth-
century freak show in the museum space with exhibits that stress bodily deformation. He
also makes art out of food stuff, forcing beholders to experience his work with all their
senses, not merely with their eyes. In short, his is a different embodiment of art, one expert
in the presentation of differently abled bodies. For example, Hollywood Halloween pictures
the artist tearing a Halloween mask from his head (Figure 6.1), but because the mask has
been stuffed with hamburger meat and ketchup in addition to the artist’s head, the effect
is a kind of self-defacement.
The transformation of the artist from eerie able-bodiedness to the defacement of
disability is the work’s essential movement. The work reverses the apparently natural
tendency to consider any form a corporeal transformation as driven by the desire for
improvement or cure. In Death Ship, a crazed ship captain hands out sailor hats to the
audience, inviting them on a voyage in which the boundaries between body, food, and
filth dissolve, as the captain smears his body with ketchup and food and installs a feeding
tube for himself running from his anus to his mouth. Mother Pig similarly plays out a
self-sculpture using processed meats and condiments in which McCarthy, masked as a
pig, wraps strings of frankfurters smeared with ketchup around his penis. In these typical
Disability aesthetics 61

FIGURE 6.1 Paul McCarthy 1977, Hollywood Halloween, performance, Los Angeles, CA

© Paul McCarthy. Courtesy Paul McCarthy and Hauser & Wirth.

62 Tobin Siebers

works, the smell of raw meat and pungent condiments permeate the air of the performance
space, making it difficult for the audience to avoid reactions to foodstuff and flesh from
its everyday life.
In addition to the challenge to disinterestedness perpetrated on the audience by
McCarthy’s stimulation of the appetite or gag reflex, as well as the assault on human beauty
and form, is the representation of the mental condition of the artist. As the performances
grow more intense and irrational, the audience begins to react to McCarthy as if he were
mentally disabled. The video of Class Fool (1976), for example, shows the audience’s
reaction to his performance moving from amusement, to hesitation, to aversion. At some
level, McCarthy’s commitment to elemental behavior – smearing himself with food,
repeating meaningless actions until they are ritualized, fondling himself in public – asks to
be seen as idiocy, as if the core values of intelligence and genius were being systematically
removed from the aesthetic in preference to stupidity and cognitive disorder. Plaster Your
Head and One Arm into a Wall (Figure 6.2), in which McCarthy inserts his head and left
arm into wall cavities and then uses his right hand to close the holes with plaster, provides
a more obvious example of these values. McCarthy changes how art is appreciated by
overstimulating his audience with a different conception of art’s corporeality. He takes the
analogy between art work and body to its limit, challenging ideas about how the human
should be transformed and imagined. Moreover, the link between aesthetic appreciation
and taste faces a redoubtable attack in his works because of their single-minded evocation
of things that disgust.
The appreciation of the work of art is a topic well rehearsed in the history of aesthetics,
but rarely is it considered from the vantage point of the disabled mind – no doubt because
the spectacle of the mentally disabled person, rising with emotion before the shining
work of art, disrupts the long-standing belief that pronouncements of taste depend on
a form of human intelligence as autonomous and imaginative as the art object itself.
Artistic production also seems to reflect a limited and well defined range of mental
actions. Traditionally, we understand that art originates in genius, but genius is really at
a minimum only the name for an intelligence large enough to plan and execute works of
art – an intelligence that usually goes by the name of “intention.” Defective or impaired
intelligence cannot make art according to this rule. Mental disability represents an absolute
rupture with the work of art. It marks the constitutive moment of abolition, according to
Michel Foucault, that dissolves the essence of what art is (1973: 286).
The work of Judith Scott challenges the absolute rupture between mental disability and
the work of art and applies more critical pressure on intention as a standard for identifying
artists. It is an extremely rare case, but it raises complex questions about aesthetics of great
value to people with disabilities. A remarkably gifted fiber artist emerged in the late 1980s
in California named Judith Scott. Her work is breathtaking in its originality and possesses
disturbing power as sculptural form (Figure 6.3). The sculptures invite comparisons
with major artists of the twentieth century and allude to a striking variety of mundane
and historical forms, from maps to the works of Alberto Giacometti, from Etruscan art
and classical sculpture in its fragmentary state, to children’s toys. What makes the fiber
sculptures even more staggering as works of art is the fact that Scott has no conception of
the associations sparked by her objects and no knowledge of the history of art. In fact, she
Disability aesthetics 63

FIGURE 6.2 Paul McCarthy, 1973, Plaster Your Head and One Arm into a Wall, performance,
Pasadena, CA
© Paul McCarthy. Courtesy Paul McCarthy and Hauser & Wirth.
64 Tobin Siebers

never visited a museum or read an art book, she did not know she was an “artist,” and never
intended to make “art” when she set to work, at least in the conventional understanding
of these words. This is because Scott had Down’s syndrome. She was also deaf, unable to
speak, extremely uncommunicative, isolated, almost autistic. She was warehoused at age
seven in the Ohio Asylum for the Education of Idiotic and Imbecilic Youth and spent the
next thirty-five years of her life as a ward of the state, until her twin sister rescued her and
enrolled her in the Creative Growth Center, a California program in Oakland designed to
involve intellectually disabled people with the visual arts. Almost immediately, she began
to make fiber sculptures six hours a day, and she maintained this relentless pace for over
ten years.
Although materials were made available to her, Scott behaved as if she were pilfering
them, and each one of her sculptures takes the form of a cocoon at the center of which
is secreted some acquired object (Figure 6.3). The first hidden objects were sticks and
cardboard spools used to store yarn and thread. Then she began to wrap other objects, an
electric fan, for instance. Commentators have made the habit of associating her methods
with acts of theft and a kind of criminal sensibility, acquired during thirty-five years in
a mental institution. The association between Scott’s aesthetic method and criminal
sensibility, however, takes it for granted that she was unable to distinguish between the
Ohio Asylum for the Education of Idiotic and Imbecilic Youth and the Creative Growth
Center in Oakland, between thirty-five years spent in inactivity and neglect and her years
involved intensively in the making of objects of beauty. The fact is that Scott’s relation

FIGURE 6.3 Judith Scott, Untitled, 1989. 30 × 11 × 6 inches. Collection de l’Art Brut

Copyright: Creative Growth Art Center. Photograph by Leon A. Borensztein

Disability aesthetics 65

to her primary materials mimics modern art’s dependence on found art – a dependence
that has never been described as a criminal sensibility to my knowledge. Her method
demonstrates the freedom both to make art from what she wants and to change the
meaning of objects by inserting them into different contexts. One incident in particular
illuminates her attitude toward her primary materials. During a period of construction in
the art center, Scott was left unobserved one day for longer than usual. She emptied every
paper-towel dispenser in the building and fabricated a beautiful monochromatic sculpture
made entirely of knotted white paper towels.
Scott’s method always combines binding, knotting, sewing, and weaving different
fiber materials around a solid core whose visibility is entirely occluded by the finished
work of art. She builds the works patiently and carefully, as if in a process of concealment
and discovery that destroys one object and gives birth to another mysterious thing.
A number of aesthetic principles are clearly at work in her method, even though she
never articulated them. She strives to ensure the solidity and stability of each piece, and
individual parts are bound tightly to a central core (Figure 6.4). Since she had no view to

FIGURE 6.4 Judith Scott in action 1999. Oakland Studio, Creative Growth Center.

Photograph copyright: Leon A. Borensztein. With thanks to the Creative Growth Center.
66 Tobin Siebers

exhibit her work, no audience in mind, her sculptures do not distinguish between front
and back. Consequently, her work projects a sense of independence and autonomy almost
unparalleled in the sculptural medium. Despite the variety of their shape, construction,
and parts, then, Scott’s sculptures consolidate all of their elements to give the impression
of a single, unique body.
John MacGregor who has done the most extensive study to date of Scott poses succinctly
the obvious critical questions raised by her work. “Does serious mental retardation,” he
asks, “invariably preclude the creation of true works of art? … Can art, in the fullest sense
of the word, emerge when intellectual development is massively impaired from birth,
and when normal intellectual and emotional maturation has failed to be attained?” The
problem, of course, is that Scott did not possess the intelligence associated with true artists
by the tradition of art history. What kind of changes in the conception of art would be
necessary to include her in this history?
Despite the many attacks launched by modern artists, genius remains the unspecified
platform on which almost every judgment in art criticism is based, whether about artistic
technique, invention, or subversiveness. In fact, Thomas Crow claims that the campaign
against autonomy and creativity in modern art gives rise to a cult of the genius more robust
than any conceived during the Romantic period (1996). We still assume that creativity is an
expression of inspiration and autonomy, just as we assume that aesthetic technique is a form
of brilliance always at the artist’s disposal. Intelligence, however, is fraught with difficulties
as a measure of aesthetic quality, and intention in particular has long been condemned as
an obsolete tool for interpreting works of art (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954). Artists do not
control – nor should they – the meaning of their works, and intentions are doubtful as a
standard of interpretation because they are variable, often forgotten, improperly executed,
inscrutable to other people, and marred by accidents in aesthetic production. If intention
has uncertain value for interpretation, why should it be used to determine whether an
action or object is a work of art?
Disability aesthetics prizes physical and mental difference as a significant value in itself.
It does not embrace an aesthetic taste that defines harmony, bodily integrity, and health as
standards of beauty. Nor does it support the aversion to disability required by traditional
conceptions of human or social perfection. Rather, it drives forward the appreciation
of disability found throughout modern and avant-garde art by raising an objection to
aesthetic standards and tastes that exclude people with disabilities. The idea of disability
aesthetics affirms that disability operates both as a critical framework for questioning
aesthetic presuppositions in the history of art and as a value in its own right important to
future conceptions of what art is.
7
THE BODY AS A PROBLEM OF
INDIVIDUALITY

A phenomenological disability studies

approach

Tanya Titchkosky and Rod Michalko (2012)

Excerpt reprinted from Dan Goodley, Bill Hughes and

Lennard Davis (eds) (2012) Disability and Social Theory:
New Developments and Directions, Palgrave Macmillan,
pp 127–129.

Disability, as Paul Abberley (1998: 93) reminds us, is interesting often only as a problem.
Or as Bill Hughes (2007: 673) puts it, ‘almost by definition, [we] assume disability to be
ontologically problematic, and many disabled people feel that many of the people with
whom they interact in everyday situations treat them as if they are invisible, repulsive
or “not all there”.’ What interests us from a phenomenological perspective, is that the
contemporary scene of disability framed as a ‘problem’ typically generates the requirement
for explanation and amelioration, but little else. Thus, this paper examines the hegemonic
taken-for-granted character of the disability-as-a-problem frame.
We aim to show how this frame is produced against a background of a notion of the
‘natural’ or ‘normal’ body, that is, a body conceived of by science as in need, and worthy,
of description – how does it work, what are its essential features? The disabled body, in
contrast, is conceived of as requiring explanation – what went wrong, how can it be fixed
and brought back to normalcy? Yet, the questions ‘what went wrong and what should
be done?’ are based on the reproduction of the frame ‘disability as a problem’ and leave
this frame completely unexamined. Questioning the ‘facticity’ (Heidegger, 1962) of the
problem-of-disability means reflecting on the oft used, over-deterministic, and under-
theorized frame ‘disability is a problem in need of a solution’ as itself a solution to some
implicit problem. That disability is conceptualized as a problem is what we take to be
our problem in need of theorizing. In other words, conceiving of disability as a problem
68 Tanya Titchkosky and Rod Michalko

in need of a solution may be treated as a response to an implicit version of disability, a

response that acts as a solution to the question ‘What is disability?’ This approach permits
us to ask, what sort of problem do contemporary times need disability to be? And, what
is the meaning of human embodiment that grounds the unquestioned status of disability
as a problem?
The field of disability studies says, and says often, that such frames constitute disability
as an individual problem of tragic proportions requiring only individualized redress. But,
from a phenomenological perspective, knowing this and showing this are not the same. We
aim, then, to show how disability is made into an individual problem of tragic proportions
and this returns us to the question of the normalized embodied contours of individuality
itself. As disability is made into a problem, what is made of the human condition harnessed
to the workings of a culture that seeks to service ‘normal’ individuals? A disability studies
approach informed by phenomenology can contribute to understanding the consequences
of the contemporary ‘demand’ on us to understand identity as our individual ‘task’ and
‘duty’ (Bauman, 2004: 18–19). We will further draw out these issues by conducting an
exploration of how the phenomenon of disability-as-problem composes university life
while teasing out how the language of the problem reflects the educational world views
that arise through the lived bodies that we are. In so doing, we offer a reflection regarding
what a phenomenological approach does in order to do what it does and to say what it says,
and then show this at work in the university milieu.

Disability as problem
Framing disability as a problem in need of a solution takes many different forms. The
biomedical world view, for example, conceives of disability as the ‘body-gone-wrong’
(Michalko, 2002: 120) and, if living a life of disability is to be achieved at all, this body
should be treated in a way that permits it to ‘look’ and act as ‘normal’ as possible. This
treatment, or better, this interpretive work, is achieved through such contemporary
ideologies as medicine, rehabilitation and education, especially that of the ‘special’ kind.
Still another form of the disability-as-problem frame is the erasure of disability through
the privileging of personhood – a framing of disabled people as ‘like everyone else’ but
only like and not as everyone else since, within this frame, personhood is not located in
disability but against it (Titchkosky, 2001). This frame suggests that disabled people can
‘resemble’ non-disabled others even though they are other to non-disability regardless of
the fidelity of the resemblance. Disability may participate in normalcy, but it can never be
normal let alone be valuable, enjoyable, or necessary.
Framed in these ways disability is represented and experienced as a kind of partially
protected liability precariously perched on the edge of liveable life (Butler, 2009: 9, 43). The
disciplinary infrastructures and technologies engaged in these ways of framing disability
are powerful and global in their character and reach (Titchkosky and Aubrecht, 2009). The
disciplinary research based regimes, such as medicine and education, do not typically address
what it means to constitute the phenomenon of disability in this singular and unified way.
The socio-political act of framing disability as a problem in need of a solution does not
The body as a problem of individuality 69

engage itself, it does not question what it makes when it makes disability a problem – this
way of framing disability is not reflexive and this now becomes our problem.
Phenomenology is a way to frame disability as a scene (Butler, 1993: 23) where the
meaning of the human condition of embodiment can be brought into consciousness
for reflective consideration – a task we regard as essential to any political possibility of
forging something new since the new is tied to rethinking our most basic ways of framing
embodiment. The desire for something ‘new’ is grounded in the sense of the unexpected
potentiality that resides in all forms of human action as well as in the politicalized sense
that disabled people face extreme forms of devaluation within cultures animated by limited
and limiting conceptions of embodiment that themselves leave much to be desired. The
possibility of forging something new is intimately interwoven with questioning what is
typically assumed to be beyond question; questioning what is otherwise taken as a given
serves as a reflexive re-framing of our lives together as bodied beings.
We turn our analysis toward a fuller discussion of the phenomenological conception of
the ‘frame’ and of framing with regard to disability.

Disability-frameworks and phenomenology

The world comes to us and we receive it always-already ‘framed.’ Like all other
phenomena, disability comes to us in a frame and this frame ‘works’ as a guide and even
as a rule for recognizing the phenomenon of disability. We recognize disability in others
and in ourselves insofar as disability-frameworks guide us to these recognitions and work
to rule them. Even though we recognize disability, we do not easily recognize its frames
and the framework that provides for such recognition. Nonetheless, we are conscious of
disability insofar as there are disability frames for and of such consciousness. Disability
consciousness typically entails experiencing disability as always already a problem, located
in individuals.
Edmund Husserl tells us that a function of understanding is ‘… ruling in concealment,
i.e., ruling as constitutive of the always already developed and always further developing
meaning-configuration “intuitively given surrounding world”’ (Husserl, 1970: 104). The
world surrounds us, according to Husserl, and it is intuitively given to us. The world
comes to us always configured (framed) as meaning – the world always means. Or as
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945: xxii) says, ‘Because we are in the world, we are condemned to
meaning.’ Meaning is the rule and it constitutes a world, including all that belongs in and to
it, which comes to us as ‘given’ and intuitively so. As such, we take the reality of the world
for granted. It is this ‘rule’ of the taken-for-granted world that is concealed from us when
we experience the world. We perceive the world that surrounds us but we do not ‘see’ the
frameworks that constitute this world as configured in and by meaning. […]
Sustaining the ‘given-ness’ of the world, the sense that it is naturally just there for all
to perceive, is an activity in which we are constantly involved (Sacks, 1984). The world,
change and human agency are given to us and received by us as naturally occurring
phenomena. These phenomena are seemingly so natural to us that we readily give an
explanatory account for those times they do not occur. We make sense of the world even
when it is disrupted and every disruption is remedied through the sense-making character
70 Tanya Titchkosky and Rod Michalko

of the natural attitude (Garfinkel, 1967; Weiss, 2008). ‘I think you’re in denial, you have
to get past this and move forward.’ ‘Some people just don’t see that things have to change,
they’re brainwashed by society and the media.’ ‘What you need is a reality check.’ Despite
the mundane character of these accounts, they do dramatically demonstrate how we act to
sustain the taken-for-granted and natural character of the life-world.
We are continuously providing an account, albeit in a taken-for-granted way, for the
existence and possibility of world views, different and conflicting as they may be. We all
have a world view. We perceive the world from a perspective or ‘standpoint.’ We are socially
positioned in the world and, from the perspective of contemporary versions of identity,
for example, we are so positioned through categories such as race, gender, sexuality, social
class, and sometimes even disability. These social categories position us and give us a
standpoint, a perspective from which to view the world. We also view the world from the
‘point of view’ of our interests, concerns, anxieties, aspirations, and the like (Ahmed, 2004
a & b). The way people are positioned in the world, then, generates not only multiple
perspectives but multiple realities.
While we do experience the world differently from one another, depending upon our
sense of our social identity and upon our differences and interests, we also experience
the world in common with one another insofar as we assume that everyone would ‘see’
the world as we do if they were in our position (standpoint) and that we would ‘see’ the
world the way others do if we were in theirs. This means that frames reconcile difference
by making the perception of a disruption or a difference into a signifier of the same, as
originating in the intuitively given life-world. How we understand and know the world
and its phenomena is potentially understood and known by ‘everyone’ – everyone, that
is, who shares our social position, everyone who shares in our taken-for-granted sense
of being anyone. People knowing the world ‘in common’ is provided for by the assumed
potentiality of shareable perspectives, or what Schutz (1973: 11) calls, ‘reciprocity of
perspectives,’ the ‘interchangeability of standpoints,’ or as what we have been calling
frames or frameworks.
Schutz expands this phenomenological notion of shareable frames.

What is supposed to be known in common by everyone who shares our system of

relevances is the way of life considered to be the natural, the good, the right one by
the members of the ‘in group’; as such, it is at the origin of the many recipes for
handling things (and each other) in order to come to terms with typified situations,
of the folk ways and mores, of ‘traditional behaviour,’… of the ‘of course statements’
believed to be valid by the in-group in spite of their inconsistencies, briefly, of the
‘relative natural aspect of the world’.
(Schutz, 1973: 13)

Living in the midst of others, at times we experience a sort of ‘belongingness,’ a sense

of belonging in and to a group, a social space, not as someone marginal to this group
and space, but as someone integral to them and thus as someone who is valuable. What
we conceive to be relevant is now understood as a shared perspective and as relevant to
everyone ‘in the know’ and thus what is relevant and valuable is understood under the
The body as a problem of individuality 71

rubric of a ‘system’ rather than that of ‘individual idiosyncrasy.’ In this way, our perspective
of the world becomes understood, as Schutz tells us, as something natural, good and
right. From this ‘system of relevances,’ socially put together or constructed through our
assumption of the ‘reciprocities of perspectives,’ flows all other aspects of our individual
and collective lives. And, perhaps most important, we come to understand ourselves as
naturally belonging in and to this world.
It is, then, this taken-for-granted life-world and the natural attitude that represents, for
us, the genesis of disability frameworks. It is within and from this conception of human
life that disability experience, whether our own or that of others, springs and that frames
disability as a meaning-full phenomenon. Disability is a frame that can, upon analysis,
teach us much about the life-world that generates it. But herein lies an irony – disability
is framed as a phenomenon located and locatable only outside of the taken-for-granted
life-world as well as outside of the natural attitude. Disability is thus understood as
marginal to the common-sense world and, as such, as outside of intuitively given reality.
Disability is one source of what Schutz (1973: 228 [see also Michalko, 1998: 29–34]) calls,
the ‘fundamental anxiety’ insofar as disability can, and often does, disrupt the taken-for-
granted character of the world and our life in it.
Disability, framed as a problem, becomes one of the fundamental ‘unnatural aspects’ of the
otherwise natural, good, and right way of being-in-the-world. Disability disrupts, and even
threatens, what Schutz calls, ‘the relative natural aspect of the world.’ What disability often
represents is the taken-for-granted sense of the unnatural, of the value-less and of that which
does not belong – or, to take liberties with Schutz’s words, disability is framed as the unnatural,
the bad and the wrong way of being-in-the-world. With this framework as background, this
chapter now turns to an examination of some of the ways disability is conceived of and treated
as just this sort of radical and disruptive problem, a problem naturalized as such.

Disability as a problem in need of a solution

The perception of a problem brings with it the requirement for a solution even though,
and somewhat paradoxically, the problem is an expected and taken-for-granted aspect of
the life-world. Problems are inevitable (Butler, 1999: vii) and a life free of problems is
inconceivable. Everyone has problems – some serious, some not so serious, some trivial
and some catastrophic – but, everyone has problems. We are not required to search for
problems, for they ‘naturally’ occur in the round of everyday life. In the face of our
inevitable problems, we are, however, expected to search for solutions.
The search for a solution to the problem of disability is inevitable and not optional
since disability is understood within this framework as generating the requirement for a
solution and thus the search. Disability is understood as a problem insofar as it represents
a disruption to the ‘natural-order-of-things’ with its concomitant requirement to restore
this order, an activity understood as the ‘need’ to solve the problem of disability. Cure, of
course, is the quintessential solution to disability conceived of as a problem. But, many
disabilities resist curative measures and become, in the vernacular of the day, ‘permanent.’
Now, we have a more serious problem – what to do about and how to live with disability
as a ‘permanent problem,’ or, how to solve the permanent problem of disability.
72 Tanya Titchkosky and Rod Michalko

The solution to the permanent problem of disability, the one favoured today, is
normalization which takes shape through remedial treatments such as rehabilitation,
special education, and the like. Since the problem of disability is located in the world and is
so often permanent, the solution becomes one of ‘normalizing’ disability thus ‘making’ it a
‘normal’ part of the natural-order-of-things. Normalizing disability is one way of making
it identical with the taken-for-granted life-world where this act of ‘making identical’
serves to socially produce the life-world as identifying with disability as one of the many
problems that are inevitable, again, naturally so. Through the social act of normalization,
disability becomes merely a problem that some people have. Ironically, being ‘merely’ a
problem requires that disability never comes to consciousness as anything but a problem.
Thus, the rule of finding a solution to the always-already problem of disability is a singular
unified response to disability with which individuals are routinely and ordinarily engaged.
We already know, and obviously so, that disability simply is a problem in need of a solution
and to admit an alternative approach can be as disruptive as is the onset of impairment or
as is the attempt to manoeuvre in a world prepared only for a ‘non-impaired carnality’
(Hughes and Paterson, 1997: 607, 604).
The ubiquity of the frame of disability-as-problem for individuals means making
disability identical not only as problem but also in its solution. Henri-Jacques Stiker speaks
of the act of making disability identical in this way:

This act [of identification and of making identical] will cause the disabled to
disappear and with them all that is lacking, in order to assimilate them, drown them,
dissolve them in the greater and single social whole.
(Stiker, 1999: 128)

Making disability identical is not the same as making disabled people identical to those
who are not disabled nor does it allow non-disabled people to identify with disabled
people. Instead, the act of making identical generates the common-sense understanding
of disability as part of the life-world and, as such, identifies disability as a phenomenon
among the plethora of phenomena making up the taken-for-granted world. Making
disability identical, however, does not make disability ‘equal’ to other phenomena; on the
contrary, it makes disability one of the less favoured problems to have.
As one of the least favoured problems to have, the contemporary act of making
identical – an act marked by the advent of rehabilitation and special education – seeks,
in its identification with the world, to make disability disappear, particularly the lack that
disability is thought to be. In this way, as Stiker says, disabled people can be assimilated
or, more poignantly, be drowned, dissolved ‘in the greater and single social whole.’ Given
that disability is merely a problem, any alternative interpretation is, like disability itself,
also drowned, but with this annihilation of alterity comes the achievement of a ‘normal’
approach to the problem of disability. This is one reason why Hughes (2007: 680, 681)
argues that, ‘[T]he real problem in this existential mire is not disability but non-disability…
The normative, invulnerable body of disabilist modernity [the greater and single social
whole] that is the problem.’ This interpretation, however, admits an alternative view, a
The body as a problem of individuality 73

view which is typically drowned in the single social whole by asking ‘But what is your
problem? What do you need? How can we help?’
[…]
Experiencing disability as a problem that some people have and simultaneously a problem
that everyone has, represents the dominant ideological frame through which disability
experience is mediated. Some of us are a problem to the society, its institutions and settings.
That disabled people experience their lives in this way is crucial, if not essential, for the
ways in which society and its institutions develop solutions to the problem of disability.
Any solution developed within this framework, of course, serves to politically and socially
sustain the cultural conception of disability as a problem and thus to make it disappear, to
drown it, in the single social whole that contains the inevitability of problems as an integral
feature of its social organization. It is important that we phenomenologically uncover the
problem to which the conception ‘disability is a problem in need of a solution’ is a solution.
To this end, and as a way to further exemplify our phenomenological approach, we turn
to an examination of one way that the university formulates the problem that is disability.

Including ‘them’
Like all other appearances, the appearance of disability must be noticed for its appearance
to count as apparent. Noticing requires more than ‘looking’ insofar as it is taken-for-
granted cultural frameworks that permit us to ‘see’ what we are ‘looking at.’ What do we
‘see’ when we experience someone using a wheelchair or someone who is blind or when
someone tells us they have a learning disability? Typically, what we ‘see,’ is a problem. But,
what sort of a problem and thus what sort of a solution do we perceive? The contemporary
space of the university, in our case the University of Toronto, does have a way of ‘seeing’
and thus of noticing disability. As a way to explicate this ‘way’ we turn to an examination
of how the university conceives of disabled students.

Accessibility Services, St. George Campus

The role of accessibility services is to facilitate the inclusion of students with

disabilities into all aspects of university life. Our focus is on skills development,
especially in the areas of self-advocacy and academic skills. Services are provided
to students with a documented disability. It can be physical, sensory, a learning
disability, or a mental health disorder.
Accessibility Services is responsible for facilitating the inclusion of students with
disabilities into university life. Specifically, accessibility services is responsible for:
UÊ Receiving and retaining documentation from a medical professional or
specialist which identifies your disability. (This documentation is kept in
confidence with the service.)
UÊ Providing information and advice to students, student applicants, university
departments, and individual staff members on accommodation strategies.
UÊ Providing or facilitating services such as alternative test and examination
arrangements, note-taking services.
74 Tanya Titchkosky and Rod Michalko

UÊ Assessment for adaptive equipment and assistive devices.

UÊ Assessment for learning disabilities, coordination of interpreters and intervener
services, and liaison and referral on and off campus.
UÊ The office is also a resource for instructors who require information in order to
meet the needs of students in their classes. The office also plays an educational
role; raising the awareness of students with disabilities among staff, faculty, and
students at the university and wider community.
(Accessibility Services, University of Toronto, 2010)

The role of accessibility services, as it understands it, is to ‘facilitate’ the ‘inclusion of

students with disabilities into all aspects of university life.’ Students with disabilities are
understood as not included into all aspects of university life despite the obvious ‘fact’ of
their presence in university life. Present yet absent or included as an excludable type, is
the way that accessibility services frames and subsequently characterizes the presence of
disabled students in university life (Titchkosky, 2008). This frame constitutes disabled
students as the problem of the lack of ‘skills development’ particularly those of self-
advocacy and academic skills. Thus, the lack of skills marks the problem that disabled
students are understood to be and skill development marks the solution. Disability thus
becomes a technical problem in need of a technical solution and the problem of disability
as a problem is itself a solution to the absent presence character of disability.
Accessibility services says that disability can be physical, sensory, a learning disability, or
a mental health disorder, and that students are eligible for services only if their disability
is ‘documented.’ Student documentation of their own disabilities does not count as such.
It is only medical professionals or specialists who are permitted (legitimately) to provide
such documentary evidence. Evidence of a disability, therefore, can come only from the
legitimated source of biomedicine. The notion of ‘expertise’ is invoked as a way to establish a
disabled student’s eligibility for yet another form of expertise, namely, accessibility services.
‘Documentation,’ then, acts as an implicit social process to transform ‘your disability’
(point one above) into ‘our disability’ (see the remaining points above). This social process
acts to delegitimize a disabled student as ‘expert’ and to legitimize professionals as such
thus transforming disability into a problem that can be best remedied by ‘expertise.’ This
represents yet another version of the problem-of-disability: disability is a ‘thing’ about
which expertise can be gleaned and put into practice (Titchkosky and Michalko, 2009:
1–14). As an objective-problem-thing, a disabled student enters university life framed by
the sensibility that there are those who ‘know’ his or her problem …expertly. Knowing
oneself as disabled, then, is illusory insofar as a disabled ‘one’ is not constituted as an ‘expert’
on disability and given that ‘knowing disability’ is framed, in contemporary times, as some
‘thing’ to be ‘expertly known’ making all other ways of knowing disability superfluous.
It is a medical professional or specialist, who provides documentation that, according
to accessibility services, identifies your disability, but this does more than merely ‘identify’
a disability in a student. The documentation of disability and the subsequent accessibility
services practices may be read as the constitution and re-constitution of expertise as the
paramount framework, and framer, of the conception of disability-as-problem. This
The body as a problem of individuality 75

framework gives rise not only to legitimate individual problems understood as a disability
but also to individuals legitimated as in possession of such problems understood as ‘people
with disabilities.’
Disabled students have a problem, an individual one, and now that they are applying
for entry into university, or are already here, or, as we suggest, have always been here,
disabled students are now a problem for the university, disability is now a problem that
the university has. The solution? Medical and subsequent accessibility services’ expertise.
While disabled students share some of the same needs that their non-disabled counterparts
have, ‘disability needs’ are different. All students are understood as representing a ‘deficit’
with regard to not possessing or lacking the knowledge that universities have. Closing this
gap, however, is not the same for all students. The university is the means for closing this
gap, but disabled students experience this ‘means’ as a barrier and not as a solution to the
‘knowledge deficit.’
The needs of disabled students are conceived of as different from their non-disabled
counter-parts or, in the vernacular of the day, they are ‘special needs.’ And, these ‘special
needs’ are met with special measures – the provision of information and advice to students,
university staff and faculty regarding accommodation strategies, the provision of alternative
examination arrangements and note-taking, the provision of adaptive technology, the
provision of assessment for learning disabilities, sign language interpreters, the provision
of awareness training to university staff and faculty regarding the ‘special needs’ of disabled
students. And finally, the provision of and, staying true to medicine – indicated in the
penultimate point above – the ‘referral.’
The spatial and educational organization of the university is not framed as a problem,
instead, only disability is framed as such, and thus the problem of and with disability is
conceived of as the problem of access. According to common sense reasoning, disabled
people ‘because’ of our disabilities, do not typically have access to mainstream society and
this problem is solved by society ‘identifying and removing,’ as the saying goes, barriers
to such access. But, we have also demonstrated that this seemingly straightforward and
simple conception of the disability problem/solution is much more complex than it initially
seemed. We need only raise Titchkosky’s (2011) question, ‘Once we’re in, what are we in
for?’ to provoke and reveal this complexity. On the heels of this question, we now conclude
this chapter with an initial formulation of the problem to which the framework ‘disability is
a problem in need of a solution’ is represented as a solution. We have also suggested that the
university needs disability ‘to be’ a technical problem requiring a technical solution and we
will reflect on what we understand a phenomenological approach needs disability ‘to be.’

Needing disability… to be
Finding a home in the university as a disabled person, within the problem/solution frame,
means ‘getting in’ as an individual understood as having a personal problem. This problem
finds its solution through the invocation of expert and technical intervention meted onto
the life of the person with the problem who likewise is ordinarily expected to deal with their
problem thereby gaining some distance from the status of ‘being’ a problem for self or for
others. Disability thus becomes a stage or social space over and against which individuals
76 Tanya Titchkosky and Rod Michalko

achieve a sense of their individuality; it is that space where we can show each other we are
oriented to the doing of ourselves as individuals but only so long as we conform to the
normative sense that no life is to be found or forged ‘in’ disability. Hence, we need to stage
our life as one ‘with’ disability rather than ‘in’ disability (Michalko, 1999: 172).
Individuals deal (or not) with disability since disability is only a problem. Thus – the
relatively recent identity category ‘person with a disability.’ In this way, a sense of obtaining
the identity of person is achieved by containing disability within the frame of problem
and letting nothing of disability slip into alternative relations between self and other
which could potentially change the exclusionary prowess of everyday life. Disability is
thus conceived of as the problem-background against which the figure of individuality is
achieved; it is not, however, imagined as that scene where we might re-think and re-cast
the normative order of individuality and thereby of everyday life.
The figure of individuality is framed as our normative task and duty creating disability
as a problem and as a way to achieve our task of producing the startling reasonableness of a
taken-for-granted sense of individuality. Disability now serves as the key scene for the re-
achievement of the primacy of personhood understood as the development of an individual
identity. In his work on the modern ‘identity,’ Zgmunt Bauman (2004: 21, 32) says,

Identity could only enter the Lebenswelt [life-world] as a task, as an as-yet-unfulfilled,

unfinished task, a clarion call, a duty and an urge to act – and the nascent modern state
did whatever it took to make such a duty obligatory for all people inside its territorial
sovereignty… In the liquid modern setting of life, identities are perhaps the most
common, most acute, most deeply felt and troublesome incarnations of ambivalence.

Within modernity, disability is framed as a space where the ‘duty and urge to act’ as an
individual is expertly announced, technically organized, and bureaucratically arranged as a
duty for all. Always constituted as a problem, and as one imagined as marginal to mainstream
existence, disability becomes, ironically, central to the question of belonging and thus akin
to a sacrificial space where all that disability could be is submerged, even annihilated, for
the good of demonstrating the common ubiquity of an urge toward individuality. Insofar
as disability is the problem over and against which we can demonstrate that we are worthy
of belonging within modernity’s structures of individuality, it is of paramount importance
to conform to the sense that disability is merely and only a problem in need of a solution.
The structure of education, for example, has incorporated disability as a disembodied
project of individual identity and the expertly identified ‘person with a disability’ becomes
not only expected but also accepted within the modern organization of belonging. In more
general terms, Bauman (2004: 22) puts it this way, ‘[W]hoever else you might have been or
have aspired to become, it was the ‘“appropriate institutions” of the state that had the final
word. An uncertified identity was [is] a fraud…’ As we showed, it is neither reasonable, nor
natural, let alone good, to aspire to find life, that is ‘real’ embodied limits and possibilities,
and thus identity in disability. Instead life is forged only and simply against it (adjusting)
and as background (overcoming).
But herein lies a radical ambiguity, if not paradox. We come to the scene of embodied
existence as people who, first and foremost, can act as though any bodily difference that
The body as a problem of individuality 77

could make a difference to being-in-the-world is merely the occasion to show each other
the ‘normal’ achievement of a ‘normative’ sense of individualized identity as persons.
Framed as people with a disability, individuals become those who do not live through
their bodies, minds, senses, or emotions, but with them and with them assert claims to
personhood. This is the socio-political consequence of understanding disability as problem
in need of a solution that we now witness in almost all traces of disability conceptions
today. In short, the problem to which ‘disability is a problem in need of a solution’ points is
individuality – the problem of individuality generates the solution of ‘disability is a problem
in need of a solution.’
Now, what of phenomenology – what sort of problem has it made of disability and what
does it need disability to be? Our chapter has demonstrated that whatever else disability
might be it is lived as a problem in need of solution and it is made present as a space to
think about everyday life that makes disability present in this singular and unified fashion.
It is both over-determined by culture and, ironically, it is also thus an ideal place to reflect
on how we make and organize devalued and excluded people in routine and ordinary ways.
Disability is, in this sense, ambiguity incarnate, a rupture in the clarity and unquestioned
flow of daily life, and thus almost a ‘natural’ starting place for thinking about the workings
of culture.
From the perspective of a phenomenologically informed disability studies approach,
the question is not one of asserting a better, more correct, or more socially just definition
of the situation called ‘disability.’ Instead, phenomenology asks ‘What is the phenomenon
called disability?’ It does not do so by asserting a definition, but by addressing how disability
makes an appearance in the world and is lived. If disability is lived primarily as a problem
in need of a solution, as we claim it is, then this is what phenomenology needs disability
to be in order to pursue its commitment to question and theorize. Phenomenology needs
disability to be a life lived in the natural attitude. This allows us to ask – What sorts of
people are understood as living in the singularity of ‘problem’ and what sorts of cultures
need to have so many of their people understood, managed and expertly controlled in
regular and predictable ways? Disability, for phenomenology, becomes a place where such
questions thrive.
By not taking disability for granted, it is possible to show how disability comes to appear
as a problem and thus to reveal the frames, or what Husserl (1970: 104) refers to as the
‘ruling concealment’ that generates the ‘need’ to understand disability as a problem in
the first place. The phenomenological urge is to find a way to hold in tension any of the
ways that disability makes an appearance in everyday life as always already part of what
disability has been made to be so as to reveal how cultures make the problems they need.
The need of a phenomenological approach in disability studies, then, is to understand
disability as constituted as a space for critical cultural inquiry regarding the normative
order that makes disability always already a problem. And, herein lies the political potential
of a phenomenological approach to disability and disability studies – the experience of
disability, our own or that of others, becomes the scene where we can frame how we
experience embodied existence and, thus, disability becomes a place where culture can be
examined anew, again and again.
8
DESIGNING COLLECTIVE ACCESS

A feminist disability theory of universal design

Aimi Hamraie (2013)

Excerpt from Disability Studies Quarterly

(DSQ) (2013) 33: 4, http://dsq-sds.org/article/
view/3871/3411.

In the [US] civil rights movement era, feminist and disability approaches to architectural
design emerged to address the problems of spatial segregation. Activists argued that
inaccessible built environments – such as segregated lunch counters, workplaces without
childcare, suburban single-family homes, and buildings with stairs and without ramps
– made oppressed people less visible and, therefore, less likely to receive legislative
protections (Steinfeld and Maisel 2012, 13–15). Throughout the 1960s and 70s, disability
activists physically occupied public buildings in order to demonstrate that law and society
had failed to include them (Nielsen 2012, 168: see also Serlin, this volume). The efforts of
these activists resulted in the passage of federal civil rights legislation that aspired to protect
the access of people with disabilities to the built environment. The term barrier-free design
emerged to describe the architectural strategies that underlie these legislative gains.
Barrier-free design was not merely a legislative trope or expedient; rather, the theory of
barrier-free design supported efforts in the architectural profession to design environments
according to the spatial needs and demands of women, people of color, and people with
disabilities (Matrix 1984; Steinfeld 1979; Mace 1985; Weisman 1989; Welch and Jones
2002, 193). As architect Ray Lifchez wrote (1987, 1) in his groundbreaking Rethinking
Architecture: Design Students and Physically Disabled People:

Building forms reflect how a society feels about itself and the world it inhabits.
… Valuable resources are given over to what is cherished – education, religion,
commerce, family life, recreation – and tolerable symbols mask what is intolerable –
illness, deviance, poverty, disability, old age. Although architects do not create these
social categories, they play a key role in providing the physical framework in which
Designing collective access 79

the socially acceptable is celebrated and the unacceptable is confined and contained.
Thus when any group that has been physically segregated or excluded protests its
second-class status, its members are in effect challenging how architects practice
their profession.

A key contribution of late twentieth-century social movements to theories of

architectural design is crystallized in the connections that these movements drew between
physical environments and the social realities that they create. These movements and their
professional counterparts showed that the design of buildings is not a value-neutral and
passive act; rather, the design of the built environment actively conditions and shapes the
assumptions that the designers, architects, and planners of these value-laden contexts hold
with respect to who will (and should) inhabit the world. In short, built environments serve
as litmus tests of broader social exclusions.
Universal Design (UD) is an approach to access to the built environment that goes
beyond barrier-free design (Mace 1985). UD seeks to design built environments to be
as accessible as possible from the outset, to as many people as possible. That is, UD
seeks to design built environments that will not require future retrofitting or alteration.
Furthermore, UD goes beyond legal accessibility requirements (for example, what is
required to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act) to integrate into disability-
access strategies the specific requirements that accrue when designers take into account
aging, gender, size, and health (among other variables) (Steinfeld and Maisel 2012; Welch
and Jones 2002). In the critical disability studies literature of the humanities and social
sciences, UD has gained theoretical attention under the banner of “universal access.” As
feminist geographer Isabel Dyck notes, “conceptualizing the environment has been crucial
to the politics of disability research in delineating issues of access, a crucial dimension of a
socio-spatial model of disability” (Dyck 2010, 254; emphasis added). Feminist philosophy of
disability and other disability theories cite UD to prove that disability is a product of the
built and social environments, rather than a medical state that is intrinsic to the body of a
given individual (Wendell 1996, 46; Silvers 1998, 74–75). In the terms of these philosophies
and theories, the idea of a universally accessible environment is synonymous with the best,
most inclusive, approach to design and defines the ideal outcome of disability politics.
Disabled feminist philosopher Susan Wendell inaugurates this position when she calls
for a “universal recognition that all structures have to be built and all activities have to be
organized for the widest practical range of human abilities” (Wendell 1996, 55).
Some feminist disability theorists have disagreed with Wendell, emphasizing that the
physical environment alone is not enough to account for the exclusion of people with
sensory, cognitive, or mental disabilities from social and public life (Corker 2001, 39–40).
Parallel debates over the desirability and scope of UD occur within the design professions.
These professional debates hinge on the very concept of a universal, one-size-fits-all
approach to design (Hannson 2007, 17; Sandhu 2011; Steinfeld and Tauke 2002).
The implied tensions between these divergent approaches to access indicate that
additional exploration of value-based justifications for UD is needed. In this paper,
therefore, I parse out the potential meanings of the component terms of UD – namely,
universal and design – rather than take for granted or dismiss what UD is or to what it aspires.
80 Aimi Hamraie

In order to engage in this inquiry, I perform what feminist theorist Karen Barad calls a
“diffractive reading,” which she describes as a method of “reading insights through one
another in ways that help illuminate differences as they emerge.” Such a reading illuminates
“how different differences get made, what gets excluded, and how those exclusions matter”
(Barad 2007, 30). This approach to UD responds to Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s call for
feminist and disability studies to recognize their parallel development of theories in areas
of overlapping interest (Garland-Thomson [2002] 2011a, 1). In addition, the approach
responds to recent scholarly appeals for discussions of the “philosophical and theoretical
basis” of UD (Imrie 2012, 876). Rather than limit my discussion to the ideological basis of
UD, I explore how shifting its frame and emphasis can better address issues with respect
to the body, environment, and interdependence that both feminist philosophy of disability
and disability studies have articulated. In other words, I develop an idea of accessible
design that construes it as a method of social justice activism, rather than as a marketing
strategy. To do this, I draw upon four literatures, all of which address UD and have thus
far had limited impact on UD thought: feminist philosophy of disability, feminist disability
studies, feminist architectural theory, and disability geographies of access. By bringing these
literatures together, I hope to introduce them to a design audience, as well as to create space
for discussions about design within feminist philosophy of disability/feminist disability
studies. I shall first explain what UD is, exploring its design methodology and addressing
some of the problems that it raises. Then, I outline some of the issues and approaches that
a theory of accessible design that is premised on interdependence can adopt to create broad
and collective access to the built environment.

Introducing universal design

The architect Ronald Mace coined the term universal design in order to describe accessibility
that goes beyond the scope of barrier-free design (Mace 1985). Mace, a designer who used
a wheelchair, defined UD like this:

[UD is] a way of designing a building or facility, at little or no extra cost, so it is

both attractive and functional for all people, disabled or not. The idea is to remove
that expensive, “special” label from products and designs for people with mobility
problems, and at the same time, eliminate the institutional appearance of many
current accessible designs.
(Mace 1985, 147)

Mace’s goal of making the environment “functional for all people” echoed activist
demands for the integration of disability into broader conceptions of human community
and citizenship. Mace’s initial definition of UD reflected a desire to make the aesthetics
and function of access more available and to focus less on disabilities as an additional, extra,
and unusual consideration – that is, as a “special need.” Because Mace’s definition of UD
did not specify methods with which to achieve these aims and goals, he and other experts
recognized the need to further specify and elaborate what exactly universal design means and
how it differs from legally-mandated accessibility under the Americans with Disabilities
Designing collective access 81

Act (ADA). In the mid-1990s, therefore, Mace convened access experts at North Carolina
State University’s Center for Universal Design to craft a new definition. These experts
defined UD as “the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to
the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaption or specialized design” (Center
for Universal Design 1997). This definition retained Mace’s initial notion of a broad user
group (“everyone” or “all”) and added to it the idea that buildings and products must already
account for the diversity within this group in the way that these buildings and products are
designed. The authors of this new definition also wrote the “Seven Principles of Universal
Design,” a document that continues to be cited as the basis of UD (ibid.). The Seven
Principles that accompanied the new definition were: (1) Equitable use; (2) Flexibility in
use; (3) Simple and intuitive; (4) Perceptible information; (5) Tolerance for error; (6) Low
physical effort; and (7) Size and space for approach and use. Notwithstanding the appeal
to equity in the first two principles, these guidelines do not appear to make an overarching
ideological or value-based claim. Nor do any of the Principles mention disability, leaving
unanswered the question of whom equity and flexibility are meant to benefit.
In addition to the architectural strategies that have been developed to expand the work
of barrier-free design and improve rehabilitation (Steinfeld, Paquet, D’Souza, Joseph,
and Maisel 2010; Sanford 2012), several approaches to UD have emerged that address
the scope of inclusion and the strategies that can achieve it. Social justice approaches to
UD build on disability, feminist, and environmental justice movement work in order to
educate architects and designers about human diversity (Ostroff, Limont, and Hunter
2002; Steinfeld and Tauke 2002; Weisman 1999). Industrial design (consumer-oriented)
approaches take UD beyond architecture to the design of consumer products and fixtures
(Mueller 1997). Each approach brings a different value, object, or methodology to UD.

Theorizing value-explicit design

Feminist and disability theories of access argue that supposedly value-neutral built
environments are material-discursive phenomena that mask the dominance of perceived
majority identities and bodies. Leslie Kanes Weisman, a feminist architectural theorist
and UD educator, exemplifies this position in her “Women’s Environmental Rights: A
Manifesto,” declaring:

The built environment is largely the creation of white, masculine subjectivity. It is

neither value-free nor inclusively human. Feminism implies that we fully recognize this
environmental inadequacy and proceed to think and act out of that recognition. …
These are feminist concerns which have critical dimensions that are both societal
and spatial. They will require feminist activism as well as architectural expertise to
insure a solution.
(Weisman [1981] 1999, 5, emphasis added)

In other words, the epistemic positions of designers matter for the material-discursive
qualities of value-explicit design. Supposedly neutral design often privileges the most
common bodies through (what I have called) the “normate template” for architectural design
82 Aimi Hamraie

(Hamraie 2012). Garland-Thomson’s term normate represents the unmarked privilege of

majority embodiments – white, male, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, and middle-class
bodies – that appear neutral when their social location is in fact highly specific (Garland-
Thomson 1996, 8–10). When the normate serves as a neutral template for design, what
emerges is a built environment that is accessible only to certain bodies. The normate template
produces the illusion of what disability geographer Rob Imrie characterizes as disembodied
environments that “deny the presence or possibility of bodily impairment” (Imrie 2010, 40,
see also this volume). Since marginalized and minority bodies must necessarily use space,
they often experience what Garland-Thomson calls “misfit.” She writes:

Like the dominant subject positions such as male, white, or heterosexual, fitting
is a comfortable and unremarkable majority experience of material anonymity, an
unmarked subject position that most of us occupy at some points in life and that often
goes unnoticed. When we fit harmoniously and properly into the world, we forget the
truth of contingency because the world sustains us. When we experience misfitting and
recognize that disjuncture for its political potential, we expose the relational component
and the fragility of fitting. Any of us can fit here today and misfit there tomorrow.
(2011b, 597)

Fitting and misfitting are material-discursive, relational, and interdependent categories.

In order to sustain itself, the normate template relies upon the impression that normates
are normal, average, and majority bodies. Misfitting shatters this illusion, marking the
failure of the normate template to accommodate human diversity. As disability sociologist
Tanya Titchkosky explains, epistemic claims about disability as unknowable and therefore
excludable sustain misfitting. Titchkosky puts it this way:

The apparent and obvious ease of a statement like “things just weren’t built with
people with disabilities in mind” is a way to make inaccessibility sensible under
contemporary conditions. This ordinary “truth claim” is a type of say-able thing in
relation to disability. …The say-able is where cultural understandings reside.
(Titchkosky 2011, 74)

In addition to revealing the cultural devaluation of misfit, keeping bodies and people
“in mind” is an epistemic and material-discursive position (Imrie 2002, 55). Designers
produce misfit when they make claims such as: “You can’t accommodate everybody.
You’ve got to draw the line somewhere” (Titchkosky 2011, 31). As Barad explains in her
theory of “agential cuts” (Barad 2007, 176), acts of line-drawing are material-discursive
practices that actually shape what kinds of bodies appear to be possible and likely to live in
the world. Following Lifchez, inaccessible environments make the argument that disabled
bodies are unworthy of inclusion and quite possibly do not even exist as potential spatial
inhabitants. The delineation of normate bodies as likely spatial inhabitants and misfits
as “justifiably excludable” is not merely an act of omission, but rather, is also a material-
discursive act that solidifies normate privilege (Titchkosky 2011, 78).
Designing collective access 83

Garland-Thomson’s notion that environmental fit makes nondisabled people less

aware of their own embodied privilege (“we forget the truth of contingency because the
world sustains them”) echoes moral philosopher Charles Mills’s (1997, 97) argument that
racism makes white people less likely to acknowledge and understand structural racism.
Insofar as normate architects and lawmakers claim that there are too many disabilities to
“keep in mind,” or that they do not have the requisite information to design for minority
embodiments, they do not merely lack available information. On the contrary, these
declarations reflect what critical race and feminist epistemologists call “epistemologies of
ignorance” (Mills 1997; Tuana and Sullivan 2007). According to these theorists,

ignorance is not the result of a benign gap in our knowledge, but deliberate choices
to pursue certain kinds of knowledge while ignoring others. We must therefore
concern ourselves with our choices of knowledge production and who we take
ourselves to be accountable to through these choices.
(Grasswick 2011, xvii)

In other words, epistemologies of ignorance show that misfit is an active construction

of what appears to be a lack of information about the range of human diversity. Knowledge
and ideologies privileging the normate are always present in built environments. The
point, following Garland-Thomson, Grosz, and Lifchez, is to affirm the normate template
as a produced parti – that is, the basic starting concept – of ignorance, rather than simply an
effect of designerly business as usual.
Privileging the embodied user experience of misfit through accessibility can also assist in
the conceptualization of alternatives to epistemologies of ignorance. Value-explicit design can
challenge the epistemic subject-object relationship between designers and spatial inhabitants.
For instance, participatory design methodologies that feminist and disability-focused designers
have developed offer a way in which to use designerly knowledge to critique the normate
template’s epistemology of ignorance. Lifchez famously invited people with disabilities into
the design studio at the University of California-Berkeley School of Architecture in order to
train students in accessible-design strategies (Lifchez 1987). In doing so, he centered disability
and made design students accountable to the needs of disabled users. He also decentered the
designer as the authoritative knower or expert, training students to take on partnership roles
with their intended clients and to value their authority and expertise about their experiences of
the built environment. The translation of experience into design is hardly straightforward; it
is not surprising, therefore, that participants in the process noted the difficulties that students
had with shifting expertise to clients with disabilities (Sarkissian 1987). Nevertheless, Lifchez’s
methods privileged users, brought them into much closer proximity with designers, and
made disability intelligible to design students. Other architectural educators, like Weisman,
have educated new generations of design students in UD methodologies and research
through work like the Universal Design Education Project (Welch 1995) and user-centered
community partnerships (Weisman 2012). This work provides alternatives to value-neutral
design in order to productively engage with epistemologies of ignorance.
User involvement is, nonetheless, only one piece of the UD puzzle; that is, UD requires
more than additional knowledge about disabled people and bodies (in which case designers
84 Aimi Hamraie

may come to treat misfitting bodies as no more than objects of knowledge for designers).
UD must also address the structural conditions that prevent marginalized people from
becoming professional designers or having access to decision-making in design processes.
As I explain in the next section, a UD politics of interdependence can privilege disabled
people and others who experience misfitting in order to address intersectional inequalities
through design.

Body-environment interdependence
The task of a feminist disability theory of UD is to make the normate template’s parti
explicit, hold designers accountable for what appears to be disability-neutral design, and
show that this neutrality is a constructed form of ignorance. Making UD’s values and
ideologies explicit requires consideration of excluded bodies and full acknowledgement
of the range of interactions between bodies and environments. In recent years,
disability geographers have argued for attention to the embodied experiences of users in
consideration of questions of access, rather than an exclusive focus on physical structures
(Chouinard, Hall, and Wilton, 2010; Imrie 2010; Gleeson 1999). In this work, bodies
push back against inaccessible environments and “overturn some of the problems relating
to poorly designed environments” (Imrie 2002, 64; Imrie 2012, 876). Refusing to take
inaccessible design for granted as deterministic of exclusion, recent qualitative research
in disability geography has documented embodied experiences as evidence of spatial
use and agency. Indeed, disability geographies have set an important new agenda for
research on access and have provided user perspectives that should be applied as part of
the knowledge base of accessible design. Philosophical and theoretical explorations of the
values, ideologies, and methodologies underlying physical environments are, nevertheless,
still necessary, particularly in the context of UD. Building upon the concepts of material-
discursive, parti, and normate template laid out above, I maintain that a feminist disability
theory of UD demands attention to how physical environments produce symbolic and
material access or exclusion through their interactions with and knowledge about bodies.
As feminist geographers and architects have pointed out, the notion that there is a physical
environment that exists regardless of, or prior to, embodied knowledge and experience
fails to acknowledge the implicit reliance of design processes on normate bodies (Brown
2011; Rose 1993; Weisman 1992).
Because design is a value-laden material-discursive practice, a feminist disability
theory of UD must consider how body-environment interactions can be sites of a politics
of interdependence. Such a theory must begin with intersectionality, understanding
environmental misfit as both an epistemic position and a material-discursive axis of
oppression (Code 2006; Garland-Thomson 2011b). As feminist disability scholarship has
shown, the lack of access to physical environments is often due to the stigmatization of
dependencies and the interdependencies that they entail (Garland-Thomson 2005; Eiseland
1994). In a liberal democratic understanding of access, disability, aging, femininity, non-
normate size, and lack of resources all characterize dependencies to overcome or eliminate.
This refusal to acknowledge dependency ignores the fundamental interdependence of all
bodies for sustenance, community, and care (Wendell 1996, 145–148).
Designing collective access 85

Intersectionality must consider how the normate template for the built environment
is a system of exclusion that segregates spaces and people along the axes of disability, race,
class, and gender (among others). Recent disability justice work from activists such as Mia
Mingus on the notion of “collective access” promotes the interdependence of disability,
anti-racist, and gender justice (Mingus 2010b). In addition to guiding disability justice
organizing, collective access can be a material-discursive design goal that emphasizes the
relationality of built environments with social and structural conditions. A collective access
understanding of intersectionality can produce a theory of body-environment relations
focused on social justice. For instance, collective access recalls the work of feminist
materialist architects who designed built environments to challenge inaccessibility through
the politics of interdependence. Dolores Hayden, famously asking, “What would a non-
sexist city be like?” imagined the feminist re-appropriation of suburban homes to fit the
needs of non-traditional families who would live in collective housing (Hayden 2000). She
tied this work to an anti-capitalist critique of consumer culture and the spatial divisions
between “the household and the market economy” (Hayden 2000, 270). Redesigning
existing spaces allowed Hayden and other feminist architects to address broader economic
structures, the existence of which depended upon suburban household design and urban
planning. Hayden’s work shows why a theory of access must continue to think about
the built environment. Her analysis of the construction of the suburbs, for example, is
not about marginalized people as “passive victims of insensitive design” (Imrie 2010, 35).
Rather, her analysis shows how feminists have targeted the culture of suburban home life
to simultaneously address capitalism and patriarchy through attention to unpaid labor,
lack of safe housing and green space, and the spatial needs of non-traditional familial
arrangements. UD’s approach to collective access by design can proceed with a similar
orientation. That is, UD can understand design to be a value-based activity that generates
material-discursive conditions of inclusion or misfit depending on what kinds of bodies
are included within the scope of the “universal.” […]
When feminist and disability studies scholars claim that UD is a form of inclusive
design that keeps a range of human variation in mind, they invoke the notion of broad
accessibility, that is, the notion of “design for all people, to the greatest extent possible”
(Center for Universal Design 1997). Broad accessibility assumes that the normate template
creates misfits beyond categories typically considered to be disabilities. As recent work
in disability geography has shown, misfit is as much about age, size, weight, emotional,
cognitive, and gender diversity as it is about physical and sensory disabilities (Chouinard,
Hall, and Wilton 2010). Broad accessibility recognizes that intersectionality compounds
environmental misfit and requires a more collective notion of access than barrier-free
approaches and individualized accommodations can afford (Mingus 2010a). For instance,
for reasons related to structure, design, heavy doors, lack of space, signage, and social
policing, public restrooms are often inaccessible to people who use wheelchairs, children,
elderly people, and transgender people alike. Broad accessibility understands that all of
these types of people and bodies have a stake in accessible built environments.
Because design is a value-based activity, however, not all human variations
straightforwardly count as part of the universal. When the content of the universal is
unspecified, UD can slip into vague notions of “all” or “everyone” that assume normate
86 Aimi Hamraie

users and de-center disability. For example, a common claim about curb cuts is that they
are usable to a broad group of people, including users of wheelchairs, strollers, or bicycles.
However, this claim indicates that there are multiple potential uses for these features
of the built environment, not all of these uses were intentionally incorporated into the
design. The values and knowledges through which wheelchair users, bicyclists, and people
pushing strollers come to count as part of “all” and “everyone” remain unexamined.
Very easily, curb cuts or ramps can be constructed too steeply or narrowly for a manual
wheelchair user, though they may be usable to a walking person who pushes a stroller.
Broad accessibility serves as a more complex notion of inclusion, showing that UD must
still center disability access in order to avoid lapsing into the normate template.

***

Added value is exemplified by claims that accessible designs have (usually economic)
value for “other people” beyond the benefits of disability access. Considerable attention
within the UD literature has been paid to demonstrating that a market demographic
exists for broadly accessible designs (Hannson 2007, 23; Steinfeld and Maisel 2012,
45–48). UD proponents argue that design with broad consumer appeal has the “added
value” of destigmatizing disability access by taking it out of the context of a “special needs
accommodation” (Steinfeld and Maisel 2012, 23). This framing is in response to the
preponderance of assistive technologies that are only usable by individual people with
specific types of disabilities, have a medical aesthetic, and are excessively costly (Mace
1985; Mueller 1997). Accessibility requires de-stigmatizing, however, only if disability is
taken for granted as a stigmatizing quality. Positioning UD as benefitting “other people,” in
addition to disabled people, contributes to the impression that valuable design requires
utility for nondisabled people in order for its creation to be justified. In turn, the concept
of added value itself becomes stigmatizing toward disability as a category deemed to
have not enough value. Unlike broad accessibility, which expands the category of “all”
to include multiple stigmatized minority embodiments, within added value, it seems,
disabled people themselves are never enough to comprise the category of “all,” regardless
of how demographically pervasive they may be.

Conclusion: toward collective access

What would it mean for designers committed to universal access and social sustainability to
take up interdependence and collective access? In addition to the recognition of design as a
value-laden activity that produces material-discursive effects, and beyond the adoption of a
goal of broad accessibility, further work on a feminist disability theory of UD must address
the neutralizations, omissions, and ignorance that extant approaches to access perpetuate.
In particular, this work should attend to how racism and economic injustice are structural
conditions that both create a lack of access and are perpetuated by consumerist and added
value positions. Who has benefitted from value-added UD products? Who has been left
out? How can UD address the structural conditions that prevent disabled people, people
of color, and poor people (by no means mutually-exclusive groups) from training in the
Designing collective access 87

design professions? How can the UD concept of social sustainability become a collective
access strategy for anti-racist urban planning, rather than a buzzword for the promotion of
gentrification or “smart growth?” These questions underscore the necessity of a social justice
orientation that does not take UD for granted as the best, most inclusive, form of design.
The application of U.S.-based UD principles to transnational contexts is another area
that could benefit from the exploration of interdependence, broad accessibility and added
value framings, and the economics and politics of design. To address these issues, a feminist
disability theory of UD work should build upon existing work on international UD
efforts (Mullick, Agarwal, Kumar, and Swarnkar 2011; Sandhu 2011). That is, a feminist
disability theory of UD should consider what collective access and interdependence mean
in the context of international movements for disability justice. For instance, what is the
status of designer expertise in international UD projects? What kinds of knowledge are
privileged? What broader ideologies and values does the promotion of U.S. UD principles
serve internationally? How has the enforcement of disability access become contingent
on neoliberal economic reforms justified according to added value? How have users and
designers pushed back against these values and ideologies?
A feminist disability theory of UD based on disability justice, collective access, and
interdependence can understand value-explicit design as a form of activism within the
design professions. UD practitioners and theorists, building upon the theory outlined
here, could continue to develop strategies for participatory design, shifting from value-
explicit design for disability to design with and by misfitting bodies more generally. These
subtle differences in framing could shift both the role and work of designers, as well as
render UD as a more capacious and social justice-oriented material-discursive practice.
9
MORE THAN ACCESS

Overcoming limits in architectural and

disability discourse

J. Kent Fitzsimons (2016)

In recent decades, regulations and guidance aimed at making architectural environments

less disabling have improved daily life for those with mobility and sensory disabilities.
This approach to accessibility clearly produces social progress. However, it also has the
unfortunate side effect of casting architecture as a prosthetic device that normalizes
lived experience based on an able-bodied paradigm. Rather than generate architecture
whose qualities draw from the specificities of a great variety of physical conditions, it
tends to reinforce what may be called the “eyes on legs” benchmark, where architectural
experience is understood as a function of a body that associates the ability to walk with
fully operational vision. I will argue that approaching accessibility as a compensatory
measure can distract from other aspects of the complex relationships between space design
and the experiences of disability. This requires challenging assumptions that imagine and
interpret architectural space predominantly through a seeing and mobile body, to the
detriment of other senses and of other ways of appropriating the built environment. In
this chapter, I will therefore forefront disabled spatial practices that involve “more than
access.” I will discuss two cases in which an architectural work provides the opportunity to
conceptualize disabled experiences in ways that challenge limits in accessibility theory and
practice as well as in architectural thought. Through architectural analyses of these works,
I will argue that the full spectrum of bodily capacities could benefit if both architectural
discourse and disability guidance and advocacy conceptualized the specificities of disabled
architectural experience beyond the habitual terms of access.
Both cases studies consist of architectural environments that are open to the public. In the
first work, Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin (2005), I
explore how access can consist of more than just functional ease of movement to a destination;
rather it can be integral to our meaning-making around, and experiences of, material space.
This is because the Memorial’s formal and spatial organization creates the potential for an
infinite number of meaning-making experiences, without pre-judging their nature and by
favouring the activation of all the senses. As a result, it challenges the notion that accessibility
More than access 89

consists of compensating impairments that hinder ostensibly ‘normal’ building occupation,

and suggests rather that built space can enable encounters of architectural and experiential
significance, whatever one’s unique physical relationship to the world.
The second work, Sejima and Nishazawa and Associates’ Rolex Learning Center at the
Polytechnic University in Lausanne, Switzerland (2005–2010), provides the opportunity
to examine how architecture might redefine the boundaries that normally divide ability
and disability into separate categories. Because it includes a significant amount of floor area
that neither complies with accessibility regulations nor corresponds with conventional
expectations for usefulness, this educational facility creates an unprecedented environment
that constantly draws its users’ attention to the way they move through space. As a result,
it disables some able bodies and enables others with disabilities, and thus redraws the
contours that gather individuals together into different “types” of building occupants.
Both the Berlin Memorial and the Learning Center in Lausanne were discussed in an
article entitled “L’art d’une architecture discriminatoire” (“The Art of Discriminatory
Architecture”) in the November 2005 newsletter of the Zurich-based Swiss Center for
Disability-adapted Construction (Centre Suisse pour la construction adaptée aux handicapés).
That article rightly critiques both works for their lack of consideration of disabled peoples’
rights, pointing out that the initial design proposals demonstrate a great divergence between
the needs of inclusive design and what it calls the “aesthetic and formal qualities” of “artistic
or architectural interventions.” While that article provides a convenient backdrop and useful
information for this chapter, my argument here will be of a very different nature. For while
the struggle for architectural accessibility remains justified and necessary, there is also room to
claim that disabled experience is a legitimate architectural experience in its own right, because
of its specificity and through its difference from supposedly normal experience. That claim,
which echoes a certain tension within disability criticism, also makes it possible to question
the conceptual framework of architectural discourse where the body is concerned, and to
speculate on a broader agenda for corporal experience in the built environment beyond the
language of access or of current disability advocacy and guidance.

Accessibility trouble: the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

In the heart of Berlin, a large plaza-like architectural work constitutes the Memorial to the
Murdered Jews of Europe (Figure 9.1). Designed by American architect Peter Eisenman
for a competition in 1997, the Memorial was inaugurated in May of 2005. It occupies a
whole urban block on the street that links the Brandenburg Gate with Potsdamer Platz,
which also corresponds to the line followed by the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989.
Eisenman’s project consists of over 2700 stelae or slabs made of concrete, each one
measuring 95 cm x 2,38 m, with heights varying between zero and four metres. The
resulting proportions of many of these concrete monoliths makes them resemble unadorned
sarcophagi. They are organized on an orthogonal grid, with lines running north–south
and east–west. Each line is a path or alley, 95 cm wide, the same dimension as the short
side of each stele. There are 130 such paths cutting straight through the site (Eisenman
2006: 152). The ground plane that these paths traverse is a rolling relief of hills and valleys.
The tops of the stelae also create a changing topography. However, it is different from that
90 J. Kent Fitzsimons

FIGURE 9.1 View of a path through Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Stelenfeld,
Berlin, Germany
Photo by Stephan Czuratis (Jazz-face) – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.
php?curid=1288384

of the ground, neither mimicking nor mirroring it, but rather creating a field of random
interference between two formal systems. The result is that each path through the site sinks
and rises along continuous slopes, while the slabs surrounding it change heights in a more
staccato manner. These interfering topographies are generated through a savvy calculation
that includes parameters taken from different grids and lines meeting on the site.
As often happens, the result of this particular design process was not a model of accessibility.
The paths in the memorial project possessed slopes that were often more steep than permitted
by regulations. Furthermore, the undulating landscape did not provide the level landings at
required intervals that offer a moment of rest. Finally, the narrowness of the paths, while
technically sufficient, was not hospitable to people in wheelchairs, being on the “tight’” side.
In the article “L’art d’une architecture discriminatoire,” the Swiss Center for Disability-
adapted Construction targeted Eisenman’s project, claiming that “the Berlin memorial
illustrates, in a particularly acute manner, discrimination against people with disabilities for
purely formal reasons” (2005: 2). The article recounts that it was only after disability activists
took legal action that the memorial design was adapted to be partially accessible in terms of
German law. Historical and geographical conditions made the project’s disregard for what by
then were considered standard accessibility requirements all the more shocking for disability
activists. It is just steps away, at number four on the Tiergartenstrasse, that the Nazi regime’s
euthanasia programme (1939–41), “Operation T4,” had its headquarters. This programme
More than access 91

was responsible for the deaths of over one hundred thousand Germans with various types
of physical and mental impairments. Disability rights organizations judged it distasteful that
a memorial dedicated to one group of Nazi Germany’s victims be inaccessible to those who
share the physical traits of other victims.
Of interest here is how activist advocacy was able to affect changes to the design, based
on compromising between architectural intention and disabled access requirements. The
Berlin Tribunal decided that at least thirteen of the one hundred thirty paths traversing the
site would have to meet the accessibility code. Why not more, or all? The Tribunal argued
that too much modification would harm the work’s “artistic concept.” The court thus
understood that the paths are not simply functional elements that provide access to the
memorial, but constitute an essential element of the “artistic work” itself. The impression
of tightly spaced stelae sitting on a moving ground – through which Eisenman sought to
evoke a sense of insecurity and constraint – presumably depends, at least in part, on the
slopes’ otherwise prohibitive steepness. The Swiss Center’s article ironically deduces that
the negative effects of depriving the “general public” of this concept were deemed greater
than the negative effects of excluding those with mobility disabilities from full access.
Looking at the Tribunal’s argument more closely, we find that it creates a logical conundrum.
If the paths do not function as access to the memorial, they do not fall under the provisions
of the law. But it is precisely because of their narrow and undulating nature that they are the
work, rather than merely its access route. In other words, it is by not meeting accessibility norms
that the paths are excused from their application; not respecting the law justifies them being
outlaws. This strange bit of reasoning betrays some interesting aspects of design thinking in
architecture. In particular, it creates a distinction between a path as access, and path as substance,
as a meaning-making experience. Eisenman’s memorial constitutes a limit condition where
there seems to be full coincidence between circulation and sense, between movement and
meaning. But the Court’s statement implies precisely that, normally, there is a distinction.
It opposes two sets of terms: on the one hand, access–circulation–functionality; and on the
other hand, experience–substance–meaning. In this reading, the means of getting from one
place to another is ‘normally’ purely functional, devoid of experiential interest. In contrast,
the destinations – for example the rooms of a building – would constitute the substance of the
architectural work. They would be where the architect’s intention is realized through bodily
experience, and is thus not expressed as an “access” issue at all. For the Tribunal, when it
comes to thinking about disabled people, circulation and programme – access and experience
– are valued differently with regards to their architectural significance.

Re-assessing access
Interestingly, the Tribunal’s distinction is constantly challenged by real architectural
proposals. Many projects from the last twenty years – museums, theatres, transit hubs,
libraries – incorporate large ramps or sloping ground as an integral part of the architectural
experience. In these cases, we might be tempted to argue that, because the bit of tilted
ground is part of the architectural concept, and is therefore not simply an access element
leading from one space to another, it need not meet accessibility standards. In cases where
the circulation is a meaningful part of the work – where access is the experience – is it
92 J. Kent Fitzsimons

acceptable that the very form of paths and passageways prevent easy movement? Rather
than take sides in this inherently contradictory debate, we might consider its underpinning
assumptions. The first question might be: what is being accessed, and how is it ostensibly
accessed? Regarding the Berlin case, recall that for the Tribunal, the paths are not on the
way to something, but rather are that something. It is by experiencing the paths themselves
that one accesses the sense of this particularly difficult subject of remembering, that is,
memorializing the Holocaust. Eisenman explains how the contrast between the ground
plane and the stelae tops achieves this effect:

A perceptual and conceptual divergence between the topography of the ground and
the top plane of the stelae is thus created. This divergence denotes a difference in
time, between what Henri Bergson called chronological, narrative time and time as
duration. The monument’s registration of this difference makes for a place of loss
and contemplation, elements of memory.
(2006: 152)

We might ask if any one path best produces this divergence between perception and
concept, or if, on the contrary, any path makes it manifest as well as any other. If we push
this question to its logical conclusion, we could ask if one must pass by each of the two
thousand stelae, on all four sides, from every possible arriving itinerary, to every possible
departing itinerary, in order to realize the work’s meaning, its potential, to experience it
in an appropriate way for it to be the memorial that it is. Since it is practically impossible
for any one person to exhaust the possibilities, the meanders, the turning in circles, the
disorientation, we would then ask: is the Berlin Memorial really fully accessible to anyone?
As far as architectural meaning is concerned, the Memorial’s specific configuration
brings the conventional way of thinking about access to a critical limit. It reveals another
possibility: architecture need not define singular experiences revealed by a unique path.
It could rather create a great potential for making paths. The stelae make perceptible
the prospect of seemingly infinite pathways, just as there are infinite routes through a
large city’s grid. It is unlikely that visitors try a dozen paths, let alone the one hundred
thirty straight paths through the Memorial. Rather than choreographing one particular
experience, Eisenman’s architectural intervention in Berlin is the armature for countless
individual experiences. Architecturally these engage directly with mobility itself as a sense:
as something that is directed or disoriented, slowed down, or speeded up (even if the
underlying assumption is of a body that starts out able). This line of reasoning admittedly
runs the risk of downplaying the right to choose one’s path from all the variations. But
the memorial’s specific form makes the claim for choice seem less urgent by asking us to
reconsider what architectural experience is, how one may have access to it, and the extent
to which access is assumed to mean ease of movement and way-finding.
In his 1886 dissertation Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture, architectural
historian and theorist Heinrich Wölfflin noted that:

[W]hen Goethe once remarked that we ought to sense the effect of a beautiful room,
even if we were led through it blindfolded, he was expressing the [...] idea [...] that
More than access 93

the architectural impression, far from being some kind of “reckoning by the eye,” is
essentially based on a direct bodily feeling.
(1886: 155)

Since the Berlin Memorial’s paths are not access but are rather the work’s very substance,
in other words the source of architectural experience, we might ask what it would be like
to “be led through it blindfolded.” Eisenman hints at the prospect of non-visual perception
in his comparison between his Memorial and traditional monuments:

The traditional monument is understood by its symbolic imagery, by what it

represents. It is not understood in time, but in an instant in space; it is seen and
understood simultaneously. [...]
In this monument there is no goal, no end, no working one’s way in or out. The
duration of an individual’s experience of it grants no further understanding, since
understanding is impossible. The time of the monument, its duration from top
surface to ground, is disjoined from the time of experience.

(2006: 154, author’s italics)

The contrast is meant to oppose chronological time with what Henri Bergson called
duration. This passage also associates vision with a particular sort of architectural experience,
with the assumed immediacy of understanding through looking. Eisenman thus opens the
way to consider the experience of his project not through vision and representation, but
through the body and its many senses’ duration in space.
When vision impairments are addressed in architectural regulations, it is as a disability
affecting ease of movement and way-finding. The regulations do not ask that architects
convey the beauty, the surprise, or even discomfort of an architectural space to blind and
visually impaired people. Instead, they settle for grooves in the floor to give cues to the
white stick, and discourage disorienting curving walls in favour of clear orthogonal spatial
distribution. None of this is ostensibly so that those who cannot see can appreciate the
architecture. It is rather so that they can get from one place to another without trouble. The
Berlin Memorial expands on such a limited interpretation of accessibility. Whilst taking
motion for granted, the grooves for walking sticks found along some of the Memorial’s
paths do not only ensure that one can navigate to a given destination (Figure 9.2). Like
the groove on a vinyl record, they draw a sensitive instrument along a channel whose
rhythmic structure and changing amplitudes unfold in time. As one moves between stelae
and through intersections, there are variations in air pressure caused by compression and
release. Heat and coolness alternate on skin as the sun peaks out from behind a stele
and disappears again. The air temperature drops in the descent into the sunken areas,
akin to the incremental changes in a repetitive Philip Glass composition, drifting almost
imperceptibly from one scale to another. The resonance between rhythms in space
and those in the body may be related to functions such as the heartbeat, digestion and
respiration (McNeill 1995: 6). In these ways, the Berlin Memorial draws attention to the
possibility that meaning-making and experience come through changes in perception rather
94 J. Kent Fitzsimons

than from instances of perception; not from what something looks like but through the very
multiplicity of its sense experiences, layered through time. It puts brackets on vision as a
privileged vehicle for architecture and unleashes all the senses as fully legitimate forms of
architectural experience. It thus challenges the habit whereby one associates the sensorial
experience of a spatial configuration with a specific representational and visual meaning,
a shortcut that too often considers some experiences to be more true to an architectural
work than others. In contrast, the Memorial makes it possible to hypothesize a design
process in which modifying architectural form for the eye would be the last step after it has
been designed to work with the other senses; that is, as an extra gesture for those who see.

FIGURE 9.2 View across Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Stelenfeld, Berlin,
Germany
Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net) CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.
php?curid=32824026
More than access 95

This last point underscores how much the Memorial departs from the conventional
question that is raised when addressing disability considerations in architecture: in other
words, can everyone, including those with mobility or sensory impairments, access this
building? In Berlin, we must formulate a different question: to what modes of experience
does this architecture lend itself? Or, to paraphrase Julia Kristeva (2003), what ways of
being does it anticipate and realize? The difference between these two concerns may have
a great impact on design practice. A design process nourished by the ways that bodies with
different sensory and mobility capabilities develop impressions of architecture could result
in environments where we see otherwise through touch, feel otherwise through sound, hear
otherwise through vision. It would imagine the differentials and collusions of one sense with
another in the space of perception. Updating Wölfflin’s invitation, it would consider how
we might hear our way through a room with skin tingling. While this process need not be
only a detour by which we return to the ostensible normal body that walks and enjoys five
functioning senses, that body, too, has much to gain from architecture designed in this way.

(Dis)ability trouble: the Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne

The Berlin Memorial disturbs a common understanding of circulation and sense in
architectural thought, and by the same token questions the notion of accessibility in
disability guidance and advocacy. The second case studied in this chapter also entertains
an atypical relationship to concepts of mobility in architectural space. However, the
consequences of its particular architecture involve the very definition of physical disability.
The Rolex Learning Center for the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
in Switzerland was designed by the Japanese firm Sejima and Nishizawa Architects and
Associates (SANAA). SANAA won the competition in 2005, and building construction
was completed in 2010. This university building is a large rectangle measuring about
120 metres by 170 metres, or three football fields side by side. It is ostensibly a one-
storey structure, as it consists of a single rectangular layer of space held between a floor
and a roof (while there is also a large basement area, its architectural characteristics do
not warrant discussion here). However, it is in fact an unprecedented type of space: a
single, continuous interior that is subdivided thanks to the ingenious combination of an
incessantly sloping floor and a series of oval-shaped external patios. The result is an indoor
landscape of rolling hills, wrapping around outdoor voids that bring natural light and air
into the heart of the building. The topographic quality is underscored by the contour lines
that figure in the plan (Figure 9.3).
The Learning Center’s 14,000 square metres include a library and scientific information
areas, teaching areas, living areas (cafés, restaurant, offices, boutique), cultural areas
(exhibition space, university press offices, conference room), and service areas. The
Polytechnic’s idea is that the Learning Center complements existing facilities on campus
as a hothouse for intellectual and social exchanges. For the university’s head librarian, as
the “point of entry to the EPFL, the Learning Center will be a place to learn, to obtain
information, and to live. It will become a place where virtual and physical components
combine to provide facilitated access to knowledge” (author’s italics). The architects present
the Learning Center as “a center for exchange and exploration of ideas for everyone”
96 J. Kent Fitzsimons

FIGURE 9.3 SANAA (2010) Plan of Rolex Learning Center, Lausanne, Switzerland

Reprinted by permission from SANAA

(Aymonin 2008). The use of sloping floors for changing elevation within the building,
along with the near absence of doorways, might lead one to think that it would be barrier-
free for users with mobility disabilities. Indeed, while all the other competition entries
distributed the programme in multi-floor buildings, this building ostensibly eliminated
the need for stairs, ramps and elevators: what could be more universally accessible than an
entire building contained in a single room?
However, like Eisenman’s Memorial, the project for the Learning Center – as presented
for the competition and ultimately to the public – lent itself to critique from an accessibility
perspective. The ramping ground plane that ran throughout the building did not respect local
accessibility regulations: its slope varied constantly and could be downright steep in some
places, and there were no resting landings. Moreover, orientation for people with vision
disabilities would be particularly difficult, as there was no regular geometry for reference,
and almost no walls to serve as guides. Despite the Center being a single-storey building,
consisting entirely of that hallmark of architecture rendered accessible – the sloping ground
– the project was in fact very inaccessible from a regulatory standpoint. In this context, the
aim to provide “access to knowledge” expressed by the project’s client and architects could
seem rather ironic. One can understand that disability rights activists reacted negatively
when such language was used to present a building that would be very difficult to inhabit
More than access 97

for those with mobility or vision disabilities. All the more if one considers the high profile
of the undertaking, reflected not only in the budget, but also in the design competition held
to select the architects: in total, ten architecture firms competed, drawn from the roster of
international star architects, including many Pritzker Prize winners. As the Swiss Center for
Disability-adapted Construction pointed out in “L’art d’une architecture discriminatoire”
“rendering people disabled with a new ninety million [Swiss] franc building intended to
house a study centre is particularly shocking” (2005: 4).
As a result, the design development phase – as the project moved from the competition
version through building permits and then to construction – required changes so that the
building would comply with accessibility regulations. The revised plan looks as though
elements were traced from a snakes-and-ladders game board. To ameliorate the level
changes that sometimes amount to 4.5 metres (almost two storeys), the designers used
switchback and S-shaped ramps, and straight-shot funicular-like lifts, to complement the
usual vertical elevators. The result is surprising at points, for example where the relatively
small restaurant dining room is served on one side by a multi-stop inclined lift (for mid-
climb access, for kitchen access, and finally for dining access), and on the other by a rather
original winding ramp broken up with steps: this kind of circulation redundancy would be
a luxury in almost any other project. This latter stair-ramp suggests that even able-bodied
building users would have trouble with the Learning Center’s unusual floor plane in some
places. In any case, the matter was apparently settled from a regulatory perspective. But as
with the Berlin Memorial, the Rolex Learning Center calls for closer attention to what it has
to say about how the body and its experiences are conceptualized in architectural thought.

Blurring the difference?

One characteristic of particular note is that there are two types of floor area in the Center.
Some spaces are accessible according to conventional interpretations of accessibility codes.
These are areas of level ground, whether open or enclosed in glass partition walls, and are
joined to each other and to the building exterior by uninterrupted surfaces whose slope
never exceeds the maximum allowed by law, with resting landings at specified intervals,
and a vertical or inclined lift intervening where ramps are not possible. In the final project
plan, these areas are identifiable by the tables, chairs, desks and bookshelves that populate
them. This furnished landscape is a continuum of code-abiding architectural space.
In contrast, the remaining ground floor area in the building consists for the most part of
relatively steeply sloped ground, as the dense contour lines in the plan reveal. This interior
space has a strange status. It is clearly not considered important enough by Lausanne’s
building commission to require that it be accessible. But at the same time, the Polytechnic
obviously considers it important enough to spend great amounts of additional money for
its construction and maintenance: indeed, it represents a good third of the built floor area.
Snaking around the prudent, law-abiding parts of the building, this other kind of space
raises interesting questions about how architectural thought conceptualizes inhabitation
and, by extension, the assumed bodies of its various inhabitants.
To start, we could contrast the unusual binary opposition between accessible and
inaccessible space at Lausanne with the radical distinction between circulation space and
98 J. Kent Fitzsimons

meaningful space discussed in the Berlin Memorial. In Eisenman’s project, the problem
was that meaning and inaccessibility coincide. In contrast, the spaces that are arguably
the most significant (because useful) in the Learning Center are fully accessible, yet they
coexist with large swathes of floor area that are apt to cause accessibility trouble. On the
one hand, there are areas with familiar programmes such as library, offices, multifunction
room, or cafeteria, whilst on the other, the remaining space – that is, the sloping ground of
the interior landscape – is supplemental, bonus floor area whose nature is not expressible
in conventional design terms, neither for regulatory purposes not from a simply practical
point of view. It is neither clearly circulation space, as there is so much of it, so much of
it is uncomfortably steep, and access to all other spaces is handled otherwise; nor is it
easily usable space, at least in terms of conventional building programmes: aside from the
perfunctory solution of graded seating – which is already included in an auditorium space
(in the lower left part of the plan), it is very difficult to furnish such spaces for any usual
occupation, as may be observed in outdoor areas with similar relief. It is interesting to note
that the contrast between furniture-friendly spaces and areas with excessively inclined
planes is much more pronounced in the revised plan than in the original competition
scheme. It is as though practical considerations – including but not limited to those related
to disabled building users – exacerbated the differentiation between space that may be
occupied “normally” and that other, indefinable space.
As we will see, this new space may be understood as a challenge to the usual distinction
between mobility ability and disability. It disrupts the clear-cut border between barrier-free
sequences through a building and paths that are interrupted by impediments to smooth, easy
movement. In conventional buildings, the limits to the continuity of accessible space are
clearly defined by steps or more significant breaks in floor levels. Indeed, the presence of such
breaks cues one to look for a ramp or lift nearby. Furthermore, the ramps that compensate for
such obstacles virtually always have a constant pitch. In contrast, the unconventional space
in the Learning Center in Lausanne is composed of floor areas with constantly changing
slopes, making it more akin to a natural landscape than to an architectural environment.
Whereas conventional architecture exhibits a clear distinction between discontinuous paths
on the one hand (where steps are involved) and smooth, barrier-free routes on the other, the
Learning Center repeatedly solicits occupants to evaluate at what point the ground’s incline
might become too steep for them to use (Figure 9.4).
A first consequence of this architectural quality is that the need to judge whether or not
one should use a slope is as true for those not normally associated with mobility disabilities
as for those who are. While this may be a common situation outdoors (especially in
Switzerland), it is not often encountered indoors. A second consequence is that, in the
Learning Center, some users who would be obliged to use a stigma-inducing ramp when
changing levels in other buildings might fall in with the users who would usually use the
stairs. A flight of eight steps in a conventional public building deters even the most athletic
wheelchair user: the steps create a clear distinction along rolling lines. In the Learning
Center, this distinction is blurred. The breaking point between an acceptable incline and
one that is too steep is much more subjective, more situational or contextual. Some hills
are clearly too steep for safe use by wheelchair users or people with difficulty walking, for
whatever reason. But many parts of this “other” space, including some that are adjacent to
More than access 99

FIGURE 9.4 Interior views of Rolex Learning Center showing constantly changing slopes

Reprinted by permission of SANAA.

100 J. Kent Fitzsimons

code-respecting ramps, may be easily practicable by building users who would normally
be characterized as disabled. This architectural work thus upsets a distinction that arises
in other buildings where level changes occasion the juxtaposition of steps and ramps, and
by extension a differentiation between normal and “non-normal” occupants based on how
they move around. In short, the Learning Center blurs the line between able- and disabled
people twice. First, it presents slopes that are a challenge for all: parts of the building
“disable” those not normally affected by the few steps that inconvenience wheelchair users
and others with mobility difficulties. The Learning Center’s specific form, in particular its
steeper slopes, prevent full, unlimited use for many bodies. Then, it blurs the line a second
time by making it possible for some users to eschew regulatory ramps in favour of more
challenging slopes. The steeper slopes “enable” certain individuals to do things not usually
possible in a building. One can slalom up a slope to lessen the strain, or take a straight line
to test muscle strength and respiratory control – or simply to show off. The descent could
also be an opportunity for a thrill. Daring the same slopes as people walking on two legs,
some wheelchair users may revel in the opportunity to exercise on something other than
the usual six per cent pitch. Combined, these disabling and enabling moments redistribute
bodies in space according to parameters that differ greatly from those that normally hold
sway in architectural environments. This other space in the Learning Center could
therefore be qualified as a very specific kind of circulation, one that reconfigures the usual
distinction between mobility ability and disability.
Echoing this idea of (dis)ability trouble, here is John Hockenberry, an American
wheelchair-bound war reporter, describing his daily Chicago commute between his
apartment at the bottom of Michigan Avenue and his office at the top: “Rolling to work
every morning was a character-building, hand-over-hand, rope climb. Coming home in
the evenings was flat-out, downhill, and effortless” (1995: 209).
While Hockenberry would probably not agree to allowing steeper access ramps
in general, he writes from the experience of his disability; something that tends to be
suppressed by the ability/disability binaries within architectural discourse and built into
access guidance. He further raises important questions about how his particular way of
being is perceived by others:

Though I rolled in rhythm and wove my way with precision, the presence of a
wheelchair in the crowd never seemed as natural to the crowd as it did to me. Where
I saw beauty and grace gliding down, others, particularly those walking toward me,
saw terror, collisions and serious injury. Going up, where I saw a bracing physical
challenge, others saw pain and suffering.
(1995: 209)

Based on this testimony, we might speculate that if Hockenberry were to visit the
Learning Center, he would challenge assumptions of an obvious dividing line between
ability and disability. In Lausanne, those who enjoy some muscle strain, or who are in a
rush, or who are trying to impress someone, can identify with each other, whether they
walk on two legs or roll on four wheels. Meanwhile, some individuals normally counted
amongst the able population may be discouraged by the slopes, and feel solidarity with
More than access 101

others with certain physical impairments. Such new channels of identification are possible
because of this strange, new space in the Learning Center, space that is neither official
programme nor functional circulation. Conventional accessibility regulations attempt to
erase the distinction between physical ability and disability by providing ramps and lifts to
complement steps and stairs. The Learning Center blurs the line, or redraws it day by day,
depending on how each building user feels.
This different way of imagining architecture’s relationship to the body could benefit
ostensibly non-impaired individuals as much as those whose particular physical or
sensory conditions become disabilities when encountering an unaccommodating built
environment. In the Berlin Memorial, we saw that the significance of an architectural
space may come from changes in perception and experience, rather than from instances
in which symbolic messages are conveyed through representation. This both reduces
discrimination by opening up the legitimacy of multitude, embodied experiences in all
their diversity, and broadens the palette of senses that may be called upon by designers. For
different reasons, the Learning Center in Lausanne also compels us to ask how considering
the complexity of disabled individuals’ different ways of being can enhance architectural
thought and, by extension, architecture in general. As Carol Breckenridge and Candace
Vogler have pointed out, “the disabled are ‘good to think’” (2001: 353). The wager here
is that everyone can benefit from innovations if architects start from the variety of lived
experience to generate architectural form.
Another quote from John Hockenberry can serve as a conclusion. Regarding his
downhill commute, he observed that, on good days,

The spaces between pedestrians were made for wheelchairs, and I belonged there.
Pedestrians saw it as well. On their faces was: “That looks like fun.” When had they
ever yearned to be in a wheelchair before? […] The promise of art and revolution
is that people might discard their preconceptions and truly understand what is in
the mind of another. What would a world look like in which people dare to wish to
know what it is like not to walk?”
(1995: 214)

Whether or not its architects intended it, the Rolex Learning Center may give us a
glimpse of that world.
10
FROM STEEP STEPS TO RETROFIT
TO UNIVERSAL DESIGN, FROM
COLLAPSE TO AUSTERITY

Neo-liberal spaces of disability

Jay Dolmage (2016)

“[D]isabled people in Western societies have been oppressed by the production of space,”
writes Brendan Gleeson (1999: 2). As I will show, disability is a reality – but disability is
also produced, sometimes most powerfully through our design of space. In this chapter
I will examine three central spatial metaphors from the field of disability studies: the
steep steps, the retrofit, and universal design. The steep steps reflect social structures wherein
hierarchies of privilege are reflected in conventional architecture. The retrofit refers to
the mandate to redesign spaces for access, albeit often under temporary, backdoor and
overly legalistic parameters. Universal design refers to the movement to design spaces for the
broadest possible access, anticipating diversity. All three metaphors have physical as well
as symbolic entailments.
I will map these spatial metaphors across the history of the disability rights movement,
but I will also connect them with what I see to be “new” spatial logics, connected to
industrial capitalism, late or fast capitalism, and neo-liberalism. My examples will connect
to the architectures of higher education, spaces that we should feel invited and compelled
to critique as embodying social (re)productions: the buildings in which students learn
can and should also be seen as carrying and conveying lessons about societal values for
the bodies and minds within (and without) those spaces. The goal in this chapter is to
give readers some metaphorical tools for analyzing built spaces from a disability rights
perspective, acknowledging the stories and the histories and the attitudes and prejudices
built into these spaces and also built against bodily diversity and mobility.
In this chapter, I return to some previous research to create some new ideas (2006). In
doing this, I am returning to old places to map new ones. In past work, I have examined
and used the aforementioned three spatial metaphors to explore and explain the ways that
disability is positioned in culture and society, and in particular in social institutions like the
university. The first premise has always been that we need to care about space. To begin
From steep steps to retroﬁt to universal design 103

with, we do “think” spatially – we readily see the world in terms of physical space and spatial
relations. Thus, spaces already convey information, and reconstructing or re-imagining
these spaces is a mode of argument. As David Harvey and others have argued, “places have
material consequences insofar as fantasies, desires, fears and longings are expressed in actual
behavior” (1993: 22). Spaces, and how we write about them, think about them and move
through them, suggest and delimit attitudes. As Brendan Gleeson wrote, the production of
space can oppress disabled people “due in part to their exclusion from the discourses and
practices that shape the physical layout of societies” (1999: 2). Disability is also produced,
sometimes most powerfully by our uses of space. For this reason, I’ve argued that we
must see the steep steps all around us in the academy; we must see our work as constructing
alternative modes of access – retrofitting – whilst recognizing the critical dangers of this mode
of mapping; but we must also conceptualize new ways to more broadly conceive of what
we do, and therefore we should consider universal design (UD). In the past, I have pretty
robustly challenged the steep steps and the retrofit, while in a way situating UD as the “just
right” alternative (2006), like in the children’s fairy tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
But in this chapter I will challenge Universal Design as well, particularly as it is invoked
through times and spaces of late capitalism and neo-liberalism.

Steep steps
The steep steps metaphor puts forward the idea that access to privilege is a movement
upwards – only the truly “fit” survive this climb. At the university, these steep steps,
physically and figuratively, lead to the ivory tower. The steep steps metaphor sums up
the ways the university constructs spaces that exclude. It seems as though, regardless of
the architectural style(s) of a campus, steep steps are integral, whether these are the wide
marble staircases of Greek-revival administration buildings or the brutalist concrete stairs
and terraces like those constructed on my own campus at the University of Waterloo in
Canada or at Brunel University in Britain. The most “traditional” of campuses, many
of them built around churches, or in classical Ionic style, similarly rely on steps not just
as architectural details, but as symbolic social center-pieces of university life. Traditional
university life. For example, think of Amory Blaine in Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. He
develops a “deep and reverent devotion to the gray walls and Gothic peaks [of Princeton]
and all they symbolized as warehouses of dead ages […] he liked knowing that Gothic
architecture, with its upward trend, was peculiarly appropriate” to his elite university
(1996: 62). This same upward trend builds stairs, as well as some peculiar attitudes about
who can come within the walls, and who can ascend the heights. Unsurprisingly, when
Disney/Pixar animators wanted to create a realistically forbidding setting for the film
Monster’s University, they studied several Ivy League schools: the MU School of Scaring has
broad, high marble stairs just like those you’d find at Harvard or Stanford. In reality, and
in the public imagination, higher education is about steep steps.
The university allows some people up these stairs, and it throws others down the same
steep incline. Historically, steps were also closely associated, eugenically, with cognitive
levels and forms of work. Thus these steps also classed citizens and linked their value to
labor-output. In this way, the steep steps are an apt metaphor for industrial capitalism, just
104 Jay Dolmage

as they are created by capitalism and its values of bootstrapping, autonomy, winner-takes-
all competition, progress as upward mobility, and so on.
Indeed, one way to map the spaces of academia and disability would be to look at the
ways land – land already stolen from indigenous peoples – was parceled out in the U.S.
in the early to mid-1800s. While land-grant universities were popping up in rural spaces,
asylums and “idiot schools” were popping up in other adjacent settings – on old farms and
abandoned land. From within one privileged space, academics were deciding the fate of
others in similar, yet somehow now pathological, other and impure spaces.
In the architectures of both these developing institutions, stairs made powerful
ideological statements. As Trent (1994) and others have pointed out, American academics,
through the flawed science of eugenics, systematically developed the means to segregate
society based upon often arbitrary ideas of ability – the university was the place for the
most able, the mental institution the space for the “least.” Not only have people with
disabilities been traditionally seen as objects of study in higher education, rather than as
teachers or students; not only has disability been a rhetorically-produced stigma which
could be applied to other marginalized groups to keep them out of the university; but the
university has always had a mutually-reinforcing and polarized relationship with societal
institutions like asylums and asylum-schools (and even immigration stations, reservations,
and prisons). In short, the privileged status of the university is an argument for other
spaces of incarceration, sterilization, and deportation.
As Craig Steven Wilder has shown, in America, “European powers deployed colleges to
help defend and regulate their colonial possessions and they turned to [the slave trade] to
fund these efforts [….] College founders and officers used enslaved people to raise buildings,
maintain campuses, and enhance their institutional wealth” while they also “trained the
personnel and cultivated the ideas that accelerated and legitimated the dispossession of
Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans” (2013: 9–10). In Canada, with a
different but similarly devastating history of enslavement and dispossession (nonetheless)
university founders relied on what Mosby (2013) calls “colonial science.” Let’s define that
as: experimentation on aboriginal peoples, immigrants, and people with disabilities that
was thoroughly institutionalized and reinforced by government policy, at the same time
establishing the knowledge and power of universities. These eugenic practices, and in fact
eugenics itself, can be seen as the invention of the North American university and, as I
have written elsewhere, we can read this history through university buildings built in large
part by and upon the exploitation of people with disabilities (Dolmage 2015b).
Take for example three “asylum schools” or schools for the “feeble-minded” in the
Boston area in America. Wrentham School for the Feeble-Minded was opened in 1906. In
the 1950s, “residents” at this and the Fernald School (founded 1854) were fed radioactive
isotopes in a scientific experiment. Young boys at these schools signed up to be part of
the “science club,” a club name invented by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(M.I.T.) faculty club, and they were given Mickey Mouse watches and armbands, and
taken on special outings, in return for taking part in a “nutritional study.” Seventy-four
boys were fed oatmeal injected with radioactive iron or calcium (Welsome 1999: 231, 235).
Welsome suggests there was “nothing unique” about this study, as the school had become
a “veritable laboratory” with a “captive population” for academics from Boston (231, 233).
From steep steps to retroﬁt to universal design 105

Thus, the asylum schools were built in the long shadow of the universities, also as their
perverse mirror-image, also as the foundation and source of the research that built the
academic reputation of North America’s “finest” schools.
Another example: in Canada, the Children’s Psychiatric Research Institute, a residential
“school” in London, Ontario, was in part established because researchers from the
University of Western Ontario were tired of having to travel all the way to Orillia, Ontario,
to access patients/research subjects at the Hospital School there (Zarfas 1963).
And another: recently a construction crew at the University of Mississippi discovered a
graveyard on land it was clearing to build a medical center. News coverage of the discovery
registered shock that this would halt the building (Mitchell 2014). In clearing the land,
they found over 1000 unmarked graves, believed to be those of patients at the former
Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum. But nowhere in this coverage is there any outrage or
horror about the fact that these graves were unmarked, that these patients weren’t deemed
deserving of a proper burial, that these lives were so demeaned.
These examples, and the many others I could have included here if space allowed,
establish several important facts. First of all, there is a steady pattern of setting up such sites
in close proximity to universities, where one group of humans could be held and studied by
another. Yet we also can comprehend what the binary relationship has always been between
universities and asylums, hospital schools, and other institutions. This violent exploitation,
this structural connection, has underpinned the expansion of the North American university.
What a statement to the future doctors and other medical professionals who were trained
in these places. At these universities, because of the absence of awareness of this history,
learning now literally unfolds upon an ignorance of the eugenic past. This, then, is perhaps
the most perverse instantiation of the logic of the steep steps we might hope to find: we
continue to actually build universities in service of eugenics, lifting some bodies upwards
towards privilege upon the footings of segregation and oppression.

The retroﬁt
So how do we address this eugenic past, laid out up and down all of these steep steps?
Maybe we come around the back. To retrofit is to add a component or accessory to
something that has been already manufactured or built. This retrofit does not necessarily
make the product function better, does not necessarily fix a faulty product, but it acts as
a sort of correction – it adds a modernized part in place of, or in addition to, an older
part. Often, the retrofit allows a product to measure up to new regulations. Retrofits may
be seen as mechanical, or as a matter of maintenance; thus they aren’t seen as creative.
Retrofitting is also often forced or mandated. Another entailment of the retrofit is that it
is a stop-gap measure – this leads to the idea that a retrofit can, in fact should, be given
low priority. Thus, as a building is retrofitted to accommodate disability, as per the “specs”
of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) or the UK Disability Discrimination Act
(DDA), ramps are added onto the side of a building, or around back, instead of at the
main entrance. Both the ADA and the DDA call for reasonable accommodation. Common
reason then seems to dictate that disability is supplemental to society, that it is an after-
thought or an imposition.
106 Jay Dolmage

The construction of elevators or ramps instead of steep steps, these are well-intentioned
ideas; they speak to our desire for equality. Yet the retrofit is a sort of cure, but half-hearted,
thus leaving many people with disabilities in difficult positions. In the university the retrofit
is also a part of curriculum and pedagogy, particularly in relation to issues of difference. Too
often, we react to diversity instead of planning for it. We acknowledge that students come
from different places, and that they are headed in different directions, yet this does little
to alter the vectors of pedagogy. Most often, the only time disability is spoken or written
about in a college class is in the final line of the syllabus, when students are referred to
disability services should they desire assistance. The message to all students is that disability
is a supplementary concern – and then that it is not the teachers’ concern, not really a part
of the course; it’s at the back door of the syllabus. Teachers “deal with” disability via the
ideological equivalent of a ramp – disability as an identity category can come in the side
or the back entrance if it is to be included at all. If a student does seek accommodations,
teachers treat them according to the cliché about Las Vegas: what accommodations happen
for this student, stay with this student; what accommodations happen in this class, stay in
this class. The nature of the “retrofitted” accommodation requires that teachers make no
lasting changes to pedagogy or to the culture of the university. Of course, this same sort of
retrofitting happens across all of society, and across all of architecture.
I want to cautiously suggest that, in some cases, a retrofit can be useful, can aid students
in their navigation of this space – just as an elevator or a ramp might enable mobility to a
building. It is important, however, to recognize that the retrofit is often only an “after-the-
fact” move because “the facts” refuse to recognize disability as part of normality rather than
separate and additional to it, or “the factors” cast disability as a strategy, or “the benefactors”
claim accessibility not as everyone’s right, but as their opportunity to provide charity, or as
an opportunity to construct these students as drains or threats. Of course, the intellectual
implications of the retrofit are many. When we look at the buildings and spaces of our
universities and cities, we see how thought about disability has almost always been a side-
thought or an after-thought: count the appended ramps, the painted-in parking spots, the
stair-lifts. As a building gains its extra accoutrements to meet these requirements it creates
a sort of comical and hazardous obstacle course for people with disabilities. Moreover,
even to use these retrofits frames the user as deficient, as a “drain” or “threat.” Retrofits
might be seen as huge concrete sorting mechanisms for ableism. En route, the retrofit
sends a very clear message about its values for bodily diversity.
For instance, consider the meme of “curb-cuts to nowhere” – images, posted online, of
ramps and curb-cuts that literally lead nowhere, or lead to inaccessible spaces or features,
thus negating their purpose. These images have commonly been posted as a form of backlash
against accommodations, yet they more accurately reflect an absurd critique of the late
capitalist industry of retrofitting. One excellent example comes from the aforementioned
Brunel University in London, a school that, like my own University of Waterloo, has
many examples of brutalist staircases – expansive cast-concrete sets of steps used not just
as stairs, but also as potential outdoor seating, even as social or communal gathering space
(Figure 10.1). These staircases can also be seen aesthetically, ostensibly, as key players in
the rhythm and continuity of the university space. A key feature of such steps is that these
staircases often connect perpendicularly, or in seeming waves, with other similar banks of
From steep steps to retroﬁt to universal design 107

concrete steps. In the image in Figure 10.1, taken of the outside of the (in)famous brutalist
Lecture Centre at Brunel, we see one set of these stairs as wide at the building itself leading
up to the entrance, and another perpendicular set connected and leading to the building
from another direction, creating a concrete plateau at the entry level and a kind of small
pyramid of stairs. Because these staircases are so wide, a pedestrian can access them from
any place, and thus can use the stairs in a wide variety of ways. The largest bank of stairs
leads down to a green space, for instance. But when a ramp is retrofitted onto these stairs
and down to this green space, instead of leading directly up to the entrance it climbs only
up a single set of stairs at the forefront of the picture, thus ensuring that if one wanted
to travel from the building to the green space, you’d need to use two ramps. Further, the
ramp itself is made of steel and “feels” temporary against the cast concrete steps. Further
still, the ramp does not lead down to a pathway in the green space, but instead leads down
to the base of a tree, seemingly difficult to navigate around. Even further, the ramp is
arranged crossways and directly in front of the broad set of concrete steps, thus making
about twenty feet worth of the concrete steps unusable for anyone.
The building itself is essentially a giant concrete box, held up on the stairs-side by
a series of thin concrete columns. Tiered staircases with small balconies appear at the
front of the building, with each balcony a different color and with bright arrangements

FIGURE 10.1 Stairs at Brunel University, UK

Photo by Ken MacLeod.

108 Jay Dolmage

of flowers (each balcony being a central design feature and at the same time inaccessible).
The entry level is entirely glass. Another small ramp leads up to the entry level from the
far left of Figure 10.1 – the second ramp you’d need to use to get from the green space to
the entry, and located basically as far from the first ramp as possible. In this one example,
we can come to understand just how retrofits function aesthetically and architecturally:
positioned as temporary, as so often in opposition to the rest of the space, sending a message
that disability is an unforeseen and uninvited presence. These “curb-cuts to nowhere” and
accessibility-gone-wrong examples reveal the half-heartedness of retrofitting, or they show
how most accessible design is facile, or so long as it begins addressing an inequity, or looks
as though it is addressing an inequity, that is considered enough. In the Brunel example,
the accessibility “fix” is unsatisfactory, clashes with the other architectural messages of the
space, and in fact ruins or invalidates the architectural character or message. Disability
itself is clearly “misfit” by the ableist or “normate template” that the campus was built upon
(Hamraie 2013). This said, curb-cuts to nowhere, and other memes of accessibility-gone-
wrong, themselves can become a way to circulate anti-ableist critique. Thus, the curb-cuts
and the absurd ramps could be added into other recent online movements intended to
call out colleges and universities for their inaccessibility or for the ways that their existing
accommodation processes are insufficient or absurd retrofits (Dolmage 2015b; Price 2011;
Titchkosky 2011).
I have been suggesting that steep steps are an apt metaphor for capitalism – well, let
me suggest that the retrofit is a logic of late capitalism. That is, the retrofit points up the
inadequacy of capitalism’s ability to deal with various crises of its own making and other
long-term structural problems. The retrofit is also a logic of fast capitalism – fast capitalism
is the tendency of capitalism to extract surplus value with as little investment as possible
for the greatest possible return, while adding as little to the real economy as possible,
often by means of financial speculation and the quickening of production to the point of
making next-to-nothing. This fast capitalism can be seen as the necessary consequence of
capitalism. Like philanthropy, which gets marketized as a consequence of late capitalism,
the retrofit is something that is seen as charitable.
. Yet at the same time, the industry of temporarily correcting or normalizing disability is
massive, one of the largest and fastest growing industries in our modern world, encompassing
global pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporations, as well as architects, access consultants,
lawyers, and even educational specialists. Retrofits – be they architectural or biomedical – are a
huge part of these industries, and the temporariness and contingency of every retrofit simply
speeds up the cycle – and the capitalism. Filtered through fast capitalism, the retrofit offers
only a quick and temporary fix to critical socio-political and economic conditions, and it does
so with solutions that, as we know, often offer next-to-nothing of practical use.
In terms of rights and access for those other bodies that our society has deemed marginal,
the retrofit as a logic of late capitalism might actually ensure what Lauren Berlant calls
“slow death”: “a zone of temporality [...] of ongoingness, getting by, and living on, where
the structural inequalities are dispersed, the pacing of their experience intermittent” (2011:
759). Slow death through “accommodation” and the supplemental logic of the retrofit
would not be a way of “defining a group of individuals merely afflicted with the same
ailment, [rather] slow death describes populations marked out for wearing out” (2011: 760).
From steep steps to retroﬁt to universal design 109

“Slow death” might seem a bit maudlin or dramatic, but that shouldn’t deter us from
investigating exactly what it means and how it applies. Slow death, to me, seems to be the
chronology of accommodations such as those made to the steep steps at Brunel – it means
having to take two ramps, located as far as part from one another as possible, and it entails
similar processes of wearing out across non-physical spaces. And, perversely, the faster the
capitalism, the more difficult it becomes to recognize the pace and impact of the wearing
out, as it gets spread across space. For students in the UK, for instance, it’s not just the
ridiculous ramps, it’s also that a government austerity budget has led to huge cuts to the
Disabled Student Allowance, meaning there is no certainty of where those ramps will lead
(and you’ll find those ramps, and those cuts, across North America as well).

Universal design
The retrofit can hold us captive in a logic of fairness: it apportions out access and
accommodation in minimal ways, governed by legalistic and medicalized rhetorics that
disempower, but also defended by liberal values that seem unimpeachable, even admirable.
The “playing field” isn’t even! Of course we need ramps! But then we also need ways to
understand what has made the field uneven. We also need ways to understand academia
as something much more than a “playing field.” With all of this in mind, then, from the
beginning, we should import lots of skepticism into our discussion of my final spatial
metaphor and way to move: universal design. UD also can very effectively camouflage
other forms of administrative discrimination.
In looking at the steep steps and the retrofit, one thing becomes clear – we can
recognize these metaphors as physical structures. Yet we also need to recognize these as
temporal metaphors. The steps are steep, and they are also “steeped” in tradition. Steps
become symbolic center-pieces of university life. Traditional university life. My point is that
students with disabilities are excluded not just from campus space, but from the entirety
of collegiate history and philosophy. Likewise, the steep steps of government buildings,
art galleries, monuments, and other cultural and public spaces make the same temporal
arguments. And the retrofit is, as I said, an after-the-fact construction, an after-thought. It
is always supplemental – always not-originary. The retrofit is additional. But as a supplement,
to retrofit is to fix in some way. Unfortunately, this “fixing” provides little opportunity
for continued refitting, for a developmental and progressive process. In developing my
third metaphor, I want to emphasize the importance of the priority of universal design –
universal design as a process and mode of becoming.
As Ronald Mace wrote, “universal design is the design of products and environments to
be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or
specialized design” (1985: 147). The UD movement was first an architectural movement
that worked against the exclusion of people with disabilities, and argued that instead of
temporarily accommodating difference, physical structures should be designed with a wide
range of citizens in mind, planning for the active involvement of all. To do so, disability
and diversity needed to be central and not marginal in the design process. As Mace and
his team discovered, “many of the environmental changes needed to accommodate people
with disabilities actually benefited everyone. Recognition that many such features could be
110 Jay Dolmage

FIGURE 10.2 Ed Roberts Campus Ramp. Image used with permission of Ed Roberts Campus

Photograph courtesy of Will Henderson-Nold.

commonly provided and thus less expensive, unlabeled, attractive, and even marketable,
laid the foundation for the universal design movement” (1985: 148).
In practice, a universally designed building can make accessibility the central message of
its design. Take for instance the Ed Roberts campus in Berkeley, California. Named after a
disability rights pioneer, instead of making steps its central argument, a huge curving ramp
is the center and the focus of this building. As you see in Figure 10.2, when you enter the
building at a level entrance, a large, red, cantilevered “helical” ramp is in front of you and
it curves around within the central mezzanine to take visitors to all three floors of the
building. In contrast to the Brunel steps and ramp, here the accessibility feature is also the
central architectural and aesthetic feature.
Universal design offers us a way to locate ourselves not in response to changing, hostile
geographies, but as proactive architects of future possibilities. UD, registered as action, is a
way to move. In some ways, it is also a world-view. Universal design is not a tailoring of the
environment to marginal groups; it is a patterning of engagement and effort. The push towards
the “universal” is a push towards seeing spaces as multiple and in-process. The emphasis on
“design” allows us to recognize that we are all involved in the continued production of space.
As Aimi Hamraie has powerfully shown, UD is a form of “value explicit” design, a design
that “provides a framework within which designers can be held accountable for the types of
environments that they produce. UD is an approach to value-explicit design that critiques the
false value-neutrality of inaccessible environments” (2013: n.p.). With this focus on value, as I
turn to this spatial metaphor, then, I want to connect UD to an economic logic as well.
From steep steps to retroﬁt to universal design, from collapse to austerity 111

Of course, you’ll remember that I defined the steep steps as a logic of industrial capitalism,
and the retrofit as a logic of late capitalism and/or fast capitalism. I am not going to let universal
design off easily here. Thinking of UD as a logic of specifically neo-liberal late capitalism can be
an important way to interrogate its meanings, possible uses and misuses. Neo-liberalism takes
the values of free choice, flexibility, and deregulation and translates them into market reforms
and policies designed to maximize profits, privatize industry, and exploit all available resources.
But much more importantly, neo-liberalism should be seen as a system that powerfully masks
inequalities and readily co-opts concepts like autonomy, diversity, tolerance and democracy.
Not only this, but neo-liberalism has been shown to interpellate its logics and grammars into
our everyday lives – so that we all become middle-managers, so that we run our classrooms and
cultural institutions like corporations while allowing corporations to take over the discourses
we used to control and sell them back to us (Dolmage 2015b). It is highly possible that a
concept such as universal design could simply become a proxy system for demanding the
flexibility of bodies, increasing the tenuousness of social and physical structures, rebranding
our intellectual work, constantly moving the target for technological innovation as flows of
information are made ever more proprietary, and placing the privilege of “design” in the hands
of a narrowing and exponentially profiting few. Potentially worse, a cheap and easy mention
of universal design might, as Stephanie Kerschbaum reveals happens with other discourses
of diversity, “enhance pedigree” while “obscur[ing] differences” and “reinforc[ing] the status
quo” (2014: 36–37). For instance, very much unlike the Ed Roberts campus depicted in Figure
10.2, many buildings that claim to be universally designed, or that have even won UD awards
from agencies like the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, just have elegant retrofits. See
for example the restoration of St. Mel’s Cathedral in Ireland, which retained all exterior and
interior stairs and simply added ramps off to the side of the main ideological and architectural
pathways through the space. I urge you to similarly interrogate other buildings that tout UD,
to discern whether what is being featured is in fact anything more than retrofitting.
UD as a metaphor also seems especially prone to the false promise of expanding –
neo-liberalism promises an expanding world, more jobs, greater access to more and more
technology and information. But what expands is truly just the market; this expansion is
often false, supplemental, derivative; the benefits of this expansion are only ever financial,
they flow upwards rapidly, and the benefits that do trickle down do so ever more slowly if
they trickle down at all, while risk is transferred downward by the truckload. The inclusive
design (UK terminology for UD) of something like the London Paralympics offers a
powerful example. As Robert McRuer shows, the

politics of affect that has accompanied this [inclusive] agenda has been multivalent
– a limited but spectacular celebration of disability and disability identity […]
around the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games […] has coexisted with
a concerted campaign to cast recipients of disability benefits as “scroungers” or
“spongers” or “shirkers.”
(2015: n.p.)

In the end, what good are a few accessible stadiums and public pathways when one of
the key sponsors of the games (Atos) is also the company comprehensively downgrading
112 Jay Dolmage

and rejecting disability Work Capability Assessment claims? Isn’t it possible that one
limited celebration or one accessible park creates the vacuum into which a thousand cuts
can slide, and can hide?

Collapse and austerity

Of course, now is the moment in the chapter when I am supposed to offer a much
more hopeful message. Now, I am supposed to land on a final metaphor that solves all
of the social, spatial, and even economic problems my other metaphors have posed. But
instead I want to identify a few further spatial, architectural connections that we need to
be increasingly wary of, and that might in fact oppose the goals of universal design, and
instead create what Margaret Price calls “conflicts of access” (2012: n.p.).
I offer only first thoughts on these metaphors here, and encourage you to think them
through as we continue to move through them spatially, temporally, and economically.
First, I think we are called upon to re-conceptualize the ways that, even though universes,
societies, and structures might expand, they also collapse – and this metaphor – the
collapse – might be an interesting one to reclaim and re-inhabit, given global financial
crises, but also given the fact that this is a disability metaphor: canes and wheelchairs and
portable ramps collapse so that we can move them, hide them, store them, put them back
together again later. Collapsing is a way to fall apart as we come together, and connects to
invigorating, powerful rhetorical acts of refusal and delay. I would suggest that the idea
of “collapse,” which has come to powerfully inflect all of our discussions of capitalism,
must be thought from disability, and this will save it from purely pejorative readings: what
is beautiful, useful, inevitable about collapse? What about the collapse of an inequitable
economic and social system can and should be celebrated, and what space gets created
for a more just and inclusive set of structures? What is design for collapse, how does
it differ from UD? How do we avoid rebuilding steep steps or simply continuing to
offer temporary retrofits? Generally, architects are taught to think through collapse very
carefully: materials and processes must be tested for collapse. But what about testing built
environments for the collapse of intentions and the conflicts of economic and aesthetic,
or academic and embodied concerns? Of course, we have generally responded to collapse
with other temporal, architectural, and economic metaphors – like austerity. So the
concept needs further thinking. But a place to begin a “value explicit” design would be
to map where and how the designs’ intentions might break down or overlap with other
needs and concerns.
Austerity is also – like collapse – a form of design-thinking and an architectural value.
Some of the power of austerity comes from the misleading aesthetic character of the
word itself, something that we see as smart, simple, intuitive, a virtue. A Zen principle.
Synonymous with simplicity. Indeed, many see economic recession as being, eventually,
good for architecture. As Adam Mayer and others have suggested, this might herald the
end of “starchitecture” and instead a “new commitment to build an environment that is
both sustainable and affordable” (2008: n.p.). Yet this assumes that the current “strapped
fiscal environment” will look anything like the environment that may have produced more
simplistic and civic-minded design in past eras.
From steep steps to retroﬁt to universal design 113

In The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills, David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu write
that “austerity is medicine intended to reduce symptoms of debt and deficits, and to
cure recessions. It cuts government spending on healthcare coverage, assistance to the
unemployed, and housing support” and yet “the real danger to public health is not
recession, per se, but austerity” (2013: ix, xiv). Their data persuasively and repeatedly
shows that austerity “does great harm, punishing the most vulnerable” (140). They ask
“what good is an increased growth rate…if it is hazardous to our health?” (145). This
has become the type of question that disability studies must repeatedly answer. In Mark
Blyth’s book Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, he suggests that “partly because it
enables conservatives to try (once again) to run the detested welfare state out of town,
[austerity] never seems to die” (2013: 10). Then, what if something like universal design
as it is being argued for and implemented (at universities and elsewhere) just camouflages
clawbacks to other essential support systems? How will design be impacted by austerity
politics and economics? How can something like accessibility, inclusive design or UD be
foregrounded in an era of intensive privatization?
Lisa Duggan (2003) suggests that neo-liberalism is characterized by the shrinking of the
public sphere as the government renounces responsibility for social welfare. This connects
to a key concept underlying austerity: that cuts to public programs can lead to private
growth. David Harvey has also suggested that the neo-liberal state attempts to “reconstruct
social solidarities, albeit along different lines […] in new forms of associationism” (2005:
81). In The House of Difference (1999) Eva Mackey famously studied discourses that invoke
liberal multicultural practices, but do so in order to protect existing economic and cultural
power structures. It is easy to see how a celebration of universal design could be a way to
actually shrink the safety net and widen structural inequalities, as seemingly happened in
the UK around the Paralympics. So this is where we have ended up, but also where we
must begin to build something new. My hope is that all of these metaphors – their physical
existence, their arguments, their places and times and economies, give us new ways to
understand and encounter architecture – as we refuse to forget the eugenic past and as we
refuse to build a future that recreates exclusion.
PART III

Education
Whilst there has been a long history of concern with universal and inclusive design in
architectural and built environment education, it continues to remain marginalised and
fragmented. Many reports on this situation have proposed reasons why this is the case,
demonstrated examples of good teaching practices, and suggested strategies for better
embedding dis/ability into learning and teaching architecture and urban design (Lifchez
1986; Morrow 2001a, 2001b; CEBE 2002; Kennig and Ryhl 2002; Afacan 2006; De
Cauwer et al. 2009; Centre for Universal Design 2010; Heylighen and Bianchin 2013;
Tauke, Steinfeld and Basnak 2014; Basnak, Tauke and Weidemann 2015). Rather than just
reiterate the arguments in these important studies, the collection of articles here instead
focus on thinking differently about how dis/ability might be included as normal – or even
avant-garde – within architectural and built environment education (Boys 2014). As with
other contributions to the Disability, Space, Architecture reader, this approach starts from
opening up ‘ordinary bodies’ to critical and creative investigation, and explores in a variety
of ways what happens when ‘unruly bodies’ (Mintz 2007) are prioritised instead.
Stefan White aims to teach design by questioning (via Spinoza and Deleuze) ‘what a body
can do’, to go beyond stereotypes about, and fixed categories of, able-bodied and disabled
people – where one is unthinkingly the design ‘norm’ and the other requires ‘retrofitting’
additions (see Dolmage, this volume). But this is also about the kinds of knowledge that
design students learn, and how that knowledge is applied. Through an example of a
studio project related to ageing, White illustrates the implications of developing design
strategies that go beyond simplistic categorisations, that accept and productively engage
with difference, and that are inherently critical and reflective of the nature of architectural
as a discipline.
Jos Boys also explores some examples of the knowledge and skills that are inculcated
through design education, to unravel how these come to embed particular ways of thinking
about bodies rather than others. She suggests here, as elsewhere (Boys 2014, 2016), that it
is the underlying conceptual frameworks of building design approaches and methods that
can act to close down and exclude more critical and creative thinking and doing about
dis/ability and architecture. In this chapter Boys looks at aspects of diagramming as a
design method – through the work respectively of Peter Eisenman and UN Studio – to
illustrate how disabled bodies consistently disappear down the cracks in the architects’
arguments about how to design. And she suggests that ‘by inserting dis/ability (that is,
disability and ability) as both concepts, and diverse lived experiences into this space-of-
diagrams between originating ideas and built product, we can simultaneously open up
contemporary practices to critique, and find alternative ways of thinking and doing dis/
ability within the architectural design process.’
The next essay in this section – Margaret Price’s ‘Un/shared space: The dilemma of
inclusive architecture’ – powerfully illustrates current directions in disability studies that
examine the conceptual, social and material spaces of the university. If feminism has often
looked to the spaces of domesticity to investigate gender relationships, and critical race and
queer studies have explored public and social domains, disability scholarship has returned
again and again to academic space and life. This work has emerged strongly from the fields
of literature, rhetoric and composition – particularly in Canada and the US – as these
have increasingly examined what happens when writing and reading are framed as deeply
118 Education

situated and embodied (Titchkosky 2003, 2007; Dolmage 2013). Such research is interested
in how the talking, writing and doing of everyday social, spatial and material practices act
to constitute higher education as a place. It looks at how such a place is made and remade
differentially across ability and disability. And it understands inclusion and accessibility
as simultaneously entangled across ideas, assumptions, actions and practicalities, and as
needing both critical and creative engagements that can work towards improvement (see
for example, Dolmage 2005, 2008, 2009, 2015; Newall 2008; Price 2009, 2011; Goggin
2010; Yergeau et al. 2013; Kerschbaum et al. 2013). As Price writes in her piece for this
volume, intersections between disability and built space – as these are enacted on a daily
and ordinary basis in academic life – are inherently complex and fraught. This leads her
to ask ‘how might architecture take into account the radical unpredictability and ambient
emergence of disability when we gather together?’ As with Dolmage’s essay in the previous
part, Price’s work is about unravelling the ways in which academic life includes disabled
faculty as excludable (Titchkosky 2008: 41) and about exploring what kinds of approaches
and analysis could enable us to work towards real inclusion, even whilst recognising that
it is never fully achievable.
Aaron Williamson also comes from a position of creative critique about the academy, but
as an artist, his forms of practice operate differently to expose the hidden contradictions,
contestations and absurdities of its everyday social, spatial and material practices. ‘The
Collapsing Lecture’ is a description of a series of performances from an ongoing live art
project. The work grows out of Williamson’s experiences as a deaf student (for whom no
‘accommodations’ were made) and teacher, as well as his long-standing interest in slapstick
and burlesque. As with much of Williamson’s work, this project deliberately troubles what
is usually (that is, for able-bodied people) the self-evident ordinariness of daily routines and
artefacts. It thus reveals the often ridiculous nature of the spaces of unnoticed normality.
Each of these readings, then, suggests a substantial challenge for architectural and
built environment students and educators. Doing dis/ability differently is not just about
‘including’ consideration of disabled people at some stage in architectural and built
environment education. Rather it demands a much deeper, more critical and richly creative
examination of how attitudes to, and assumptions about, disability shape which bodies
matter in architecture, and of the everyday ways through which some bodies are noticed at
the expense of others. This requires engaged study of dis/ability as a concept and disability as
a diverse lived experience. But is also means more. It means paying close analytical attention
to how dis/ability is constituted through the very methods of thinking and doing that are
embodied in architecture as a discipline, and in the university as a particular type of place
for learning. And it means exploring innovative ways for architecture and urban design to
resist and redesign everyday, normal, practices that exclude some bodies, but not others.

What difference can we make?

Stefan White (2016)

We do not know what the body can do...

(Spinoza quoted in Deleuze 1988: 18)

Key contemporary accounts of the relationship between individual human action and global
issues such as economic prosperity (Sen 1999), environmental protection (Arne Naess 1989)
and human rights (Nussbaum 2011) explore conceptual approaches using philosophical
frameworks which prioritise ‘difference’ over identities. That is, rather than focus on
identified categories of disability, race or gender, they engage with the potential for creativity
and inclusion created in the relationships between different people, places and practices.
This essay contributes to similarly inspired attempts to construct design philosophies that
can describe the ‘ethical’ or ‘ecological’ role of architecture in enabling, ameliorating or
challenging economic, environmental and social ambitions (Rawes 2013). Here I sketch
connections between Gilles Deleuze’s contemporary re-reading of Spinoza’s Ethics (1677)
and a selection of architectural and educational practices implicated in attempts to create
more inclusive urban environments (focused here on neighbourhood planning and design).
To explore these ideas in an architectural context I discuss correlations between Deleuze’s
critique of ‘representation’ and the ideas of architectural theorist, Robin Evans, using
Evans’ concept of ‘projection’ as a non-representational way of thinking through the role
of architectural practice, processes and products in creating inclusive urban environments.

On ethics
Ethics [...] replaces Morality which always refers existence to transcendent values.
Morality is the judgement of God, the system of judgement. But ethics overthrows the
system of judgement. The opposition of values (good-evil) is supplanted by the
qualitative difference of Modes of existence (good-bad).
(Deleuze 1988: 23)
122 Stefan White

Spinoza begins Ethics by distinguishing between the understanding of God (or Nature)
and Human kind (Deleuze 1992: 218). Unlike many of his contemporaries, he sees God
as encompassing the whole of the natural world without being separate from it. His God-
as-Nature is a whole body composed of parts, which are themselves, whole bodies. Thus,
Nature as a whole is absolutely adequate and necessary, because it is a totality composed
of an unlimited and infinite number of wholes or parts. Nature is completely adequate
because its actions are always a necessary result of its entire composition of parts. However,
the individual wholes (and their parts) of which it is composed are less adequate or
necessary, because such modes of existence – for example human – are created in relation
to the actions or influences of bodies outside themselves. We can only be reactive when
we interact with bodies or parts with which we are not already actively composed. Thus,
individual modes of existence tend to be inadequate, passionate consequences of greater
wholes but remain simultaneously part of the composition of the active whole of nature.
For Spinoza the project of improving both our collective and individual quality of life is
a pursuit of increasing the proportion of ourselves which is active and by which we can
become more ‘adequate’ – a composed part of a greater whole.
In Spinoza’s time, this was a heretical point of departure because it placed human nature
on a continuum with the nature of God. Deleuze reinvigorates its potential by exploring
how making ‘the body’ into a relational composition with Nature prioritises the reality of the
differences between these bodies in composition. This remains rather a radical idea because
it insists on differentiating between bodies and beings on the basis of their actual relationships
with other bodies rather than according to characteristics attributed to them by the ‘common
sense’ of other (more powerful) bodies. Rather than follow the predominant tendency of
reducing or eradicating difference in order to imply clarity through simplification (such as
the ‘norm’ or average), the relational differences between different bodies are instead seen
to be the actual, creative and productive substance of Nature. ‘[...] difference becomes
an object of representation always in relation to a conceived identity, a judged analogy, an
imagined opposition or a perceived similitude’ (Deleuze 1994: 138).
Deleuze argues that using our imaginations to reduce complex compositions to identities
or categories with fixed meanings and representations is a process which systematically
eradicates difference in order to imply clarity through simplification. It produces reductive
‘norms’ or stereotypes. It does so through a process of common sense analysis, which tests
the value of things or ‘bodies’ in terms of whether they are conceived ‘the same’, perceived
‘similar’, judged ‘analogous’ or imagined to be ‘in opposition’ – relative to an identity we
already have in mind. His alternative approach does not rely on such ‘representations’,
averages, pictures or stereotypes (held in the imagination) to decide or categorise bodies as
stable entities (as particular ‘subjects’ or identities in terms of disability, gender or race). It
instead insists on accounting for the intellectual and physical compositions of bodies with
their environment which necessarily change over time and whose power or potential is
actually produced through the differentials between composing bodies. Here the bodies
which are constituting Nature include everything – from humans and their individual
cells and possessions to architectural drawings and built environments and all the way
over to mountains and galaxies. Imagination (and conception) are not then simply put in
opposition with experience (and perception) but both are seen as parallel and embodied
Including architecture 123

features of composed Being. Deleuze uses Spinoza to show how both bodies of thought and
material can be creatively composed to increase our capacity as part of Nature.

Spinoza offers philosophers a new model: the body. [...] What does Spinoza mean
when he invites us to take the body as a model? It is the matter of showing that
the body surpasses the knowledge we have of it and that thought likewise surpasses the
consciousness we have of it. [...] it is by one and the same movement that we shall
manage, if possible, to capture the power of the body beyond the given conditions of
our knowledge and to capture the power of the mind beyond the given conditions
of our consciousness.
(Deleuze 1988: 18)

Rather than the mind being the sole or primary source for the understanding of our
Being, the expressions of both mind and body – that is to say, both imagined (and conceived)
forms and experienced (and perceived) functions – are seen as ‘merely particular cases’
(Deleuze 1992: 333–335) of the expressions of nature. This means that the way we decide
what is good or bad in particular situations should recognise the positive differences
between bodies, which are manifested through the capabilities of both thought and action
rather than decided by judging our erroneous deviation from pre-identified norms. In this
approach, we understand our bodies (which include our minds) as a kinetic and dynamic
set of capabilities produced through active composition with other (and by definition
different) bodies. These material and pragmatic judgements are made on an empirical basis
of what are good and bad compositions, not only in relation to what is commonly agreed
as good or its moral opposite (evil/error). What or who we are in this context is not a
category we fit into or an identity we most resemble (an identity necessarily decided by the
‘common sense’ of the majority or the most powerful) but is instead what we can do, what
we are capable of. In this approach, we make our identity through exploring and extending
our capabilities with others. It is a positive and creative exploration of what we are capable
of through attempting to do it, through actively performing new compositions.

Three kinds of knowledge

So here, the differences between bodies is a positive and creative starting point rather
than an unfortunate remainder, left over once identification or agreement is complete
and fixed. Beginning with difference is, however, not straightforward. Deleuze argues
that it is not just our basic tendency (a first kind of knowledge) to seek easy answers and
form convenient categories as a matter of habit which makes our current ways of thinking
obstructive to understanding the differences between people, things and cultures (reducing
the affects of external bodies upon us to representations, signs or pictures). For him is it
also how we implicitly limit our much more careful attempts at rationally understanding
the world (a second kind of knowledge) through the persistence and insidious power of
‘common sense’ which claims access to universal reason and dispassionate objectivity
but continues to rely on stereotypes and readymade ‘pictures’. Whilst clearly we do use
shared or more thoughtful reasoning to achieve more adequate knowledge of the causes
124 Stefan White

of the affects of external bodies on us, Deleuze says that there is an additional third kind
of knowledge which we routinely deny ourselves access to when we are satisfied with
common sense rationality alone. His third kind of knowledge sees us produce a much
more adequate understanding of relationships to external causes when we are actually
creating or changing them. The intuitive production of knowledge when we produce
particular causes or ‘affects’ through actively composing in specific ways transcends our
conscious ‘rational’ knowledge and at the same time is completely adequate because it is
empirically tested (Deleuze 2003).

1. Representations, signs or pictures

For Deleuze the first and least adequate model of knowledge is representational – it greatly
prioritises intellectual objects and their physical identifiers as the only relevant indications
of reality, presupposing an overly deterministic causal relationship to actual objects,
which, in fact, these intellectual conceptions and visual perceptions only contingently
represent. Models of disability or difference which focus on the physical dimensions of the
environment or quantitative understandings of the capabilities of individuals are often
employed in medical contexts because they appear to provide the basis for definitive
judgements of action against averages or ‘norms’. In these cases the complexity of the
relationships of capability which enable specific individuals to live their particular lives
successfully are reduced to sets of parameters in order to provide general guidance on
responses to measurable determinants like specific illnesses and in design terms, purely
physical accessibility such as benches or entrance thresholds. For example, this is seen in
the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Age Friendly Cities and Communities (AFCC)
guidance as a focus on physical aspects of the environment and the abilities of older people
to navigate it – describing the role of design in terms of lowering ‘disability thresholds’ in
the environment (WHO 2007: see Figure 11–4).

2. Shared or involved reason

The word ‘active’ [ageing] refers to continuing participation in social economic,
cultural, spiritual, and civic affairs, not just the ability to be physically active or to
participate in the labour force.
(World Health Organization 2002: 12)

The second state of knowledge produces reasons for action through experience and
imagination, allowing us to positively repeat our encounters with the world outside.
This second model of knowledge is characterised by being a development of agreement
between a variety of understandings – ‘a ratio of common notions or reason’ where the
views of our different ‘faculties’ (meaning our perceptions, imaginations, judgements
and conceptions of a situation) are internally (through seeing, thinking and feeling) and
externally (through drawing, discussion, reading) compared to generate an adequate
account of causes (Deleuze 2003). It can be likened to more holistic accounts sometimes
referred to as ‘social models’ such as for ‘disability’. Social approaches problematise
Including architecture 125

purely physical or medical understandings by – for example – suggesting that disability

is not absolute but relative and at least partially socially constructed. For Deleuze this
second kind can go beyond the formalisations of the first kind of knowledge to include
individual experiences as well as the relationships between individuals and wider society as
determinates of those experiences. However, social approaches broadly retain or reinforce
‘representational’ limitations by continuing to construct (new) categories and identities
rather than prioritising the differences they discover. The specific definition in the WHO
AFCC guidance of the nature of ‘activity’ in their concept of ‘active ageing’ is an example
of this, as it attempts to prevent recuperation as a quantitative valuation of an older person’s
economic contribution, but in so doing makes clear that this is what is at stake.

3. Intuition – citizen
[Age-friendliness is the experience of ...] factors (social, economic, environmental,
personal, physical) and the interaction between them [which ...] play an important
role in affecting how well individuals age.
(WHO 2002: 1)

For Deleuze both the first and second kind of knowledge are essential for the development
of a third kind of knowledge which goes beyond more ‘passive’ knowledges which inform
action to instead create knowledge through action. This third kind of knowledge aims to
account for the creativity and creation of individuals, environments and societies – which
is why it is of interest for designers and social activists. Deleuze argues that we need such
an understanding in order to better account for the interlocking relationship between our
environments, ourselves and our societies. I summarise these three kinds of knowledge,
using the WHO guidance as an example in Figure 11.1.
So for example, rather than seeing active ageing in terms of the first model of difference
where the contribution of older people is measured with respect to their productive outputs
as paid or unpaid work, or in the second kind, acknowledging that there are interlocking
social components to the activity of older people in a community such as friendship,
belonging and pride, a third more relational approach to active ageing seeks to directly
account for how individual actions, voices and positions lead to particular constitutions of
the city and neighbourhoods – through producing them. To reiterate however, all three
models are essential because the third kind of knowledge is enabled by the first two; they
are not in opposition. To explore all three levels of knowledge clearly requires an (inter- or
transdisciplinary) architectural and educational approach that actively attempts to produce
more age-friendly environments as an essential step in understanding how to do so. Such
a Deleuzian approach seeks to connect the city and individual levels together through the
constitution of neighbourhoods (and other places) to enable a more adequate discussion
of how the actions and existences of individual citizens constitute the city and how that
city in turn determines some of the qualities of their existence. I will return to examples
of this kind of exploratory practice later; but will first briefly explore how Deleuze’s work
connects to related ideas within architectural theory and practice itself, through the work
of Robin Evans.
FIGURE 11.1 Summary table of correlation between kinds of knowledge, models of difference
and WHO Age-friendly City and Communities guidance
Source: Author.
Including architecture 127

Evans and the problem of representation in architecture

[pictures are…] fixations within a metamorphic flux of possible experiences. A
picture is something that has to be arrested before it can be mobilised. That is why
pictures play so ambivalent a role in architecture.
(Evans 1995: 359)

Evans uses the concept of projection to describe the relationship between architect and
architectural drawing and between those drawings and the objects they describe. He argues
that projection is an embodied distinction made simultaneously in the imagination and the
perception, which is then manifested in the architect’s production. This is in contrast to
the representational assumption of an instantaneous and seamless translation between a
drawing and its object, made with the aim of removing all ‘errors’ of dissimilarity between
them. He argues that predominant accounts of architectural knowledge operate according
to what he calls ‘picture theory’ (1995: 358). He shows that whilst architecture tends to
begin and end with pictures, these are in fact limited and artificially fixed. He identifies
the inadequacies of a representational account of architecture which both formalist and
functionalist approaches suffer.
His ‘picture theory’ critique mirrors Deleuze’s analysis of the failings of representational
thought, as he finds architectural accounts tend to be constructed from either the perspective
of imagined and conceived forms or perceived and experienced functions – both of which,
for Evans are merely particular cases of projection. Evans also echoes Deleuze in identifying
positive potential in these embodied ‘transitions between objects’ (Evans 1995: 367),
arguing that it is in fact the ‘dissimilarities’ or differences between ‘representations’ and
‘what is represented’ that are central to ‘the drawing’s power as a medium’ (Evans 1997:
154). He describes ten such differential moments of projection, which occur between an
architect and architectural products in the process of drawing and building (Figure 11.2).
Evans prefers ‘projections’ to translations because he demonstrates that creative –
drawing – processes literally ‘project’ a particular set of contents into a new – expressive
– form (e.g. when a plan and section are used to create a perspective using lines of
projection). However, he also applies it less literally (e.g. when a sketch model is ‘drawn’
into an axonometric) and more broadly, to explain how design techniques and abilities
progressively and differentially inform each other. Evans’ ‘projection’ is an intuitive and
embodied capability of the architect that enables them to actively iterate compositions
from the content of one formal product (a drawing or model) to a new one through a
particular drawing or modelling process over time or in series.
This concept of projection has the potential to value architectural design as a serially
projective or expressive process between embodied expressions (the process or content, e.g. a
drawing or multiple drawings in series) and what these express (the product or form, e.g. what
is understood by the drawing and actually built). The expressions of an expressive process –
the drawings produced by the intuitive capability of an architect – have their actual existence
as a power produced in the differences between what the architect imagines and what they
perceive in relation to it. Similarly, when the drawing becomes a product it is embodied in
forms external to the architect or the architectural process, ultimately being built through
a set of interpretations and realisations, which will all involve embodied projections of
128 Stefan White

FIGURE 11.2 Adaptation of Robin Evans’s 10 relationships of projection from “Projection and
its analogues: The Arrested Image” in Evans, R. (1995) The Projective Cast: Architecture and its
Three Geometries. MIT Press p367
Source: Adapted by Stefan White.

those involved. Evans demonstrates through numerous case studies that it is fundamentally
impossible to reduce this process to a direct translation. He also shows that it is undesirable,
precisely because these embodied moments of projection are how creative acts are stimulated.
In this non-representational paradigm, the creative – projective – act always involves an
active, intuitive engagement outside both Deleuze’s first and second kinds of knowledge
within architecture. Making such projective relations explicit is the first step to critically
valuing the embodied creative labour that moves our intellectual and physical bodies from
one form of content to another via the expressive affect of drawings, models and buildings
during the design process. This valuation of embodied and creative differential relations
articulates a positive role for the architect. This kind of ‘architecture’ is in the explicit
business of creating critical (affective) relations between discipline and society to increase
the capacity of both. This is a radical move away from common sense, representational
accounts of architectural practice (of either formalist or functionalist flavour), which claim
we have to resist social pressure or contact in order to protect our creative ‘autonomy’.
A non-representational approach does not seek to ‘close down’ problems or conflicts
Including architecture 129

but instead to reveal the differences that create them so that they can be productively
composed with. It is such compositions of difference (between drawings, disciplines,
cultures and individuals) that are themselves composed into projects, and which can then
exist through and within architecture but always as capacities moving beyond it. While
Evans predominantly seeks an adequate explanation of architectural knowledge from
within the discipline, Deleuze precipitates a desire for a more adequate explanation of the
composition of architecture itself.

Redeﬁning the project of architecture

This Deleuzian shift to a third – projective – kind of knowledge generated through action
or capability must then also recognise and engage with the composition of architecture
as a discipline. Evans saw that the power of the drawing is produced in the differential
relationships between the architect and the production process, and between the drawing
and the process of construction. He understood the critical creative impulse as an explicit
opening of the architects’ compositions to the outside of their habit. However, such
compositions are conventionally restricted to formal expressions from within the discipline
and its ‘culture’. The predominant ‘diagrams’ of ‘professional’ and ‘critical’ creative practice
require that we defend an authorial position through restricting the extent of our ‘criticality’
(also understood as a breaking of norms or habits) as relating to the historical constitution
of the discipline and/or the interior processes of architectural design (see Ghirardo 1994,
Eisenman 1995 and White 2014). The habitual architectural body defines its boundaries by
setting limits on its ability to engage beyond its existing characteristic relations.
Unfortunately, this is an increasingly ineffective attempt to ensure disciplinary survival
in the face of commercial pressures that only serves to limit our powers of creation and
our capacity to evolve new selves, practices and societies. Returning to Spinoza, via
Deleuze, active composition is understood as an increase in capacity produced between
bodies composing in relation to their outside. Compositions which increase the capacity
of a body are considered affirmative and ethical and are speculative by their creative and
emergent nature. The aim of this account is to show that the architectural body can no
longer exist within the categories ‘architect’ or ‘architectural drawing’ nor the categories
‘architectural discipline’ or ‘architecture’ because the creative impulse of the individual
architect is at once determined by the discipline and serves as its constitution. It is the active
compositions of the architect that constitute an architectural project (through their agency
and movement) and in turn theirs and others’ multitudinous architectural projects that
actively constitute ‘the discipline’ within and through society.
In Figure 11.3 a project is understood as the construction of relationships which extend the
set of all social capabilities and which by definition already include the existing capabilities
of the discipline of architecture. Particular expressions, products or processes (individual
drawings or representations, including the actual building) are now valued in terms of the
project they constitute rather than the product they delineate. Questions normally excluded
from architectural discourse begin to re-enter as a personal and structural imperative: How
does architecture contribute to social progress? How can architecture create inclusive
environments? What difference can the actions of an architect, this architect, make? Here
130 Stefan White

FIGURE 11.3 Diagram of relationship between architectural discipline and society

Source: Author.

architecture must differentiate itself from within society rather than create, presume or
pretend an exclusive identity separate from it. Some of the implications for an inclusive
urban design method are shown in Figure 11.4.

Designing for spatial inclusion

In this approach, the ‘architect’ is just a particular case of the expression of citizen. Citizens
are understood as embodied subjects distinguished and produced through changes in
characteristic relations and affective capacities. Cities are understood as bodies described by a
set of social and physical capabilities, constituted by the expressive forms and content of their
citizens in relation and over time in the formula Cities = Architecture + Citizens. Creative
and active engagements are the production of real distinctions of affect between bodies,
necessarily external to the subject, and necessarily distinctions in both expression and content.
From experiences undertaken in both a professional and pedagogic capacity working in
Manchester, we have found that exploring the nature of the embodied knowledge of a particular
community can appear to reveal the affective relations that make a city liveable or loved.
Including architecture 131

However, by definition, the projective relations of a particular context are without form until
they are made explicit through attempting to construct new relations outside habitual characters or
abilities (new, real distinctions). Architectures’ real – social – autonomy or expertise is expressed
in circumstances when architects act to make or enable projective relations to be made explicit
– because to do so redirects or changes implicit and exclusive paradigms of action and their
associated processes of identification or representation. Conversely, if the architectural project
does not make its own relations explicit it acts to passively comply with the representational
repressions of the professionalisation of the discipline. In order to avoid the representational
tendencies of reducing our understanding to either simple experiences and perceptions or
isolated imaginations and conceptions we must always seek to both articulate our processes and
visualise our products. Making explicit the serial projective relationships between our processes
and products (economies, clients, architects, drawings, contractors, constructions and citizens)
attempts to prevent representations from keeping implicit the labours of their creation.
In the example in Figure 11.5, Katherine Timmins (as a post-graduate student in the
Manchester School of Architecture projects group) developed her product (a building design)
as a process involving the development of a range of other products (which included running a
choir working with women’s groups who would be end users for a building if it were to exist)
and these processes and products were part of a project with the intention of actually increasing
the access of women in Manchester to support services.

Architect’s desires –
actively seek projects 1 Pursue projects

SHARE KNOWLEDGE
LOCAL + ARCHITECTURAL
EXPERTISE Local desires –
discovered/connected
2 know more with instead of
Existing projects, represented from the
iniatives, outside
SHARE KNOWLEDGE
policies groups
WIDER COMMUNITIES
and issues –
OF INTEREST
open to the outside not
isolating
Advocate inclusion
3
SHARE KNOWLEDGE
FORM PART OF
COMMUNITY

4 Our community
Community
has the power SHARE KNOWLEDGE Acting as part of
to negotiate FORM PART OF community, with
its needs with SOCIETY community
wider society
Wider society
5

FIGURE 11.4 MSA projects inclusive urban design method from presentation to the Belgian Ageing
Studies programme, 2010
132 Stefan White

FIGURE 11.5 The Pankettes Choir, 2012

Photograph: Kat Timmins / MSA

The project of the Manchester School of Architecture (MSA) post-graduate teaching

and learning atelier has emerged as a positive and creative response to dissatisfaction
with the current ability of the architectural discipline to impact on social inequality and
intended also to begin a recuperation of critical aesthetic techniques. The MSA projects
studio is hosted by the centre for Spatial Inclusion Design research (cSIDr), a community-
engaged research and design partnership between Manchester’s City Council, architecture
school and universities. Over the past decade we have developed a number of cross-
sector projects working to make cities and neighbourhoods more inclusive. In this time
architecture students from the studio have engaged with a large number of members of
the public and developed a wide range of collaborative social and physical architectural
projects. These include building an age-friendly allotment designed with the children
of an adjacent primary school to instigating a campaign to save a derelict town hall,
enabling over £1 million pounds to be allocated to prevent its demolition, subsequently
enabling successful redevelopment. The professional, funded research of the group
focuses on multiple excluded populations with an emphasis on experiences across the
life-course, developing an approach to delivering age-friendly city policy in local contexts
recognised as exemplars by, for example, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development (OECD 2015). In our professional inclusive urban design-research
Including architecture 133

FIGURE 11.6 Old Moat: Age-friendly action plan detail, 2012

FIGURE 11.7 Old Moat: Age-friendly action plan workshop, 2012

Photo by author
134 Stefan White

practices we attempt to positively speculate by providing a propositional focus around a

specific spatially located set of social and physical relations. In the Old Moat in an Age-
friendly Manchester research project we brought architectural and urban design skills and
knowledge to the analysis and production of the social relations necessary to construct
an urban design in the context of a economically, socially and physically excluded older
population of a particular area of the city (White, Phillipson and Hammond 2012). We
created collaborative ‘action plans’ which were literally spatial plans as an important part
of the explicit manner in which the research was ‘presented’ – keeping the research
information live and accessible to an audience of non-scientists and non-architects (Figures
11.6 and 11.7). In practice, therefore, revealing the specificity of the embodied knowledge
of a particular community in a particular environmental setting involves the personal and
active – projective or propositional – involvement of the urban design-researcher. This
active pursuit is the first step in a continual process of the construction of a situated and
collaborative project. ‘Inclusive’ architectural practices that operate using a representational
paradigm will remain constrained within deliberately exclusive disciplinary habits,
however much they seek to grant the power of inclusion to excluded groups. We can only
make a real difference in society when we are an actively composed part of that whole – we
will only begin to find out what it is architects are actually capable of when architecture
itself is considered included rather than exclusive.
12
DIAGRAMMING FOR A
DIS/ORDINARY ARCHITECTURE

Jos Boys (2016)

In this essay I want to consider how starting from dis/ability might help us critically and
creatively interrogate some ‘normal’ design methods in architectural education. I want to
explore how learning to design is inculcated into students in particular ways rather than
others, and as requiring certain types of thinking and doing rather than others, that act to
literally build exclusionary practices into what it is to be an architectural professional. I ask
how it happens that we (within the discipline) simultaneously believe architecture to be a
socially engaged practice whilst thoughtlessly centring design on only the most independent,
mobile and fully abled members of humanity. And I will suggest that, following the seminal
work of Titchkosky and others, it is architecture’s own justificatory and deeply embedded
narratives that normalize and perpetuate a continuing forgetfulness about other kinds
of bodies – those that do not fit the norm, but are instead unruly in a multitude of ways
(Michalko 2002; Titchkosky 2008, 2011). By justificatory narratives I mean the competing
and compelling stories architecture tells to and about itself, thereby framing what comes to
be sayable and doable in order to be an architect (Garfinkel 1967). The problem lies, then,
not just in particular design approaches and methods – that is, with some better than others
at being ‘inclusive’ – but in how the whole subject of architecture is debated and contested. What
we have to unravel is not an inability to include human occupancy in design – because
students, educators and practitioners do think about people intensely and often – but the
flawed and problematic framings within which we are taught to think about occupancy (that
is, what kinds of bodies matter, and how these become translated into actual designs).
At the same time, I want to draw out the critical and creative potential of architecture’s
justificatory narratives. Such stories are not inherently problematic. In architecture as in
other disciplines, they are a central means through which ideas and practices are generated,
challenged, adapted and rethought. So, the other aim of this chapter is to see how we
might begin to enjoy subverting such stories, to creatively explore how contemporary
design methods might be ‘done differently’ so as to include dis/ability as both a radical and
a normal part of what students (and tutors and practitioners) already do.
136 Jos Boys

I have been attempting such explorations of different aspects of architectural approaches

and methods for several years with varying degrees of success (Boys 2014, 2016). Here I will
concentrate on diagramming, a design method that was important during the modernist
period and then fell out of favour, before being reinvigorated within architectural education
and practice from the 1990s. This was first at a theoretical level, particularly through the
writings and work of Peter Eisenman, and then more recently as a central design approach
– exemplified here by the work of UN Studio (led by Ben Van Berkel and Caroline Bos).
Of course, these examples just represent moments in a much larger, more complex array
of multiple, connected and competing design methods, so such an analysis can only be
partial and exploratory. The central aim is to draw alternative creative trajectories out of the
critique, not to provide a comprehensive overview of diagramming. So I will look at each
of these moments in turn, aiming to unravel how the underlying justificatory narratives
come to be framed, to see what is left out in the process, and how these methods might be
productively subverted by the insertion of dis/ability into the picture.
Finally – and crucially – it should be noted that the alternative versions of diagramming
played with here are not intended to be ‘better’ than those used by Eisenman or UN
Studio, and are not a ‘solution’ to incorporating diverse bodies in design methods. Rather,
the aim is to build on absurdist crip traditions in order to open up the specific peculiarities
of architectural diagramming as a means of interrogating the world, so as to critically
investigate what become normal, even radical, designerly types of operation.

Learning to design: diagramming as a method of translation

To design built spaces requires a projection into the future of a realizable physical ‘thing’,
via two-dimensional representations of our three-dimensional world:

Architectural drawings are projections, which means that organized arrays of

imaginary straight lines pass through the drawing to corresponding parts of the
thing represented by the drawing. […] We are surrounded by these flat images of
embodied events to such an extent that they have long since ceased, in themselves,
to be a matter of any amazement, or even of mild curiosity.
(Evans 2000: 19)

Design drawing, then, is an act of selection and translation. It is also, of course, a means
of communication both between and across those within architecture, and those beyond
it. I will return to these wider intersections later; here I will just focus on drawing as a
central element in the designer’s own processes.
As Evans goes on to make clear, it is in the spaces in-between the drawing and its built
version that many – often unnoticed and not discussed – actions occur. Here lie the
conceptual stories (both deliberate and ‘common sense’) that justify particular ways of
interpreting the world, representing it, and (re)designing it. Here is the space where these
stories come to require a designer’s engagement with a particular selection of ‘reality’
rather than others. And, through the resulting representations another space is made. That
is, the drawn images themselves come to seem transparently obvious and sensible. Because
Diagramming for a dis/ordinary architecture 137

they exist as ‘finished’ and complete, we believe in the correctness of their represented
reality. We do not question the peculiarity of their underlying logic. So how can we begin
to prise apart some of what Evans called the ‘eddies and circuits’ (2000: 20) between
building design as a process and its finished artefacts?
First, I will look at the seminal work Diagram Diaries by Peter Eisenman (1999) to explore
how he located himself and his proposed method (at that time) within and against existing
architectural disciplinary narratives, particularly modernism. I will suggest that he sets up
a deliberately perverse ‘anti-humanist’ argument in support of formalist composition, by
unexpectedly articulating this as a radical and creative ‘opening up’ of design. This also
suggests investigating what such an approach closes down, and what kinds of alternative
conceptual and formal disruptions might be just as (or even more) interesting to pursue.
Second I will look at more recent diagramming techniques using an analysis of patterns and
flow – enabled by access to large datasets – based on a UN Studio project in Arhem, the
Netherlands. Here what starting from dis/ability reveals is how particular representation
methods can act to assume the human body as an ‘unimpeded line’, that is as an already
mobile, autonomous and fully competent subject. Again, it then becomes possible to
consider what happens when that line is acknowledged instead to be inherently unruly.

Peter Eisenman: justifying the formalist diagram

In the 2000s, architectural writers increasingly saw the re-emergence of diagramming in the
work of contemporary architects such as Herzog and de Meuron, Sejima and Nishizawa and
Associates (SANAA), Frank Gehry and Greg Lynn (Vidler 2000). Crucially this was seen
not so much as one analytical method among others but as becoming the central generative
approach for design – a way ‘to find unexpected relationships between diverse elements in
the design process and to re-imagine what architecture could be’ (arq 2012). In this view,
diagrams were not just analytic, but ‘both constitutive and projective, performative rather
than representational’ (Vidler 2000: 6). At the same time, diagramming already had its own –
problematic – history within architectural practice and education. Through the later twentieth
century modernist architects were seen to have used diagrams to codify and rationalize
building types, with the explicit intention of enabling universal, objective solutions. In the
process however, it came to be recognized that ‘the diagram, these experiments suggested,
might as readily close down possibilities as open them up’ (arq 2012). Modernist buildings
seemed even to end up looking like over-simplified diagrams: ‘Architecture … looked too
much like the geometry with which it was designed and depicted. Geometry is thus seen as
the underlying cause of architectural alienation, the degradation of humanism, and the split
between architecture and its “public”.’ (Vidler 2000: 8)
By the 1970s and 80s then, using diagrams had a bad name. (When I was an architectural
student in this period, our tutors would say a design project looked like a diagram as an
insult.) It was in this context that the revival of diagramming as a potentially avant-garde
method – particularly in Peter Eisenman’s Diagram Diaries published in 1999 – seemed
so radical. In this period he was creating drawn sequences of abstract and gridded three-
dimensional cubic forms (Figure 12.1). Here, an initial simple ‘box’ is first sketched, and
then repetitively cut through in multiple, and often increasingly complex, ways, but always
138 Jos Boys

FIGURE 12.1 Examples of diagramming development process and effects on design

Source: Adapted from House VI floor plan (1975) and Eisenman (1999).

based on a rectilinear grid. Out of these mutations, a final form is produced. Eisenman
had already created controversy through building just such a ‘polemical’ house – House
VI – based on these formal abstractions rather than function or ‘livability’; in this building
a geometric ‘slot’ across the bedroom forced the occupants to have two single beds
(Eisenman 1987; Frank 1994) (for later work, see Fitzsimons, this volume).
In opposition to many of his contemporaries, Eisenman argued for a focus on formal
composition as a design generator of buildings. He revisited some of the influential
sources for modernist ideas about form, based on the grid, such as the historian Rudolph
Wittkower, whose systematized diagrams of Palladian villas were published in 1949, and the
architect-critic Colin Rowe whose essay ‘The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa: Palladio and
Le Corbusier compared’ originally came out in 1947. He thus aimed to positively reclaim
how the ‘postwar generation of modernists look[ed] for a geometrical and stable authority
for form in the demonstrated absence of any single functional determinants’ (Vidler
2000: 14). At the same time, his proposed method for engaging with, and manipulating,
formal composition was offered up as radically different to these earlier versions. This was
informed by contemporary interests in linguistics and semiotics:

Shifting architecture from a formal to a structuralist base, or from an iconic or

semantic to an indexical or syntactic one, would enable architecture to finally
Diagramming for a dis/ordinary architecture 139

register the insights of modernist avant-gardes, an account which suspends classical-

humanism’s centrality of the subject and proposes architecture as the abstract
mediation between pre-existent sign systems.
(Somol 1999, 17)

Eisenman’s central narrative was that three-dimensional form-making could reclaim its
own autonomy, operating in a space before the arrival of the subject. In this understanding
architectural composition is a kind of non-verbal language that exists before meanings have
been applied. Using the formal notation of orthographic drawing, multiplied through iterative
repetition and difference, enables ‘the diagram [to] act like a surface that receives inscriptions
from the memory of that what does not yet exist’ (Eisenman 1999: 100). By repetitively
diagramming formal characteristics – what Eisenman calls the interiority of architecture – rather
than starting from a socialized or historicized exteriority (that is, context, or client for example)
the designer creates new, unexpected forms and relationships. The act of diagramming comes
to ‘exceed’ the architect’s intentions and knowledge; it becomes its own design generator.
This, then, is about opening up formal diagramming to its own creative potential.
It is important to understand that this was a radical move within architectural practice in
the post-modernist period, as the discipline struggled to dis-entangle what continued to be
relevant about architectural modernist thought, what should be challenged, and how that
challenge should be articulated. Theorists and critics tended to want to reintroduce a more
explicit engagement with the social (through the ‘meaning’ of building, for example, or
through more direct and participatory relationships with clients and users). To perversely
explore abstracted formal composition put Eisenman simultaneously in the forefront and
at the fringes of radical architectural practice. He could be touted as one of the ‘titans
of architecture’ (Artemel 2013) and condemned as ‘bogus’, pretentious and deeply
irrelevant (Ghirardo 1994). By putting himself in conscious opposition to more socially
minded architects and critics as an out-and-out anti-humanist, he claims the territory of
the intellectual – against the more (and currently more fashionable) ‘experiential’ and
sensually immediate work of architects like Peter Zumthor (Artemel 2013).
Here, though, rather than get caught up in the ongoing binary opposition between
formalist and experiential approaches to architecture – with disability always assumed to fall
in the second camp – I want instead to unpick a little how Eisenman justifies his approach,
both as a means to explore its limitations and as a way into possible creative interruptions.
To do that I will visualize what happens when disability is treated conceptually and formally,
as a generator of compositions and proportional relationships. This might be considered a
perverse move: the obvious ‘common sense’ about disability in architecture is to align it with
humanist approaches and with ‘caring’ designers, not with those who start from form and
aesthetics. But, following Alison Kafer, I want to deliberately queer some of our assumptions
about what are obvious and ‘appropriate’ design approaches to disability (2013).

Cripping the grid? Inserting disability into architecture as form

As the editors of a special issue of Architectural Research Quarterly (arq) write, diagramming is:
‘a powerful rhetorical device, a way of establishing a logical basis for a project, of justifying
140 Jos Boys

design intentions and of drawing attention to particular aspects of context while excluding
others’ (2012: 4).
What, then, is Eisenman’s justificatory narrative and how does it work to make certain
things central and others marginal? Well, as will be obvious to non-architects, his story-
telling takes place entirely within architecture’s own discourses, and particularly within
its modernist/after-modernism Anglo-American confines. This location is emphasized
through the focus on the designer’s own authorial and intellectual intentions (even where
this is opened up to non-conscious understandings), with all external influences removed.
By explicitly only using the coded architectural language of the axonometric, Eisenman
also reclaims the designer’s autonomy and special power:

The diagram acts as an agency between an authorial subject, an architectural object

and a receiving subject: it is the strata that exist between them. … The diagram enables
an author to overcome and access the history of the discourse whilst simultaneously
overcoming his or her own psychic resistance to such an act.
(Eisenman 2007: 94)

Diagramming, then, acts to maintain both the designer’s objectivity and rights of
authorship, whilst enabling his creativity to be released. This is a clever, and I suggest,
masculinist, trick (Boys 1996, 1998). By offering the possibility of returning to a place before
human intervention in architecture – with all the messy needs and desires that implies – the
architect is freed from the modernist taint of making inaccurate assumptions about what
people are like, or should be like; his intentions are pure. People instead become ‘receiving
subjects’ – that get what they are given, justifiable because of the intellectual clarity and
creativity of the designer. Of course, this is an artificial, polemic and even ‘tongue-in-cheek’
argument. Eisenman seems to revel in the artificiality – his is deliberately a conceptual game.
His design decisions may be argued as based entirely on formal and ‘pre-human’ grounds,
but are in fact enacted in specific ways in his buildings and spaces, often as a deliberately
anti-humanist – some might say nihilist – commentary on everyday life, whereby what is
‘common sense’ and meaningful becomes expressed as conceptual and meaningless. In the
process the author both stamps his intellectual authority on the design project, and appears
to stand back and let the diagramming do the work of ‘uncaring’ social commentary.
In the overall structuring of his argument Eisenman justifies this position through
the simple technique of a binary opposition – between (bad) modernist typologies with
their closing down of possibilities, and the (good) opening-up of multiple compositional
repetitions. This central binary then resonates throughout, and is rhetorically supported by,
a series of other similarly constructed associations – formalism/functionalism, modernism/
contemporary, radical/normative, objectivity/subjectivity – that act in unison to create the
idea that this design method is progressive and avant-garde. As Ghirardo notes (1994),
such an approach has led to worldwide success for Eisenman, as he seems to have touched
a resonant chord within architectural education and practice.
Precisely because of this predominant framing within the discipline, via binary
oppositions and in a voice aimed only at other architects and architectural students, it
should be noted that Eisenman’s arguments do as much closing down of what diagramming
Diagramming for a dis/ordinary architecture 141

is, as opening up its potential. He closes down on other alternatives, or on more nuanced
or juxtaposed intersections between his method and others. He closes down on anything
other than designers’ intentions. And he closes down any ‘difficult’ discussions about the
interrelationships between such a method and the built spaces that result (see for example
Goldberger (1989) over the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University).
So, what if instead of making arguments for one form of diagramming over another as the
most ‘progressive’, we treated all design methods as always uneven, partial and problematic –
and explore what kinds of criticality and creativity can be produced by taking notice of/playing
with the differences and gaps? Rather than following Eisenman and restricting unexpected
and creative design developments to the generation of multiple iterations within formal
composition and the interiority of architecture, we could look for exactly this creative potential
in the spaces in-between and across various design methods and their resulting built spaces.
We could intersect (rather than merely make oppositional) the various theoretical narratives
that justify particular ways of interpreting the world, representing it, and (re)designing it. We
could open up – for inspection and creative interruption – the particular selections of ‘reality’
rather than others that different kinds of diagramming enable. And, through the resulting
representations themselves (both drawn and built), we can investigate how particular choices
rather than others become normalized as transparently obvious and sensible.
As an example: rather than refuse to have anything to do with a diagramming method
that appears to leave bodies out completely, let alone disabled bodies, I will explore how to
generate built compositions from an equal abstract and artificial figure – the wheelchair user.
The supporting justificatory narrative goes as follows: the most mechanist and utilitarian
diagram in Western modernist architecture was not the grid or the universal building
type but the averaging out of diverse human bodies into the ‘norms’ of ergonomic and
anthropometric data such as produced by, for example, Henry Dreyfuss and the Neuferts,
that are still in use today (Dreyfuss Associates 1974; Neufert and Neufert 2012; but see
also Lambert 2012; Lambert and Pham 2015). Within this process of overall statistical
simplification, the wheelchair user becomes the most supremely anti-humanist icon of
all. The disabled person becomes only the chair and the chair becomes the symbol of
disability, enabling it to be reduced to a pure, abstract and meaningless trope.
This should be music to Eisenman’s ears. The cubic space of the wheelchair and its
‘average’ occupant can offer us an alternative compositional element from which to generate
a three-dimensional grid, and then generate multiple repetitions and iterations on that grid
as it is extruded through the spaces of motion. Using his explicit logic, this becomes an
objective set of procedures that can open up unexpected design potential (Figure 12.2).
The unspoken ‘human’ logic – usually of course that of an upright and differently mobile
body – is refused, just as personal and social norms are ignored in House VI. Enjoyably,
such diagramming also produces a similar frisson of discomfort to Eisenman’s own; it too
treats a body (a disabled body!) as merely a formal compositional component.
What would such diagramming involve and what does it reveal? Most immediately, the
ideal ‘wheelchair user’ can be turned into a nine-squared diagram with ease, by including
the arc of arms above the body, as with the Vitruvian Man (Da Vinci 1490) or Le Corbusier’s
Modulor (2004 [1954 and 1958]). I have based my sketch on a 60 in. or 1524 mm bounded
frame, itself taken from the dimensions of a ‘normal’ wheelchair turning circle. Within that
142 Jos Boys

FIGURE 12.2 ‘Cripping the Grid - 1’, Generating architectural proportions based on a
wheelchair user
Source: Sketch by Thomas Carpentier.

cubic frame, by taking horizontal lines through eyes and knees, and vertical lines aligning
to each side of hands gripping wheels, we have a nine-square grid. Manipulating further
elements of the body-chair for additional lines and planes (wheel hubs, footrests, pushing
handles, ankles, shoulders) an increasing complex grid can be produced, that could be used to
start building up a complexity of solids and voids, based on formal additions and subtractions,
superimpositions and collusions, rotations and other interventions (Figure 12.2).
But what then? Such a logic could be used to generate architectural form; the ‘box’
could become the frame of a whole building. But, already what is most explicitly exposed
is the artificial obsessiveness and constriction that imposes. Starting from bodies, however
abstract (rather than dissecting an already ‘whole’ volume), demands a different sort of
procedure, one that is inherently additive and generative. These alternative cubes need
to be joined, intersected, made to dance with each other. To me they suggest generosity,
spaciousness and dynamism (Figure 12.3), very different to the obsessive retentiveness
shown in Diagram Diaries. In this version, the outstretched hands of each wheelchair
figure can be imagined to touch, clasp and spin around each other. Space, volume and
movement takes on the potential spaciousness of a different kind of proportion. Groups
of two and four make maybe circles and spheres within the dimensions of the grid frame,
expanding spaces outwards. Just as Eisenman proposed, using the formal notation of
orthographic drawing, multiplied through iterative repetition and difference, can generate
new, unexpected forms and relationships. Just as with his work, these can help to exceed
Diagramming for a dis/ordinary architecture 143

FIGURE 12.3 ‘Cripping the Grid - 2’, Absurdist attempt to generate architectural form from the
movements of a wheelchair user
Source: Sketches by Thomas Carpentier.

common sense assumptions embedding in anthropometric descriptions about wheelchair

users. The resulting exploratory quick sketches here are not about determining a particular
form; only hinting at how such alternative diagramming might be taken forward.
There is much work in disability studies and related disciplines that has begun to engage
with diverse bodies and space in this way, by aiming to disrupt assumptions of a normal
user who is unproblematically the ‘receiving subject’ of architectural designing. Whether
144 Jos Boys

through Rosemary Garland-Thompson’s concept of misfitting (2011) or Sara Hendren’s

unexpected overlap between a wheelchair user and a skateboarder (see this volume), or
Thomas Carpentier’s alternative The Measure(s) of Man project (Figure 12.7) these
approaches all refuse to start by assuming the ‘norm’ of the able-bodied. This is both about
critiquing what is left out when design starts from an unnoticed and unconsidered fully
autonomous, mobile and component body-in-space, and about opening up the creative
potential of disability as a concept and as a diversity of lived perceptions and experiences.

Diagramming in a world of ﬂows

More recently, with the impact of both digital forms of representation in architecture,
and the ability to manipulate huge datasets, what constitutes diagramming has again been
explored and debated within the discipline. Here the conceptual underpinning looks more to
contemporary philosophies, rather than back to modernist architectural history or linguistic
theory – particularly to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (2013) in A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: ‘Most common is their notion of the diagram as an
‘abstract machine’ that is conceptually abstract, yet fully functional as a concrete device for
assemblage and deployment of spatial and social effects’ (Fedorchenko 2008: 293).
If Eisenman focused on diagramming architectural form, these more recent approaches
use diagrams to capture dynamic processes such as circulation flows, spatial relationships and
patterns of intensity. Form is no longer a separate, artificially composed or even ‘representational’
entity, designed to express meanings. It is generated entirely from the accumulated actions
of its occupants, layered up through time, and therefore becomes whatever it ‘needs’ to be.
This means that the architectural composition is something that is neither designed first,
nor added on after, once the analysis has been done. Instead it grows out of that analysis, as a
process rather than a ‘shape’. In the Atlas of Novel Tectonics (2006) Reiser and Umemoto give
an example to explain what is meant by this. They first suggest that architectural modernism
was very influenced by the streamlined shape of machines such as aeroplanes and cars, and the
rational appearance of industrialized processes (‘a house is a machine for living in’). They then
propose that more recent design is less interested in looking like a machine, and much more
in generating designs by understanding how the engine of that machine works.
Working from an investigation of underlying processes also helps to enable the appearance
of a smooth, transparent and direct transition from design method to finished built result.
This is because vector-based and animated digital techniques have now almost completely
taken over from hand-drawn sketches or orthographic drawing in architectural education and
practice. This means that there is an increasingly easy equivalency of ‘diagrams’ between the
two- and three-dimensional mapping and visualization of occupancy and other data flows and
the two- and three-dimensional form-making that uses parametric design (also know as ‘blob’
architecture). Parametric design involves the generation through algorithms of multiple and
dynamic iterations of form, based on playing with the various design parameters involved,
such as site conditions, usage patterns and functional requirements. This is

the excitement of digital aesthetics; the potential of mapping, finally, space, time,
and movement in formal terms; the possibilities inherent in direct milling from
Diagramming for a dis/ordinary architecture 145

design to finished object, all these too might be understood, if not as directly
postmodern in affect, certainly as smoothing the transition from an old industrial
to a new digital world.
(Vidler 2000: 17)

Like Eisenman these more recent practices also emphasis the diagram as a mode of
opening up to unexpected possibilities. In ‘Beautiful Apparatus: Diagrammatic Balance of
Forms and Flows’ (2008), for example, Maria Fedorchenko argues that a project by UN
Studio (Arhem Central Station in the Netherlands) exemplifies a design method where
diagramming not only analyses movement through space and time, but intersects this
creatively with form-making. For her, architectural design can no longer be conceived of
as making singular buildings, but must create built space within much larger, often urban,
patterns of dynamic exchange:

Processes of flow, change and integration take priority over compositions of static
objects and staged appearances. Faced with the need to negotiate the instability of
their project sites, designers redefine the conceptual treatment of the production
of space. … Converting a static project into a dynamic system of collection and
distribution is a way to achieve maximum effect with minimum intervention. Thus,
most infrastructural designs are configured primarily as operative scaffolds for a
complex series of programs and events.
(Fedorchenko 2008: 288–289)

Architecture in this understanding is articulated as a kind of framework that fixes

organizational and occupational patterns, while letting the formal structure emerge out
of these ‘field conditions’ (p289). To repeat, architecture becomes about what it can do,
rather than what it looks like. This, in turn, challenges previous ‘standard’ representational
and diagrammatic techniques of architectural practice. This is because new diagrammatic
design tools can simultaneously model and mediate across both operational and visual
diagrams – do more, that is, than organizational ‘bubble diagrams’ and other conventional
methods. The resulting analyses of datasets not only intersect with more traditional –
and inherently static – orthographic plans, sections and elevations, but change these for
new kinds of dynamic three-dimensional modelling. This is not simply a back-and-forth
between form and function, it is an:

emerging consistency between architecture as a background support for fluid

performance and as a foreground tool that alters and concretizes flow dynamics.
Such a consistency can serve as the foundation for a prototypical design methodology
that reconciles two seemingly contradictory pressures: how to use the instability of
program for social effects and how to employ the precision of form for visual impact.
(2008: 290)

In this process, diagrams become both distilling and generative devices, ‘multiplying
programmatic and spatial options’ (p293) (Figure 12.4).
146 Jos Boys

FIGURE 12.4 UN Studio (1999) ‘Program and Movement’ diagram for Arhem Station,
Netherlands
Reprinted by permission of UN Studio

UN Studio: the problem of the unimpeded line

Most crucially for Fedorchenko, the ability to move between and across functional and
formal diagrams avoids their potential opposition as modes of design thought:

With the diagrammatic approach, beauty can be reconciled with practical necessity.
Diagrams allow the designer to handle infrastructural logistics while retaining the
freedom to construct powerful imagery, akin to artists or filmmakers. The resulting
‘beautiful apparatus’ reclaims the status of the architectural project as not only an
efficient mechanism but also as a work of art.
(2008: 301)

The justificatory narrative that Federchenko employs here on behalf of UN Studio, and
perhaps parametric design more generally, then, is that form and function no longer need to
be separate – as in the famous ‘form follows function’ tagline for modernist architecture – and
thus functional and practical requirements do not need to act as a ‘drag’ on creativity or beauty
(that is, on the formal and compositional aspect of designing). This version of parametric design
sets itself in opposition to, and better than, any other design method that artificially divides the
practicalities from form-making, or prioritizes one over the other. In fact, such an argument is
in direct continuity with modernist approaches, in offering up a specific diagramming method
Diagramming for a dis/ordinary architecture 147

as a smooth, comprehensive, transparent and logical generator of – and thus justification for
– particular types of form-making, in this case ‘blob’ rather than ‘grid’ architecture. Precisely
because the building’s shape seems to grow directly out of design analysis, it is beautiful (that
is, through the elegance of the method itself). We are invited to admire the beauty of the
apparatus, not make judgments on the aesthetics or compositional qualities of the building
itself. Similarly the architects’ engagement with function and programme – their systematic
description and evaluation of the complex intertwined facts, aims, values and needs that form
the basis of any design – is naturalized as obvious and appropriate, because it seems to lock so
seamlessly with the ensuing architectural form.
At the same time, parametric design is set in opposition to, and better than, modernist
approaches, because its development of programme incorporates multiple and dynamic
variations of occupancy and ‘social effects’. Rather than starting, for example, from a universal
Modulor man (Le Corbusier 2004 [1954 and 1958]) in order to delineate compositional
form out of a singular ‘ideal’ (and normalized) human, parametric design generates data
from the ‘mass’ of humanity and our accumulated and various actions through space. Such
an approach does not pretend to objectivity as modernist architecture did, but its justification
remains solidly located in demonstrating an ability to combine rationality with creativity.

Inserting unruly bodies into the world of ﬂows

How, then, might we critically intersect dis/ability with this second project? Perhaps we could
start by investigating exactly what kinds of bodies are acknowledged and mapped through
the analysis of flow and pattern. What gaps and invisibilities exist within and behind an
argument for creative rationality? Unlike Eisenman who refuses to ‘bow down’ to the social,
UN Studio are a progressive practice who are concerned with the social effects of design, and
incorporate inclusion and accessibility into their work. But, in diagramming for the Arhem
Station scheme only particular types of difference are recognized. These are differences of
direction, distance and destination. The already-existing variations between diverse bodies
disappear; mapping of multiple patterns of movement and circulation occur after a fully
capable, mobile and autonomous subject has been assumed. All these multiple journeys are
mapped as the unimpeded line of the ‘normal’ body that, as Titchkosky so memorably writes:

just comes along ‘naturally’ as people go about their daily existence. People just
jump into the shower, run to the store, see what others mean while keeping an
eye on the kids, or skipping from office to office and, having run through the day
whilst managing to keep their noses clean, hop into bed. All of this glosses the body
that comes along while, at the same time, brings it along metaphorically. Speaking
of ‘normal bodies’ as movement and metaphor maps them as if they are a natural
possession, as if they are not mapped at all
(2002: 103)

Other authors (see Dolmage and Price this volume) have shown how architectural design
generally tends to work from a ‘normal’ body, with disability only added on afterwards,
through a retrofitting of the resulting environment. Here, I want to examine explore in
148 Jos Boys

more detail how we might use diagramming to make explicit some of the complexities of
diverse human occupation of built space. and that can I want to explore how an alternative
diagramming can act to comment on and disrupt some of the disciplinary assumptions in
contemporary uses. architectural diagramming, at the same time And I want to illustrate
how diagramming can also offer creative potential for thinking about disability differently.
This raises the question of what kinds of work are going on as humans differently (and
differentially) occupy spaces and buildings. There are also already a multitude of ways in
which architects diagram human occupation. For example, this may be through mapping
personal and organizational needs, through articulating our sensory and experiential
relationships to built space, and/or through analysing and extrapolating from the patterns
of events and flow that we create en masse. Yet in almost every case bodies are assumed
mobile, autonomous and with fully working senses. To critique this ablest assumption is
simple. It just means making explicit what work it is bodies do as they occupy built space
and – just as importantly – what bodies matter, that is, are designed for, and what bodies
don’t. What happens when we start from what impedes the line?
Most immediately, this means that rather than assume a clear and obvious separation
between disabled and non-disabled people, we should look to a form of diagramming
that can embody the complexities and fragilities of all our bodies. It needs to enable a
mapping of dis/ability as ambiguous, relational and variable. This begins with individual
bodymind (Price 2015) perceptions and experiences, but it is also completely entangled in
the everyday social and material practices that frame what counts as normal (human) and
as abnormal (less than human) in a society and specific moment (Boys 2014). Figure 12.5
sketches out a possible list of what it is to be human and occupy space.
The embodied and situated actions listed are not fixed (either to a particular body
or place). Where and how we locate ourselves – and are located within and by different
contexts – will have many diverse enabling and disabling effects through time on each of
us. Embodiment is not simplistically being ‘disabled’ or ‘non-disabled’; it is relational,
dynamic and varied. But each heading also recognizes that fit and healthy bodies need pay
little heed, whilst those with impairments are – or quickly become – increasingly expert at
taking notice, at planning ahead, at negotiating difficulties. This is not about the ‘strangely
familiar’, a well-known architectural strategy concerned to make us all take more notice
of our surroundings by increasing the unexpected (Borden et al. 1996) but which start from
a body that can just ‘nip about’ without thinking. Nor it is about the deeply experiential,
as so well developed by architects like Peter Zumthor (2006, 2010). These architects also
emphasize the senses – but again assume that these reside in a completely adroit and
capable body; a body that can also be a flâneur, deliberately able to drift through the city,
without any impediment (see Serlin this volume). Instead the table here tries, albeit in a
limited way, to make visible the very everydayness of our bodies, and how it might begin to
be described in all its variations and differentiations. Figure 12.6 then explores how such a
set of criteria might be inserted into a diagram of circulation flows and patterns of use, as a
means of taking into account the differential experience of moving through space. This is
a procedure that attempts to map patterns of slowing down, of dis/orientation, of energy,
of differential intensities, and that refuses to only diagram with lines that are unimpeded,
identical and interchangeable.
Diagramming for a dis/ordinary architecture 149

Having a body Examples of personal, Some social norms

social, material and about space
spatial intersections
Keeping your balance Gravity. Slippery and uneven Assumption of uninterrupted
surfaces. Confusing and fast motion,
reflections. Carrying or autonomous, independent
pushing loads. Scanning for and unimpeded by others or
things to hold onto.Dealing by built surroundings..
with exhaustion and
weakness.
Negotiating obstacles and Heights, widths, steps. Assumption of continuous
hazards Judging distances and gaps. visual, physical and mental
Planning accessible and agility; with high-speed,
doable routes. Needing help. instinctive and independent
Watching out for others. processing of, and responses
to, immediate experiences
and changing circumstances. .

Maintaining energy Deciding journey length and Assumption of own unnoticed

time. Looking for places to and boundless fatigue-free
rest. Slowness and energy. Imperviousness to
unevenness of progress. others and/or frustration as
others’ perceived slowness.

Thinking ahead Pre-planning. Scanning Assumption of lack of

spaces for needed resources external need, based on self-
and facilities. Navigating via containment and adequate
environmental clues. personal resources. No need
Managing orientation and of recourse to support.
disorientation.
Dealing with sensory Negotiating crowds, noise, Assumption of ability to
overload bright or flashing lights. retrieve required data
Managing complex and seamlessly and to be able to
multiple data inputs. block out non-relevant data.

Managing encounters with Staring, or unwanted Assumption that face-to-face

others interactions. Not matching encounters are non-
communication norms. Social problematic. Ability to handle
policing such as ‘gaslighting’ unspoken and neuro-typical
and micro-aggressions. ‘Out- social rules as obvious,
of-placeness’ and misfitting. unnoticed and straightforward.
Feelings of exposure.
FIGURE 12.5 ‘Having a Body’: table outlining some of the characteristics of everyday materials
and spatial embodiments
Source: Author.

As with the Effortless City project for San Francisco (http://www.effortlesscity.com/)

this requires the development of multiple notations. The sketch here uses a variety of
lines – dotted and dashed, wobbly, stopped in their tracks – and also some icons that
represent potentially fraught encounters, such as sensory overload (from noise, crowds,
data), balance-affecting moments (slippery surfaces, steep and unmarked steps, shadows
and glare) and hazards and obstacles. Using big data diagramming to map and then analyse
150 Jos Boys

FIGURE 12.6 Adapted diagram for Arhem Station, as example of mapping differential
perceptions and experiences of space
Source: Sketch by author.

statistics on the likely proportions of population experiencing these potentially disabling

effects, and showing where in built space these are most likely to appear, has the creative
potential to embed accessibility into the very centre of the design process itself.
Importantly though, working this way would also need to challenge the implied
comprehensiveness and rationality of such a diagramming approach. This is in two ways.
First, starting from disability aims to refuse ableist assumptions about what bodies can do, and
which bodies matter. Expanding the creative potential of alternative diagramming therefore
needs to incorporate critical reflection of the very grounds from which the design of built space
begins, that is, an ongoing critique of what it enables and disables. Second, recognizing that
disability and ability are a series of unstable and overlapping concepts and experiences, with
varying and differential effects that are ambiguous and relational, means also acknowledging
that gaps, tensions and contestations will always be produced. No amount of big data analysis
will resolve this; it is design decision making that selects and prioritizes. Starting from disability
does not lead to universal or simple design solutions. It does not provide any easy answers
and will certainly not result in a built environment that is perfectly accessible to everyone,
everywhere. But this is not a good reason not to try and move towards improvements.

Conclusion: diagramming the dis/ordinary

In this essay I have outlined some of the arguments made about diagramming within
architecture, as a means of critically revealing gaps, avoidances and slippages. I have briefly
Diagramming for a dis/ordinary architecture 151

examined two examples of how diagramming operates, both to delineate architecture as

a discipline and designing as a method, in particular ways rather than others. Like Robin
Evans, we cannot assume the spaces between design idea and built result are transparent
or obvious, but need to prise these apart for critical and creative investigation. By inserting
dis/ability (that is, disability and ability) as both concepts and diverse lived experiences into
this space-of-diagrams between originating ideas and built product, we can simultaneously
open up contemporary practices to critique, and find alternative ways of thinking and
doing dis/ability within the architectural design process.
Of course, this aspect of design is only one small part of the procurement, design,
construction and management process of buildings and spaces – a process that architectural
students are not yet engaged in, and architects in practice do not have much control over.
This, though, is what makes it such an interesting space for examination. The multiple
sequences of translation that make up the design process – with diagramming often at its
centre – is where architectural practitioners and students can operate most intensely as
creative beings. If disability can find a place here, it has some chance of becoming a more
ordinary part of what learning and doing the discipline of architecture involves.
However, this is not merely about ‘making a space’ for disability, or designing ‘for’
disability by just adding it to existing diagramming methods. Much more profoundly, as
Lambert and Pham put it, it is about shifting our focus

from what a body is to what a body can do, [so] we can begin to explore the political
– sometimes violent – relations of bodies, objects, and environments that are
produced and maintained through standard design practices and knowledge. How
might a collaborative relation of body and environment create the potential for a
more non-hierarchical architecture? How might it build one that frees all bodies
from the abstract concept of a ‘normal’ body?
(2015)

I have already noted that there are some design practices which work in this direction, by
explicitly challenging the normal body through architecture, that is, by creating designs that
force normal bodies into an awareness of themselves in built space (Lambert 2012; Virilio
and Parent 1996; Gins and Arakawa 2002). However, the argument in this essay intends to
go further. The idea of diagramming for a dis/ordinary architecture – of which only very
partial and unfinished examples are offered here – aims to explore not so much the buildings
and spaces that make ‘normal’ people take more notice of their own bodies, but rather
what kinds of design might be generated by starting from what I have called unruly bodies
(see Introduction, this volume). This looks to alternative kinds of diagramming that begin
with acknowledging disabled as well as abled bodies, and that recognizes the ambiguities
and complexities of inter-relationships between them (Figure 12.7). It suggests using
mapping and analytical processes that refuse to make invisible or reproduce thoughtless
and inequitable hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion; and that are critically and creatively
able to reflect on architecture’s own disciplinary attitudes and practices.
152 Jos Boys

FIGURE 12.7 Thomas Carpentier (2011) The Measure(s) of Man: graduation design project from
the Ecole Speciale d’Architecture, Paris. Reprinted by permission of Thomas Carpentier
This project questions the normatization of the human body proportions introduced by early Modernist
Architectural manuals such as Neufert’s Data and the anthropometric scale of proportion devised by Le
Corbusier as the Modulor. Instead he designs products and spaces by starting from ‘extraordinary’ bodies such
as a bodybuilder, an amputee, a pair of conjoined twins and Borg Queen, a character from Star Trek who has a
biological head on a robotic body.
Diagramming for a dis/ordinary architecture 153
154 Jos Boys

FIGURE 12.8 Thomas Carpentier (2011) Re-interpretation of the Modulor by Le Corbusier.

Reprinted by permission of Fondation Le Corbusier
13
UN/SHARED SPACE

The dilemma of inclusive architecture

Margaret Price (2016)

Figure 13.1 shows a green sign poking up in front of a bank of evergreen shrubbery. On the
sign is a stick figure in a wheelchair – this is the redesigned “Accessibility Icon” by Brian
Glenney and Sara Hendren, with the figure leaning forward slightly and one arm poised
over the wheel. Below the icon is the white-stenciled word “Entrance,” accompanied by
an arrow pointing to the right and slightly up. I’ll say more about this image a bit later.

FIGURE 13.1 Accessible entrance sign on a university campus

Source: Photo by author.
156 Margaret Price

In this three-part essay, I first review and re-define inclusivity through a disability-
studies lens. Second, I turn to the concepts of “kairotic space” (Price, 2009, 2011) and
“ambience” (Rickert, 2007, 2013) in order to suggest that inclusivity in architecture is
better understood through a concept I call crip spacetime. Third, I support this argument by
presenting evidence from an ongoing interview study of disabled faculty. In conclusion, I
suggest new directions for architectural approaches to inclusivity in the future.

Part 1: excludable types

It would be hard to find a word of more interest on college campuses today than
“inclusivity,” unless it was “diversity,” or possibly, “budget cuts.” For example, a recent
headline from the New York Times Education Life supplement is headlined, “Diversity is
one thing, inclusion another” (Eligon, 2016). The article refers to the 2015 events at the
University of Missouri involving an escalating series of racist attacks and student protests,
which led eventually to the resignation of university president Tim Wolfe. As this series of
events, and similar events that cascaded through U.S. campuses in 2014 and 2015 show,
it’s not possible to talk about inclusivity in higher education without also engaging the
question of oppression. Yet, much too often, we use the term inclusivity as if we could
take up its good parts without also confronting the historical and present-day practices of
violent exclusion that make its emphasis necessary in the first place.
Often paired with the term inclusivity is welcoming, as in, “developing a welcoming classroom”
or “safe and welcoming schools.” But as Sara Ahmed (2012) points out in On Being Included,
a study of diversity and racism in higher education, “To be welcomed is to be positioned as
the one who is not at home” (p. 43). In this book, Ahmed conducts an investigation into the
conditions attached to diversity for those whose presence produces that diversity. Diversity,
she finds, is a commodity, a currency, sometimes an object: “Diversity can be celebrated,
consumed, and eaten – as that which can be taken into the body of the university, as well
as the bodies of individuals” (p. 69). This impulse is similar to one identified by Stephanie
Kerschbaum, that of “fixing difference” (2014, p. 6). Difference and diversity are marked
by certain metrics – brown skin, for example – and used as justification for an institution’s
measurably good intentions. This is, of course, a neoliberal logic, and also a “whitely” logic
(Pratt, 1984; Fox, 2002). It’s a logic assuming that intentions are equivalent to actions, that
structural inequality is “no one’s fault,” and that representations of diversity (or inclusivity)
can be folded into existing institutional norms without changing the institutions themselves.
If we take Ahmed’s point about positioning a bit further, we might observe that the verbs
to welcome and to include operate transitively. That is, there must be an object to the verb;
someone or something must be welcomed, be included. And yet, in institutional rhetoric,
these words are often made into other parts of speech (the adjective inclusive, the noun
inclusion), in grammatical moves that specifically hide their objects. To say welcoming school or
inclusive classroom places emphasis on the space itself – the school or classroom – thus eliding
the question of who needs to be welcomed, who is positioned as doing the welcoming, or
why that welcome has been deemed necessary in the first place. To say a school has the goal
of inclusion similarly elides those who might be subjects in that goal: where will this goal be
actualized, when will it occur, who will be shepherding the action, who will be subject to it?
Un/shared space 157

Those questions – who, where, when – are drawn from Tanya Titchkosky’s The Question
of Access (2011), which approaches the problem of inclusivity from the point of view of
disability studies. Like Ahmed, Titchkosky examines her own and other institutions as
test sites to learn how attempts at inclusivity play out in material life. For example, having
observed several instances in which discussions about access at her school focus on spatial
issues such as ramps, doorways, and accessible bathrooms, Titchkosky draws the following
conclusions from the justifications made during these conversations: “Wheelchair users
are depicted as ‘never showing up,’ as an ‘expense.’ … Disability, in this instance, can be
characterized as the abject underside of legitimated existence, included as an excludable
type by signifying it as an always-absent-presence” (pp. 80, 90).
Both Ahmed and Titchkosky conduct intersectional analyses, with focus on different
identity markers, but arriving at a similar point about the problem of trying to make
inclusion happen. Regardless of how well-meant the efforts are, the very fact that gestures
of inclusion are being made means that the distinction between those “in” and those “out”
is reified; moreover, as the efforts and justifications play out, certain bodies are persistently
marked as “excludable types” (Titchkosky, 2011, p. 90; see also Titchkosky, 2007).
It is important to recognize that the “excludable type” is excluded precisely because
they are imagined out of existence, or imagined into a different space where they no longer
present a concern. It would be relatively easy to point to instances of exclusion if the
situation of exclusion were acknowledged as such; for example, if a wheelchair user were
depicted sitting in front of a flight of stairs. (This is not to suggest that such exclusions are
less violent or intractable, only that they may be more readily noticed.) However, exclusion
often operates in such a way that its technologies – how it “sustains itself ” (Titchkosky,
2011, p. 7) – are difficult to discern.
Justifications such as “Oh, this building was built before access standards were in place”
or “But we did the best we could” or “There is an accessible bathroom, just not on this
floor” shift the focus from the excluded disabled person and onto those who are “doing
their best,” or onto the semi- or non-accessible spaces themselves. Titchkosky offers a list
of common justifications, each of which places the disabled bodymind either elsewhere
(they can use that other bathroom; they can come in that other entrance; they can sit in
this designated row in the back of the auditorium) or elsewhen (maybe they’ll show up in
the future; maybe they won’t show up) (pp. 75–76). These rhetorical moves function to
create a paradox of inclusion. Inclusion is approved and valued – just not right now, or not
right here. This “paints the radical lack of access in an ordinary hue” (Titchkosky, 2011,
p. 77). It also has the effect of shifting the issue of “the problem” from the inaccessible
space to the “problemed” bodymind (Yergeau et al., 2013), and of compounding the pain
of exclusion with the additional pain of being made to feel, well, crazy.
The socio-spatial process of identifying and separating “excludable types” can be
observed in many architectural features. For example, let’s return to Figure 13.1, shown
and described at the beginning of this chapter. This time, we’ll view it with a bit more
spatial context (Figure 13.2).
First, here is the green-and-white sign itself, with the wheelchair logo, the word
“Entrance,” and the arrow pointing to the right and upward. This slightly more pulled-
back perspective than the one at the beginning of this chapter shows that the sign is not
158 Margaret Price

FIGURE 13.2 Accessible entrance sign on a university campus, showing inaccessibility

Source: Photo by author.

just posted in front of, but is nestled among, layers of shrubbery. In the background rise
red-brick buildings, typical of many U.S. college campuses. This sign delivers a familiar
message to wheelchair users and others who cannot use stairs: the accessible entrance is
somewhere else, probably around back, and quite likely at the other end of a winding
maze of pathways and passageways. Often, “accessible” entrances can be reached only
by inaccessible pathways such as wood chips, or they may take the form of large, heavy
doors (without automatic openers) which are ironically emblazoned with the accessibility
symbol.
In this case, the sign pointing toward the accessible entrance is situated in a somewhat
extraordinary context. The next image shows the front entrance of the building where the
sign is posted.
Un/shared space 159

Figure 13.3 is of the full building entrance. The building, a college library, is enormous
and grand, built of stone in perpendicular Gothic style, with stained-glass windows,
elaborate towers, and a flight of stone steps (slightly indented from the wear of many
walking feet over the years) leading up to the large wood-and-glass front doors. A student
wearing a backpack is climbing the front steps, and appears tiny in comparison to the
imposing building. The “accessible entrance” sign is nearly impossible to make out; it’s
circled in white at the lower right-hand corner of the frame. From this perspective, it
becomes evident that the sign is quite a long distance from the front entrance, and its small
size and position snuggled within the shrubs indicate that it would probably not be noticed
except by accident (which is how I happened to notice it).

FIGURE 13.3 Front entrance to university campus building

Source: Photo by author.

160 Margaret Price

This sign, and its position, raise the question of who it is for – a question that both
Ahmed and Titchkosky raise with respect to inclusivity. Is the audience for this sign a
person using a wheelchair or cane, one who might approach this library eager to get inside,
but be unable to navigate the steps? Or is it for the person who insisted that it appear in
the first place – whoever they were, maybe a campus activist, maybe a member of the legal
team? Is it for those of us who could walk up the steps, so that we don’t have to think about
those whom the steps exclude? What work are this sign, and the spatial arrangement of this
entranceway, doing in the world?
In showing you this example, my intention is not to make fun of the school where this
building is located, which in fact has made significant efforts toward accessibility. And
that’s my point. Even when best efforts are made, none of us is exempt from failure at
inclusivity; none of us is fully able to make the leap beyond what Titchkosky calls “the
unimagined type.” The presence of this sign, its position vis-à-vis the building itself, the
ways it was put in place, and the ways it continues to circulate meaning for those who pass
by – these are all parts of the machinery that sustains a lack of access with a regretful look
and a shrug of the shoulders. It’s a shame; it’s regrettable; it’s no one’s fault.
That impulse – to view the lack of inclusion as “no one’s fault” – is unfortunately one
that characterizes much architectural work. In the U.S., the Americans with Disabilities
Act (ADA) has inadvertently encouraged a minimalist approach to access, to the extent
that retrofits and exceptions have become the norm (see Newell, 2007; Dolmage, 2008,
2013 (also this volume); Yergeau et al., 2013; Keller, 2016). And even when aspects of
physical access are carefully accounted for, other forms of access, including those that
may be more difficult to discern, remain unexplored. These other forms of access may
be more difficult to discern because we are accustomed to thinking of access barriers as
recognizable, stable entities. But this misses the fact that many barriers – as well as forms
of access – arise in context, shifting as the circumstances and bodyminds of/in a space shift
(Boys, 2014, pp. 57, 85). Efforts for access must acknowledge the entanglement of social
and material elements in the constitution of spaces. In the following two sections, I first
offer a framework for thinking about these difficult-to-discern barriers by introducing
the theory of crip spacetime, then flesh out that framework by describing the everyday
experiences of disabled faculty in the higher-education workplace.

Part 2: kairotic space, ambient rhetoric, and gathering

Inclusivity is a topos in academic life. A topos, or commonplace topic (plural “topoi”), is a
concept shared by a group as a starting place for communication. Some of the important
topoi of academic life, as identified in my earlier work Mad at School (2011), include
rationality, productivity, presence, security, and independence. Topoi function as a sort
of shorthand for in-group communication; they are used as points of reference for ideas,
phenomena, or people the group values or abhors. However, their meaning may not be
agreed upon by all group members; rather, they tend to represent the dominant conceptions
that govern the group. Thus, topoi not only enable communication, they also obscure
certain assumptions; they are, as Sharon Crowley (2006) says, “part of the discursive
machinery that hides the flow of difference” (p. 73).
Un/shared space 161

The classical Greek word topos means “place,” a point of etymology that emphasizes the
importance of a socio-spatial analysis for inclusion. Spaces are, as Doreen Massey (1994)
argues, “processes”:

Instead then, of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be
imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings,
but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are
constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as
the place itself, whether that be a street, or a region or even a continent.
(p. 154)

In other words, places (and spaces) both constitute and are constituted by the
bodyminds, objects, practices, histories, and traces that inhabit them – and sometimes
haunt them. This conception of space emerged in the 1970s and 1980s (see overview by
Massey, 1994, p. 254) and has continued to develop through material feminist work such
as Karen Barad’s (2003, 2007). In this section, I begin from Massey’s argument that space
is a social process in order to revisit and update my theory of kairotic space.
When I initially conceived the idea of kairotic space (Price, 2009), I was preoccupied
with academic conferences. Specifically, I was struggling to figure out why they were so
hard for me to access. My access problems rarely occurred when I needed to ascend stairs,
make my way through narrow aisles, hear speakers, view images projected onto screens,
choose among narrow food options, or walk from session to session. Rather, I found that
my difficulties manifested in puzzling, half-articulated concerns, which I didn’t share with
anyone else: People are talking to me, but I can’t make sense of their words. I can’t remember what
that person just said. People keep touching me. I’m exhausted. I have to go outside. I have to go
home. And there were also experiences not possible to articulate even in those not-very-
articulate ways; for example, I can’t think of a useful way to render the mingled horror and
embarrassment of I am having a panic attack during a meeting at a conference, but it has happened
(more than once), and it certainly meant the space was not accessible to me – though
exactly where that inaccessibility might have been located is difficult to say. Initially, when I
came up with the idea of kairotic space, I knew it would be incomplete, but I also felt that
this strange and often painful form of spacetime needed to be named.
In Mad at School (2011), I wrote:

Kairotic space draws upon the classical Greek notion of kairos, which refers to timing
– that is, the good or opportune time to do or say something. Kairotic spaces are the
less formal, often unnoticed, areas of academe where knowledge is produced and
power is exchanged. A classroom discussion is a kairotic space, as is an individual
conference with one’s professor. Academic conferences are rife with kairotic spaces,
including the question-and-answer sessions after panels, impromptu “elevator
meetings,” and gatherings at restaurants and bars on the periphery of formal
conference events. Other examples from students’ experiences might include peer-
response workshops, study groups, interviews for on-campus jobs, or departmental
parties or gatherings to which they are invited.
162 Margaret Price

I define a kairotic space as one characterized by all or most of these criteria:

1. Events are synchronous; that is, they unfold in “real time.”
2. Impromptu communication is required or encouraged.
3. Participants are tele/present. That is, they may be present in person, through
a digital interface such as a video chat, or in hybrid form [see below for later
changes to this criterion].
4. The situation involves a strong social element.
5. Stakes are high.
I specify “all or most of these criteria” to indicate that the boundaries of such
spaces are neither rigid nor objectively determined. So, for instance, a meeting taking
place either in person or via instant message between a graduate student and their
academic mentor would probably qualify as a kairotic space. But an informal study
session between two students who have been friends for years and who experience
minimal risk in studying together probably would not.
The defining element of kairotic space is the pairing of spontaneity with high
levels of academic impact. Attention to relations of power is of great importance
in understanding kairotic space, as is recognition that different participants will
perceive those relations differently. I don’t claim the ability to define what is and
is not a kairotic space if I am not directly involved; in fact, that’s part of my point,
that one person in a space may feel that it’s entirely low-stakes and friendly (this is a
common assumption on the part of academic mentors, for instance), while another
may perceive a significant sense of risk.
Despite their importance, kairotic spaces in academia tend to be under-studied.
One reason for this is that, because they are unscripted, it’s difficult to collect data
in them (Ventola, Shalom, & Thompson, 2002, p. 361). Another, more compelling
reason is that their impact tends to be underestimated by those who move through
them with relative ease. The importance of kairotic space will be more obvious to
a person who – for example – can hear only scraps of a conversation held among a
group sitting at a table, or who needs more than a few seconds to process a question
asked during a one-on-one conference.
(2011, pp. 60–63)

In the years since I first developed the theory, I’ve revised my understanding of kairotic
space. One revision is that I no longer assume the participants in kairotic spaces must be
physically present; rather, I recognize that various hybrid forms of “presence,” including
presence via videoconferencing or other digital means, also come into play (Yergeau et al.,
2013; see also Dadas, 2017). In addition, although I still think it can be valuable to think
about “events unfolding in real time” when noting the inexorability and speed through
which academic spaces are often constituted, I also acknowledge that there is no such thing
as “real” time; or, as Lefebvre (1974) put it, “Time has more than one writing-system” (p.
110). Knowledge of “crip time” includes the understanding that crip time is not a simple
speeding-up or slowing-down of normative time frames, but rather may represent radical
forms of bending and folding, a quantum change – time “not just expanded but exploded”
Un/shared space 163

(Kafer, 2013, p. 27). These changes reflect my developing awareness that kairotic spaces are
constituted through the subject/objects that inhabit them and the emergent interactions
of those subject/objects – an ever-unfolding process that Thomas Rickert (2013) calls
“ambient rhetoric.”
In Ambient Rhetoric (2013) and the earlier “Invention in the Wild” (2007), Rickert argues
that kairos is not just a temporal, but also a spatial concept. In doing so, he draws on Debra
Hawhee’s (2002) work on kairos, which she argues manifests through “space-time” and
enables “the emergence of a pro-visional ‘subject,’ one that works on – and is worked on by
– the situation” (p. 18, qtd. in Rickert, 2007). This idea from Hawhee and others contributes
to Rickert’s theory of ambient rhetoric, through which our material, spatial, and environmental
surroundings, or what Rickert calls ambience, “connotes the dispersal and diffusion of agency”
(2013, p. 16). Not cited by Rickert, but also crucial in developing a theory of distributed and
materially entangled agency, is work by material feminist Stacy Alaimo (2008), who argues
that “material agency necessitates more capacious epistemologies” involving not only human
will, but also “the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, non-human
creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors” (p. 238). What this means
for kairotic space is not just that its inhabitants are all having different experiences (which is
still true), but also that their interactions, and the ways they are attuned to and responsive to
each other, constitute their spacetime, just as that spacetime continues to constitute them. This
understanding of spacetime overlaps with Karen Barad’s (2003, 2007) theory of intra-activity
and agency, a point I shall return to later.
Thinking about kairotic space invites further consideration/objects to gather in
spacetime. Rickert, drawing on Heidegger, argues that the way people come together in
ambient spaces, or “dwell,” has an inevitably ethical charge (Rickett, 2013, p. 16). This
resonates with my conviction that kairotic spaces cannot be meaningfully examined
without attention to the relations of power that co-constitute them. For example, when
I present at a gathering – say, a talk or workshop – I begin with an invocation that is
specifically intended to call forth the socio-spatial nature of the venue, or what Rickert
would call its ambience. A typical script for the invocation goes like this:

I want to take a minute to observe the space we’re in together. [At this point, I
generally try to describe the space a bit. I remark on features such as the size of the
space, the type of seating, whether there are steps, whether there are interpreters or
captioners present, what sort of light illuminates the space, where the microphones
are, and so forth.] I invite you to inhabit it in whatever way is most comfortable for
you. You might wish to sit or lie on the floor rather than remain in a chair. You might
want to stand up, move around, stretch, or go out and come back in. You might wish
to stay in one seat, but engage in an activity such as stimming, typing, knitting, or
drawing. All these forms of engagement are welcome.
(See Price, 2016 for full invocation)

I didn’t start making this invocation randomly. It was “born” in a specific moment, a
conference gathering at which I witnessed a good friend, a fellow crip, being triggered – in
her words, “being undone” (Kafer, 2016, p. 5). At that moment, I was thrown back in time
164 Margaret Price

to my own experiences of trauma; I too was undone; and later, I began to think hard about
what it means to gather in spaces together but radically not together. The person experiencing
trauma, sitting at a conference presentation (or in a meeting) (or anywhere), both is and is
not in the same space as the non-traumatized person sitting next to them.
This is a quality of space that, I argue, architects need to think about more carefully.
When imagining or rendering “bodies in space,” how much do we know the space they
may be inhabiting at any given moment? Are they in pain, are they experiencing a flashback,
are they hard of hearing and thus using all their cognitive energy just to make out the flow
of conversation? And without being overly deterministic about inhabitants’ experiences or
needs (for that would simply bring us back to an “accommodation” model), how might
architecture take into account the radical unpredictability and ambient emergence of
disability when we gather together?

Part 3: enﬂeshing the theory of crip spacetime

In this section, I share findings from an interview study of disabled faculty, carried out in
collaboration with Dr. Stephanie Kerschbaum. As our interviews progressed, I realized
that space was a key concept emerging in the faculty members’ stories: how participants
navigated their campuses, arranged their offices, entered and exited meeting rooms,
interacted with colleagues in social encounters, and how they evaluated the “feeling” of the
various spaces in which they worked. Through closer analysis of this broad theme of space,
I developed a theory of crip spacetime, detailed in this section and “enfleshed” (McLaren,
1988) through analysis of interviewees’ stories.
The interviewee pool, still growing, includes 34 disabled faculty members, whose
positions vary widely with regard to race, gender, class, rank, type of institution, and
discipline. During their interviews, participants self-identified with various disabilities,
including autism, deafness (both signing and non-signing), Usher syndrome, bipolar
disorder, spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis, blindness, depression, chronic pain,
chronic illness (both from-birth and later-emerging illnesses), physical impairment to face
or hands, chronic fatigue, paralysis, electromagnetic hypersensitivity, and quadriplegia.
Although analysis is ongoing, an initial process of open coding followed by category
construction resulted in the following three themes:

UÊ Exposure / vulnerability
UÊ Fatigue / repetition
UÊ Gaslighting.

The three themes, taken together, point to the necessity for co-design of academic space
to foster inclusivity. However, as I emphasize in this essay’s conclusion, “co-design” does not
mean vaguely “including” disabled people in the design process, but rather a much deeper and
more formative approach. Moreover, it means accepting that there is no such thing as “good”
design for disability, at least not that can be definitively identified in advance. We are used to
thinking of disability as something that can be accommodated through a series of predictable
moves: Design the doorways like this, the walls like that, the lights like this. But instead,
disability often must be accommodated as it unfolds through interactive spaces like classrooms
Un/shared space 165

and offices. That is more complicated than simply saying, “Allow time and a half for tests” or
“Hire an interpreter” or even “Ensure the tables, chairs, and lights are adjustable.” (And, as
has been abundantly documented, accommodations that might initially seem straightforward,
like adjustable tables or sign-language interpreters, are also complex and unpredictable; see
Titchkosky, 2011, and Blankmeyer Burke and Nicodemus, 2013.) Disability as a critical
analytic is compelling in part because it manifests human unpredictability. This is the
challenge facing architecture.

Theme 1: Exposure / vulnerability

The term exposure, for a rock or mountain climber, refers to the steepness and openness
of the terrain. It correlates with the level of risk one experiences when occupying a certain
spot. For example, a steep area on a grassy hill with a long roll-out would probably be
considered less exposed than a jagged rock face with similar steepness, because “exposure”
is calculated not only by angle but also by consequences – that is, what will happen if
you fall. Exposure, as a theme, describes a faculty member’s awareness of vulnerability
as they attempt to navigate access in their workplace. The contextual nature of exposure,
in the rock-climbing sense, helps convey the way that risk, for disabled faculty members,
is spatial: it emerges through the intra-activity of the spaces they move through at work.
Importantly, it also includes the intersectional ways that disability is entangled with
considerations of race, class, gender, nationality, sexuality, and so on, which are always
present when a disabled faculty member is assessing their exposure in a given situation.
Many of our participants discussed feeling vulnerable at work, with some using that
word directly, and some describing similar feelings and circumstances (for example, saying
in relation to disclosing disability, “You know I’ve got sensitive information out there.”).
Just as with exposure in rock climbing, the level of risk for a disabled faculty member must
be assessed by the person in the space, rather than being measured objectively or externally.
This means that the disabled faculty member is carrying out extensive labor in remaining
attuned to and guarding against that risk. Meanwhile, another participant in the same
geometric space might perceive much less risk.
For example, consider the following account by Denise. In the interview, she had just
stated that she has “my little blindness stump speech” that includes “canned answers that I
give people” (for instance, a standard response to the question, “How long have you been
blind?”). But in terms of addressing the actual day-to-day professional issues that may arise
in relation to her blindness, Denise said, her sense of exposure is much higher.

D: I might have some of those conversations with my colleagues, but when I actually
reveal true vulnerabilities that I feel as a disabled person, I am very careful about who
I have those conversations with.
S: Right, right.
D: and I can give you an example about that. [pause]
S: Yes [please
D: [After my after my first semester, it was the first week of the spring semester, and we
got our evaluations back from the previous semester.
166 Margaret Price

S: Mh-hmm.
D: And in one of my classes in particular, two or three students wrote that it’s very
distracting that everyone is on their phones or on Facebook, and that people are falling
asleep in class.
S: Mh-hmm.
D: This really paralyzed me, um, because I felt like I didn’t have control over my
classroom, and it makes me feel very vulnerable. Because on the one hand I know that
is a problem that almost every teacher now faces.
S: Right.
D: So what that information can mean for other people is to say to sort of, it can almost
give people the power to point me out and say, these are huge deficits she has as
a teacher, and sort of not keep it in perspective that [pause] it probably has some
unique challenges for me, but it is a problem that everyone faces. So I didn’t talk
to anyone for two days about it.
S: Right.
D: And I, I hid in my office and I just felt devastated. And because I couldn’t think of an
answ — a solution, because I just can’t police students, I can’t see what they’re doing.
So I decided to [actually=
S: [right
D: =bring it to my students, my new students, and I had them come up with rules
together about how they were going to keep each other in check. So once I had that
solution, and I felt that we had very good conversations in my classes, then I did tell
two of my colleagues about the problem. [pause] I didn’t tell two other colleagues,
because I just didn’t want that information, I don’t want to say, to be used against me.

I have reprinted this section of Denise’s interview in full because it demonstrates how
her sense of exposure emerges through the intra-active features of her material situation.
According to Karen Barad (2003, 2007), intra-activity demonstrates that agency is not a
matter of an individual’s will or intention. Rather, agency “is an enactment,” something
that arises through various “cuts” in matter and spacetime. Entities that intra-act (humans,
objects, animals, etc.) are not helplessly thrown about in the process of intra-action;
indeed, as Barad emphasizes, “our intra-actions contribute to the differential mattering
of the world,” and this fact carries with it a mandate for ethical action (2007, p. 178). But
human will does not guide material encounters. Rather, the effects of those encounters
arise through the intra-activity of all elements involved in a given moment. Putting this
together with Rickert’s contention that rhetorical situations are ambient, we are better able
to understand the space that Denise found herself in.
If we think about the space of Denise’s classroom in terms of intra-activity and
ambiance, it offers a meaningful response to these common questions put to disabled (and
all minority) faculty: “Well, why not ask your colleagues for assistance, if they’ve never
shown any malice toward you? Why hide in your office? We’ve all gotten bad evaluations;
isn’t your reaction a little extreme?” The pain that Denise describes (“I hid in my office
and I just felt devastated”) occurs because all the elements of her work as a professor are
intra-acting, including her lived experiences with ableism, dominant narratives about what
Un/shared space 167

“competent” instructors should be able to do, and the potential for catastrophic loss if
she admits her vulnerability to the wrong person – in short, the uncertainty that surrounds
disclosure. This is what I mean when I say that different subjects in a situation – for
example, a blind professor and her sighted colleague – are actually inhabiting different
spaces even if and when they are “together.” The intra-activity that composes the spaces
they inhabit is entirely different.
As Denise found out when she was finally able to talk to a colleague she trusted, not only
did he not blame her, but he affirmed her concerns, and further noted that she had come up
with a good solution. Despite this best-possible outcome, Denise still had to perform the
labor of being attuned to her own vulnerability. That burden of being constantly on guard,
of noticing and heading off potential problems, of protecting oneself from possible bad
outcomes, not to mention managing the emotional stress involved, has also been remarked
upon in other work by minority faculty (see discussion of intersectionality, below). The
key thing I want to highlight is that it does not matter whether the intentions of the people
surrounding the disabled faculty member are good, ill, or indifferent; the disabled faculty
member must perform the labor of vulnerability regardless. This puts a markedly different
spin on top-down campus efforts to become more “welcoming” or “inclusive.” Those
activating such initiatives are missing a salient fact: The space they inhabit is not the same
space inhabited by those they are attempting to “welcome” (see Ahmed, 2012).
I’ve analyzed Denise’s example in detail because it illustrates the point I want to make
about exposure and how it changes academic space. But Denise’s is not an isolated case:
Many other faculty members interviewed expressed similar experiences about having to
perform the labor of vulnerability, and how that affected the spaces in which they worked.
Performing these constant calculations, remaining vigilant about potential risk, is exhausting.

Theme 2: Fatigue
The term “access fatigue” comes from Annika Konrad (2016), who defines it as “being
plain sick of having to ask for access.” Without conflating the situations of disabled
and racially minoritized faculty, it is worth noting that a similar phenomenon has been
documented for people of color: “racial battle fatigue” (Smith, 2004, qtd. in Wilson,
2012, p. 70). This repetitive labor is exhausting. Disabled faculty must meet the usual
expectations of faculty work in the neoliberal university (growing class sizes, vanishing
job security, shrinking job opportunities, increasing service duties), and also meet the
constant demands of negotiating their disabilities at work. These demands range from
arranging accommodations (if such are even available) to managing the ambient sense
of exposure and vulnerability described in the previous section. As I analyzed faculty
members’ interviews, an important theme that emerged was the constant nature of the
labor interviewees had to perform when negotiating being disabled at work. More than
one interviewee, when asked “Do you talk about your disability at work?” responded, “All
the time.” The exact repetition of that phrase, from more than one interviewee, called my
attention to the potential for this theme; when I analyzed the data further, it became clear
that many of the faculty members we interviewed found “access fatigue” (Konrad, 2016) a
salient component of their jobs.
168 Margaret Price

One faculty member who said “All the time” was Trudy, a white non-tenure-track
faculty member at a small private college. She had been in this job for more than 20
years at the time of the interview, a fact that makes her story about having to constantly
recapitulate the issue of her disability and access needs even more striking:

T: I’m always asserting them [my access needs]. There are a handful of people who
know me really well, who are good friends as well as colleagues, who always anticipate
them. Most people forget.
S: Okay.
T: They don’t—even though I’m very public, even though I’m always asserting them,
even people I work with on a regular basis will say, “Oh let’s have a breakfast meeting.”
You know. They already know that I can’t do that.
S: Right, right.
T: But no, I have to do—It’s continual, okay.
S: Okay.
T: Yeah, it is continual.

As Trudy’s explanation indicates, the act of “coming out” as disabled is not a one-time
event, but rather one that happens repeatedly. The barrier of having one’s access needs
forgotten, and having to re-assert those needs constantly, is one that must be surmounted
regularly by disabled faculty. This barrier is further evidence that disabled faculty work
in different spacetimes than their colleagues, even if they share the same geographic and
geometric space. I might say the barrier is “invisible,” but that is an inadequate metaphor;
access fatigue is not just unseen, but does not exist for nondisabled faculty (although they
may, of course, have to work for access for other reasons). Moreover, the nondisabled
faculty member is unlikely to notice that a seemingly insignificant exchange they may
have just witnessed (“I need this”; “I can’t do that”; “I can do that only if the following
conditions are in place”) is sapping the energy and morale of their colleague, because the
nondisabled observer probably witnesses only a few of the daily repetitions which can
easily reach the dozens, or hundreds. Returning to the concept of kairotic space, this may
help explain why architectural efforts to foster collegiality so often fail. A “relaxed, social”
space for one person is, for another, simply yet another site in which they must carry out
unpaid and unnoticed labor.
Many other interviewees described the toll taken by the need to constantly assert or
adjust for their access needs. For example, Nicola, a working-class adjunct faculty member
with multiple sclerosis, described the constant maneuvers she must perform, both
internally and when communicating with colleagues, supervisors, or students, to match
the demands of her job to the capabilities of her disabled bodymind. She explained that
her daily routine “is basically a series of very clever strategies that I use to either conserve
energy, to compensate for deficits [M: Mh-hm] or to mask what’s going on with me.”
Marian, a deaf faculty member at a large university, said, “It’s like disclosure over and over
again, every single class that you stand in front of.” Del, who is autistic, related that at a
time in her career when it wasn’t safe to reveal herself as autistic, she performed intense
and constant labor to hide her usual mannerisms, which involve rocking and stimming:
Un/shared space 169

“I carefully like kept my hands in my pockets all the time and my body tense and I didn’t
move … I made myself really sick.” Some interviewees also described ways that structural
changes in their workplaces helped mitigate the exhaustion of constant explanations. For
example, Maya, a researcher with Usher Syndrome, is like most of her co-workers in that
she is deaf and communicates mostly by signing; however, unlike most of her co-workers,
she is also visually impaired and has epilepsy. After a number of individual exchanges with
co-workers, her supervisor asked her to make two presentations to her research team to
describe her access needs. Maya wrote, “That proved to be useful, and most colleagues
were very understanding and appreciative of the information.”
Although any faculty member could point to examples in which they’ve had to perform
unpaid labor to accommodate their own needs, the difference between this experience
and the ones described here is scale. For the disabled faculty we interviewed, these acts
of unpaid labor often constitute an all-the-time, every-day series of calculations, moves,
counter-moves, and corrections. When the burden of this sort of constant labor is scaled
up, it leads to circumstances that are not just difficult but may be intolerable. Notably, our
interview sample includes at least two faculty members who have left academia.

Theme 3: Gaslighting
The third theme, gaslighting, identifies the experience of being made to “feel crazy” when
confronting inaccessible spaces in the workplace. Gaslighting is a term that originated with
a 1930s stage play and was popularized through a 1944 film, Gaslight, in which a husband
manipulates his wife’s surroundings in such a way that she comes to doubt her perception
of reality. The term traveled into psychiatric literature and has since been used colloquially,
especially in minority communities, to describe the experience of being made to feel that
one’s perception of a situation is inaccurate – that one is remembering events wrong, or
blowing things out of proportion, or interpreting events incorrectly. This theme appeared
less frequently during interviews than exposure or fatigue; however, I am highlighting
it because it was mentioned more frequently by multiply minoritized faculty, especially
those who are queer and/or of color in addition to being disabled. Part of the purpose of
our “maximum variation” sampling approach, in which we aimed to gather as wide a range
of faculty experiences as possible, was to uncover such themes, which may be more salient
for disabled faculty living with intersectional experiences of oppression.
Zoe, an assistant professor at a minority-serving institution, described a number of
microaggressions she experienced on the job market; for example, at one campus interview,
a search-committee member made a mocking comment about ADD (attention deficit
disorder; one of Zoe’s diagnoses), and later used the R-word. At her new workplace, issues
continued, and Zoe described her sense of being pressed into a role as the “stereotypical
crazy Latina”:

It’s like, no matter how many degrees you have, you’re always worried about being
the stereotypical crazy Latina who just has to be a problem. [break] Who reads race
into everything, who reads ableism into everything, or sexism. And it’s like, how do
I not do that? That’s my life.
170 Margaret Price

This comment also fits with the theme of exposure; however, it is further complicated
because Zoe’s sense of risk was heightened by the (micro)aggressions she encountered
on the job. (I put “micro” in parentheses because Zoe commented at one point, “I don’t
wanna call them microaggressions because they’re pretty blatant.”) She described a process
of gaslighting that unfolded after she met another professor at her school: when the two
were discussing a topic their research had in common, this professor referred to medieval
women mystics “as ‘wild,’ ‘crazy,’ and ‘just plain nuts, which is why they’re fun.’ I [Zoe]
was appalled.” As Zoe continued the story, she indicated that this professor “maligned” her
teaching, then described what happened when she tried to complain:

Z: When I complained about it, my concerns were dismissed.

S: My stomach is sinking reading this [break] I am honestly so shocked that this person
wants to teach [topic of class].
Z: And I was asked if I might be reading into things or whether I might be blowing things
out of proportion, and I know these questions come as a result of what people know
about my disabilities. … So here’s how I see it working: I have anxiety disorder and I
worry about things a lot, and how they affect me or my students. I overthink things
sometimes. As a result, when I have spoken to colleagues about my concerns with this
person, no one has been able to offer any useful advice. One person said he hadn’t
heard anything negative, and the other person said I might just be taking things the
wrong way and “reading into it.” [break] One even asked if maybe I wasn’t just being
a little paranoid.

This example demonstrates why an intersectional analysis of factors leading to

workplace discrimination is crucial: Zoe’s story is not only about her disabilities, but also
about the ways they intertwine with her race, gender, and the subjects she teaches. As with
the earlier examples, Zoe’s can be read as one in which elements intra-act to place her
and her colleagues in entirely different spaces. There is an insidious additional factor at
work here, however, which is that the reality of the space Zoe inhabits is itself called into
question.
Stories of gaslighting did not come up as often as stories of fatigue or exposure. However,
when they did come up, it was frequently by faculty who experienced intersectional
pressures of disability, race, gender, sexuality, and/or class. Gaslighting overlaps with
disability in complex ways, since not only may disability figure into the subjectivity of the
person being gaslighted – as Zoe’s story shows – but gaslighting itself effects disablement by
forcing a subject to “feel crazy.” In fact, the end stage of gaslighting, according to psychiatric
research, is “severe, major, clinical depression” (Abramson, 2014, p. 23). Elena Flores
Ruíz (2014) calls gaslighting “a kind of professionalized, ambient abuse” (p. 201) – using
the term ambient, as Rickert (2013) does, to mark an emergent and spatial phenomenon.
Much more work remains to be done on the intersectional pressures faced by multiply
marginalized faculty, including those who are disabled and those who become disabled
as a result of gaslighting. For the purposes of this chapter, I will point out that this is yet
another way in which disabled faculty simultaneously are and are not in the same spaces as
those they work alongside.
Un/shared space 171

Part 4: conclusion
As I wrote this chapter, I found myself coming up against a difficult question: If architecture
– at least the sort of architecture typically used to construct buildings in academe – is an
essentially predictive endeavor, and I am arguing that disability should be recognized as
essentially unpredictable, what does this mean for the future of accessible architecture?
To put the question in somewhat less impossible terms, I am asking: If we accept that
disability is an emergent phenomenon, one that materializes through the intra-actions of
people, attitudes, histories, objects, that materialize as crip spacetime, how do we design
for disabled bodyminds?
One approach that has proven not very successful is establishing a checklist and then
adhering to it rigidly (see Wood, Dolmage, Price & Lewiecki-Wilson, 2014; Dolmage,
2015). This can be seen in “minimal compliance” applications of ADA standards (see
Newell, 2007): too often, the law serves as a baseline for what designers can get away
with rather than inspiring what new forms of access they might imagine. Other types
of building standards may try for access, but in a hit-or-miss way that demonstrates an
obvious failure to deeply consult disabled people. For example, the relatively new WELL
building standard is explicitly centered upon health, and takes into account issues such as
building occupants’ mental health, need for physical/mental respite, and potential chemical
sensitivities. However, WELL creates other problems, such as valorizing the use of stairs
over elevators, on the assumption that this is a healthier choice, while apparently forgetting
that some occupants are simply unable to use stairs (Keller, 2016). Even universal design,
for all its revolutionary history, is often approached as nothing more than a checklist with
seven items (see Dolmage, 2008; Hamraie, 2013). Still, at the end of the day, the standards
themselves are not the main problem. Large-scale building would not be possible without
some form of standard or guideline. The main problem is the failure to imagine access
differently (Titchkosky, 2011; Boys, 2014).
Co-design, or participatory design, is an obvious remedy for poorly imagined
architecture. This argument has been made within disability studies for decades, as the
slogan “Nothing About Us Without Us” attests (Charlton, 1998). However, the problems
of inclusion noted by Ahmed (2012) and Titchkosky (2011) characterize efforts at co-design
as well. Many plans for accessible design state that disabled people must be “included”
in the design process. But what does that really mean? When will we be included, and
under what circumstances? To what extent will disabled people produce, rather than just
comment on, the spaces where we work? For that matter, what sorts of disabilities will be
“included” for consideration? As a disability activist working to foster accessible spaces in
academe, I have learned over and over again that “inclusion” can mean almost anything
when co-design is claimed. And, while disabled people in academe certainly do inhabit
spaces in the way that Massey (1994) describes, that is, hacking and re-making them as
we go, it’s rare that disabled people are truly centered in the process of accessible design.
In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby (2013) propose an approach
that moves away from realism and focuses instead on the question “What if?” (p. 141). They
emphasize that, unlike most forms of social design, which continue to work within “the
limits of reality as it is” (p. 12), speculative design attempts to work fictively, deliberately
172 Margaret Price

imagining worlds that cannot be in order to improve design in the world that is. In addition
to centering disabled people as producers rather than bystanders or latecoming consultants
(Yergeau et al., 2013), I call upon architects and those interested in accessible space to consider
what it might mean to identify with disabled people – to enter our spaces rather than inviting
us to enter yours. The process of identifying-with is described by Sami Schalk (2013):

I use identify with to mean having acknowledged and prioritized political and personal
connections to a group with which one does not identify as a member. … Identifying
with is a careful, conscious joining – a standing/sitting among rather than by or
behind a group – which seeks to reduce separation while acknowledging differences
in privileges and oppression.

Schalk’s definition of identifying-with is spatial: she notes that it involves “standing/

sitting among rather than by or behind.” This sort of action, this among, is different than
calling disabled people in for a design charrette; it might mean visiting (with permission)
the spaces disabled people already inhabit, learning about our hacks and our customs,
learning where our barriers lie – with the understanding, once again, that no two disabled
people will face just the same barriers. Dwelling in crip spacetime enables the development
of what Mia Mingus (2011) calls “access intimacy” – that is, the ability to understand
another’s access needs viscerally, even intuitively at times.
There is no shortcut for this sort of visceral, ambient knowledge; like dwelling
(Reynolds, 2004), it can only be effected through time and space, not willed or predicted.
The “what-if?” of speculative design (Dunne & Raby, 2013), the possibilities of a “politics
of wonder” advocated by Tanya Titchkosky (2011), mean that inclusion itself must be
understood as fundamentally unstable. It means identifying with; accepting failure; trying,
and trying again, through meaningful feedback loops. Today’s academe is a prototype.

Note
The study reported on here was supported by a Research Initiative grant from the Conference on College
Composition and Communication (Price and Kerschbaum, Principal Investigators). Our sampling method is
“maximum variation sampling,” sometimes called “diversity sampling,” which aims to locate participants on
as wide a range as possible. Our interest is not in asking, “Who is typical or representative?” but rather, “Who
is unimagined?” In addition, we deliberately set up an “accessible interdependent research paradigm” (Price
2011; Price and Kerschbaum, 2016). Interviews took place in whichever medium participants identified as their
preference, including face-to-face video-conference, telephone (with captioning), e-mail, or instant-message.
Interviews were both oral and signed.
In the interview excerpts used here, “M” indicates Margaret Price; “S” indicates Stephanie Kerschbaum.
Although our raw transcripts use line breaks to mark every breath, and omit all punctuation except to indicate
linguistic features, the rendition of the interviews here is edited for readability, with some added punctuation,
and fewer line breaks. Ellipses indicate omitted phrases or sections, rather than pauses. Pauses of two seconds
or more are noted as [pause]. Open brackets and equal signs indicate overlapping and latched speech. For non-
indented quotations, if speech overlaps, brackets are used to denote the overlap (for example, an interviewer
saying “Mh-hm” while a participant is speaking).
For typed interviews, minor spelling errors have been corrected. [break] indicates a paragraph break in
the typed instant-message conversation, i.e., when one of the interlocutors hits “return.” In some cases, an
interlocutor hits “return” and then adds something else; in that case, [break] will appear in the middle of their
quote.
14
THE COLLAPSING LECTURE

Aaron Williamson (2010)

Reprinted from G. Butt (2010) (ed.) Performing/Knowing,

Birmingham: ARTicle Press.

It seems to me that the formally delivered academic lecture, dependent upon arguably
precarious conventions (someone reads aloud off a page for no discernible aesthetic
purpose: often the voice is flat, the delivery dull and the language of academic theory
too dense for the hearer to grasp), is by and large predisposed towards collapse. As a deaf
student I sat through much of my education without the provision of a sign interpreter
and to counter boredom I would spend the hours observing peripheral distractions such
as the lecturers’ body language, attitudes and interactions with their lecturing apparatus.
Above all, I watched closely for those moments when the objective of the lecture – to
educate and inform – was disrupted or stymied by intrusions, technical breakdowns, or
simply by a loss of nerve; since, quite often, assertion and bluffing appeared to be required.
My opinion formed that this peculiar expression of cognisant propriety – the lecturers’
performing of ‘knowing’ – was often predicated upon essentially transparent forms and
methods of address that, sooner or later, like any over-inflated edifice, are inclined to fall
apart. It was with some glee then, that over the past year I accepted several invitations to
present a performance whose hidden objective was to reveal the dubious premise and
scaffolding of the formal lecture, to deliberately ‘collapse’ it (Figure 14.1).

Performance theory
My area of expertise as a Lecturer on BA and MA Fine Art courses is in classic performance art
of the 1960s and 70s – perhaps the single most subversive period of art making, constituting
as it did, a concerted radical attack upon any and all artistic securities to that time. Since I
am also an artist in the field of performance, I have always experienced a vague sense of
unease and ambivalence towards the formal teaching of ‘performance theory’ via the lectern.
Occasionally, I face a room of expectant faces and expound about performance presenting
the artist with an ‘expanding frame’ that can stretch out from ‘the work’ to surround all of
the conditions of art making and its presentation; to include or analyse them as part of its
174 Aaron Williamson

FIGURE 14.1 Aaron Williamson (2011) ‘Flannel’ ‘Parlour Principia’ performance evening,
Swedenborg House, London, May 13 (duration 1 hour). By permission of the artist.
The word ‘Flannel’ has two meanings in English. Firstly it is a small cloth used for washing the
hands and face with; but a lesser usage of the word means ‘indirect or evasive talk’. It’s impossible
to estimate the average percentage of lecturing time that is filled with this kind of flannel.

effect. This imaginary, elastic frame, I aver, can be stretched to include – i.e. make apparent –
all the processes of the art’s manufacture, including the performative actions of the artist. In
this specific way, performance is a useful medium through which to contest the transparent
conventions through which most art traditionally comes into existence. I advise students
interested in performance then, to methodically stage ‘an observation of the periphery’ – to
look to the edges of a piece of art to grasp and deploy its wider impact and intent.
Sometimes I will be discussing this conceptual ‘periphery’ and describing examples of
how it might be methodically observed, whilst being only too aware that the lecture itself is
antithetical to this premise. It has struck me at various instances that the performative aspect
of my lecture (which, according to my sweeping assertions, must necessarily circumscribe it)
was entirely ignored since, following the conventions of formal lecturing, there were many
aspects to it which, whilst observable in plain view, were not intended to be significant. As
I negotiated the whiteboard, drawing diagrams and writing phrases, loading up the video
projector, digressing from my notes and so on, I experienced some unease that in fact, the
theory of performance art amounts to an argument precisely against the assumptions and
actions that fortify the conventional lecture through which I was attempting to describe or
The collapsing lecture 175

impart them. I began to wonder what would happen if this ‘fortification’ (which became ever
more perceptible, or less ignorable, as time went on), fell apart, began to collapse?
Quite aside from the larger question of whether performance art is in fact a teachable
subject, this sensation of self-contradiction remained with me as students fell drowsy, fire
drills were observed, late arrivals excused, I forgot my notes, the technician had to be
fetched from afar; or as exciting moments of pedagogic discovery crashed into long periods
of clock-watching. Over the years of teaching ‘performance theory’ this doubt – that I
was presenting a warped inversion of the knowledge area – grew, largely because of the
fact that I was acting from the decidedly non-performative, valorised role of a ‘Lecturer’,
attempting to describe a philosophy that seemed intrinsically antithetical to that position.

‘Collapsing lecture 1’ – Byam Shaw School of Art (9th October 2008)

As a Cocheme Fellow at the Byam Shaw School of art in October 2008 I was invited to give an
inaugural lecture to describe my work and artistic concerns. This was to be only 20 minutes
long but the convenor, Anna Hart, suggested that I approach it as a performance as well as
a lecture – a hybrid presentation. Wondering how that could be done, I was reminded of
two events that seemed relevant: the first was the infamous lecture/poetry recital by Antonin
Artaud at the Vieux-Colombier theatre, Paris in January 1947. Artaud had recently been
released after spending the years of the Second World War in a harrowing mental hospital at
Rodez and his artistic reputation and character had reached legendary status in artistic circles
during his absence. The event was billed – somewhat exploitatively – as ‘The Story of Artaud
the Momo’ [Momo’ is Marseillais pejorative slang that roughly translates as ‘loony’ or ‘idiot’]
and Parisian society was out in force (a capacity audience of 900) to observe the spectacle.
Witness accounts describe Artaud’s initial nervousness as he read stiltedly from his
pages at the lectern for the first hour. Returning to the stage after an interval he started
again but accidentally scattered his large pile of notes all over the stage floor. Rather than
collect them up, Artaud simply began screaming and tearing at his face and hair – he spent
the next hour improvising a wild performance of exclamations, chanting, vocal eruptions,
crude gestures and curses that appalled the astonished audience (Barber 2003 136–138).
The second example that I’d recalled – of a lecture that surpassed or deliberately sabotaged
its formal premise – was by William Pope.L which I’d attended at the Tate Modern as part
of the Live Culture event in 2003. As Pope.L leant on the plinth, peering over his spectacles
in time-honoured professorial manner, he spouted a stream of gibberish for 30 minutes to a
baffled audience. An American artist who subverts white/racist perceptions of black people,
Pope.L, it later transpired, had been speaking in a bastardised version of ‘Klingon’ – a dialect
borrowed from Star Trek movies. Most of the audience (along with the sign interpreters)
appeared to believe that he was an artist of obscure nationality, who unfortunately had not
warned the curators that he would be speaking in his ‘native’ language.
So, for my ‘inaugural lecture’ at Byam Shaw, inspired by Artaud and Pope.L, I devised a
short repertoire of setbacks or ‘collapses’. These included the inevitable crashing computer
and malfunctioning projector; dramatising being unable to find my reading glasses;
dropping my notes à la Artaud; suffering from a pronounced coughing fit; stammering
through a sentence and repeating it ponderously for a minute or more; drinking copious
176 Aaron Williamson

amounts of water. . . each time approaching the lectern again as if now, having finally
surmounted these insufferable setbacks, the lecture could begin. Until, finally, after 15
minutes, it was announced by the Convenor that the lecture was in fact over.

‘Collapsing lecture 2’ – Goldsmiths College (4th December 2008)

Invited by Jenny Doussan and Gavin Butt to present a formal lecture to Goldsmiths
College’s MA Visual Cultures Department, I decided that I wanted to continue developing
‘The Collapsing Lecture’ and expand it to a full-length, 1 hour-long performance. I could
see how this might in fact serve to illustrate my concerns with performance art much more
effectively than a conventional, illustrated lecture ever could.
By now, I had become methodical in gathering material. I canvassed friends who
lecture in Universities and on the conference circuit for anecdotal accounts of mishaps
and misfortunes at the lectern and thus amassed a stockpile of wryly amusing tales. By
far the commonest were those involving computer incompatibilities and the ever-elusive
link to the digital projector. But also, there were tales such as the one about the cocky Don
who had slapped his disc on the desk of the school secretary instructing her to print his
conference paper in time for its delivery an hour hence. At the lectern, in front of a packed
audience, he opened the envelope containing his paper and was mortified to discover that
it had been printed at 8 point-type which he was unable to read.
Another story had a Conference Lecturer taking the lectern almost immediately upon
arrival from the airport – so acutely jetlagged, he literally fell asleep on his feet midway
through and had to be startled awake. Many accounts made it sound as if the material
world had reared up and refused to submit to the speaker’s will: whiteboard pens ran out
of ink, lights dimmed down and flickered on, microphones squealed and chairs collapsed.
Several of those I spoke to mentioned the curious button on the remote controls of digital
projectors which, when pressed, rather than firing up the light, closes the machine down
after which it then takes an excruciating 10 minutes wait to come back on (or to ‘warm
up’) again. Many of my lecturing friends told of reading their pages out of sequence,
having forgotten to insert page numbers, and one recounted how he had misplaced the
crucial page that spelt out the central formula in his thesis after he had spent half an hour
building the audience’s expectation towards it. Perhaps the most bizarre example of all
though, was the ballistics expert in Orlando, USA who, during a lecture on ‘Methods of
Gun Safety’, accidentally managed to shoot himself in the thigh.
By now then, I was armed with a collection of mishaps that I intended to string together
in order to form an hour’s ‘Lecture’. It was agreed with Gavin and Jenny that I would arrive
15 minutes late: a novelty in these days of University lecturers’ ‘customer accountability’ to
students. Gavin gamely took on the task of filling the 15 minutes waiting for my entrance
by laboriously itemising my biography and CV to the students, all the while nervously
checking his watch and mobile phone.
Dragging a huge suitcase and with a copy of ‘The Racing Times’ poking rakishly from
my tweed jacket (with elbow patches), I finally made an entrance by nervously poking my
head around the door to the packed Theatre, querying in a mumble whether anyone was
expecting a ‘Dr. Williamson’? My regular sign interpreter, Chloe Edwards was present and
The collapsing lecture 177

– in on the ruse – spent the first few minutes laboriously and repetitively introducing me
via finger-spelling, after which I proceeded to work through the following ‘script’:

Collapsing lecture Goldsmiths College, 4th December 2008

Turning up at the lecture theatre in a fluster, fifteen minutes late, rolled-up ‘Racing
Post’ in pocket.
The laptop slowly starts up before crashing, (pull plug lead).
The projector won’t respond to the handset, request replacement batteries (Jenny).
The replacement batteries don›t fit.
The dry marker is out of ink, (tape secretly covers the nib).
Cause alarm by attempting to marker pen the expensive-looking projection screen.
Remain oblivious to mobile phone ringing in my pocket (I’d arranged with a friend
for him to call me at some point during the performance).
Request a jug of water – the plastic cup springs a leak.
Request that floor is mopped.
I can’t find my spectacles, unable to read.
I drop the thick pile of notes.
Find glasses but drop and tread on specs.
An extended, violent coughing fit, much chest beating etc.
The technician finally arrives to help.
Gets the projector working.
But my desk top files will not open – ‘corrupted’ notice.
Try to recall password, audibly mouth A-N-A-R-C-H-Y-I-N-T-H-E-U-K.
Nervously remove jacket and jumper, before replacing them again.
Discourse obscurely on the pink forms that I was told everyone was supposed to
collect from the Dean’s office – does anyone know about this?
Further improvised slapstick business with interchangeable use of water, newspaper,
the pile of notes, batteries, handset, crashing computer, broken specs, ink-less pen
and so on.
Threaten formal complaint to college about the parlous state of their technical
services.
Become irate.
Conduct conversation with Chloe in sign language about last night’s television.
(Unless there are other deafies present!)
Become very sad, withdrawn/defeated.
Start laughing/giggling/crying.
Draw meaningless diagrams on whiteboard: ‘vernacular vs perfunctory modes of
action’.
After 45 minutes: Any questions?

When I reached the request for ‘any questions’ after an excruciating, seemingly endless
45 minutes I asked the students whether they knew what I’d been doing? They had been
remarkably patient throughout, chatting while something was supposedly being fixed but
178 Aaron Williamson

focusing back on me immediately when requested. After the 30 minutes mark I noticed
some students were becoming amused and were trying to stifle giggles, but the majority
seemed to take the ‘lecture’s’ sequence of collapses at face value.
Most of the students seemed unsure as to the implication of my question but someone
eventually asked tentatively whether it had in fact been (gulp) a performance? So at that
point I switched to ‘normal’ mode and a discussion ensued about the essential performative
aspect to even the most familiar, habitual activities. It was agreed that a conscious
acknowledgement of the performed dimension of any given situation was a condition of
performance art per se and that attempting to lecture on the subject without deploying this
consciousness was intrinsically a contradiction.
The subject was also raised about the inert objects/paraphernalia of the lecturing trade
and that they seemed to take on a ‘life’ of their own during the performance-lecture.
Someone pointed out this was reminiscent of silent cinema comedy and indeed, preparing
the ‘Collapsing Lecture’, I was influenced by an article titled ‘Slapstick Theory’ (2007; 19),
by Brian Dillon in which he proposed: ‘just as humans are rendered thing-like, so by the
logic of slapstick things themselves start to rebel, to take on a life of their own’.
While we were discussing these and other ideas in the ‘question and answer’ session I
experienced the very curious sensation of being unable to return to the ‘normal’ discursive
mode upon which lecturing is premised and I kept lapsing back – compulsively – into the
‘collapsing’ state. Brian Dillon, in the same essay cited above, mentions the slapstician’s
‘tragic impossibility of escaping oneself ’, describing how the subject of the pratfall or
collapse experiences a curious split (which I had throughout the ‘Collapsing Lecture’)
into ‘the falling self and the observing self ’. This split is at the core of performance art
generally, and so it was with some vindication, (I was alert to the ‘career suicide’ element
to the ‘Collapsing Lecture’) that I felt sure I had hit the mark precisely midway between
performance and lecturing in a visceral as well as theoretical way.

‘Collapsing lecture 3’ – The Whitechapel Gallery (19th June 2009)

Gavin Butt was to curate a conference day titled ‘Performing Knowing’ at the Whitechapel
Gallery and invited me to continue developing the ‘Collapsing Lecture’ as part of it. I felt
it was worth taking the piece further since I’d been rumbled by a significant section of the
student audience at Goldsmiths, and thought that it could be done more schematically and
with greater subtlety. Gavin’s précis seemed appropriate:

‘It (ie: the day) raises issues about the efficacy of performance as ‘convincing’
scholarly argument; about the ethics and politics of performance presentation’.

By agreement again the audience would not be forewarned of my ‘real’ intention and
I decided to explore this version of the performance more as an extended put-on than as
a sequence of slapstick actions as in the Goldsmiths version. I also wanted to work closely
with the technical staff at the Whitechapel’s lecture theatre and so I arranged to visit Richard
Johnson and Nicola Sim the week before. They were enthusiastic about the concept of the
‘Collapsing Lecture’, and had their own horror-stories of technical mishaps to share.
The collapsing lecture 179

Admirably, they were undaunted by whether the piece might cast aspersion upon their
professional efficiency and so we spent an hour together exploring the Theatre’s technical
facilities to devise a repertoire of collapses and mishaps.
Additionally, to heighten the Collapsing Lecture’s veracity to that of a conventional one, I
provided Gavin [Butt] with an ‘abstract’ for him to circulate in advance [he has characterized
this mannered style of academic writing as ‘sclerotic theory’ (2005)]. This ‘abstract’ was
stylistically similar to the type of thing I wrote whilst developing and presenting parts of my
Doctoral thesis at conferences in the mid-1990s. It is worth reproducing here since in fact it
is a disguised description of my lecture’s actual concerns, but expressed in a wildly abstruse,
‘academic’ prose (5) that was an equivalent ‘put-on’ to the eventual performance-lecture itself:

‘Performance: The Unwalled Laboratory’, or: ‘A Language in Search of its

Metalanguage’
ABSTRACT:
For the artist, performance provides a medium to make statements about the
physical language of everyday living; through which, that is, to experiment and
then formally present a metalanguage of gestures, interaction, object-deployment,
utterances and so on.
But performance also occurs apart from this ‘laboratory’ of controlled experiment
that proposedly produces a designed impartation of meaning and its reception.
Beyond the ‘walls’ of this lab, at the intangible periphery of a staged event, there
will always exist supposedly surplus occurrences that in themselves invite interest
and observation. Here, unaccountable, (yet equally valid), autonomous accidents,
disruptions or alimentary spasms of intent arise to defer the willed direction of
meaning (ie: on the part of both the artist and the audience).
My question is: how can this phenomenon be represented? Can there be a
language that does not have a metalanguage? In this presentation I will explore
how perfunctory, habitual acts – subjected to the laboratory of performance – can
unexpectedly, perhaps unwelcomely, become alien, confusing or awkward. I will
attempt to demonstrate how an unanticipated ‘turn of events’ can rear up, intractable
to will, to ultimately surpass intent.
This excess (to requirement), I will argue, is in fact an ungovernable vernacular
issuing from the metalanguage circulating around any given performance. Thus, in a
schematic, perhaps fanciful model, performance is an ‘unwalled laboratory’ that can
always reward observation beyond its proposed frame.

This time, at the Whitechapel, I delivered the performance in a more deadpan way but
with the added, helpful factor that the theatre technicians, Richard and Nicola, distracted
much of the attention as they fussed about, seemingly in the throes of a nightmare technical
meltdown. This diversion allowed me to explore another aspect of formal lecturing that is
incompatible with performance art: its dependence on the lecturer’s air of authority and
control over the situation. Often, performance requires the artist to relinquish precisely
these aspects in order to open the work out to unpredictable responses and occurrences
(such as unexpected malfunction or collapse).
180 Aaron Williamson

And so, I performed more ‘realistically’ as a haughty, authoritative figure constantly

undermined by the repeated flickering on and off of the auditorium lights, extreme
microphone feedback and a shivering light projection. Having unpadded the doors just
outside the theatre, they would bang loudly when people passed through, whilst Nicola and
Richard climbed onto the stage pretending to assist me for lengthy periods, thereby adding
further plausibility to the ruse. Chloe Edwards was again present as my interpreter and
during the lengthy periods of repairing the fake technical breakdowns we conducted banal
conversations in sign language once again. Part of Chloe’s ‘character’ was to play a truculent,
unhelpful jobsworth and so, when asking her verbally for even minor assistance on stage
she would chastise me with a response to the effect that she was there only to sign-interpret.
I had made two video works which I introduced at length titled ‘Stick 1’ and ‘Stick 2’.
These were made to be stylistically reminiscent of video art identified with ‘structuralist’
minimalism of the 1970s: in the first a handheld stick cautiously enters the frame but as
it reaches the front of the camera, the video is edited to ‘stick’ in a visually equivalent way
to a vinyl record. Maintaining that this ‘sticking’ was down to malfunctioning equipment,
another bout of wiring and knob-twiddling ensued in the control booth (visible through
a window onto the theatre). Abandoning ‘Stick 1’, I requested we play ‘Stick 2’: another
banal piece in which a hand in close-up attempts to open a pot of glue until, once again,
the DVD disc apparently becomes stuck.
And so it went on, the audience becoming fidgety during the excruciatingly dull and
stuttering ‘Lecture’, which, while being painful to watch, somehow managed to kill
45 minutes. Resolving to end this ‘Collapsing Lecture’ in a different way to the one at
Goldsmiths, I wanted to avoid the gradual slide back into the ‘normality’ of the ‘question
and answer’ session. However, I did want the audience to realise that the whole ‘lecture-
performance’ had been a put-on. The solution was satisfyingly simple: having achieved
the 45 minutes, I collected my notes and stood dramatically poised as if about to attempt
another restart, but instead froze in place, holding the pose for 5 very long minutes. This
‘freeze’ effectively served notice to the audience that all had not been what it seemed and,
as I looked out at them, I could see the audience’s dawn of realisation as they started to
laugh and debate what on earth had just happened.

Postscript
Not long after the Collapsing Lecture at the Whitechapel Gallery, I was brushing up on my
knowledge of mid-20th century existentialism and came across the following text in one of
those philosophy ‘Introduction’ books rendered through cartoons:
‘In Kean (1953), Sartre comes close to saying that since we have no choice but to play a role,
we should do so with a conscious enthusiasm that may even give us a degree of authenticity’
(Thody and Read 1998:107). For the introduction to my book in 2008, Performance / Video
/ Collaboration’ (p15) I had been interviewed by Marquard Smith to whom I described my
performance works as a series of ‘mock-authentic’ portrayals of ‘ sham-shamans, cod-feral
children, charlatan Saints, bogus hermits and dubious monsters. . .’ To this list could now be
added ‘the Collapsing Lecturer’ who (following Sartre) whilst being a ‘played role’, had also
managed to give audiences interested in performance art ‘a degree of authenticity’.
The collapsing lecture 181

FIGURE 14.2 Aaron Williamson (2015) Demonstrating the World. Performances at Rainham
Sheds and Experimentica Festival, Chapter, Cardiff
Williamson enacts everyday tasks such as opening a cupboard, removing a jacket, or sitting on a chair,
with detailed step-by-step instructions – both reinforcing and destabilising their apparent familiarity.
‘Demonstrating the World’ is presented on a purpose-built mobile performance platform that houses a
radically displaced domestic interior. Designed in collaboration with architect Ida Martin and built by Studio
LW, this unique series of household objects provides an opportunity to demonstrate the sculptural qualities
of ergonomic design. For more about this on-going project go to: http://demonstratingtheworld.tumblr.com/
Reprinted by permission of Aaron Williamson. Performance at Rainham Sheds: Photo by Manuel
Vanson. Performance at Experimentica Festival, Chapter, Cardiff: Photo by Warren Orchard.
Supported by Unlimited; celebrating the work of disabled artists, using public funding by the National Lottery
through Arts Council England, Arts Council of Wales, Creative Scotland and Spirit of 2012.
PART IV

Technologies/materialities
Over 20 years ago, Lennard Davis looked at contemporary cultural theory, with its new
interests in embodiment, otherness, transgression and hybridity, and had this to say:

The disabled body is a nightmare for the fashionable discourse of theory, because
that discourse has been limited by the very predilection of the dominant, ableist
culture. The body is seen as a site of jouissance, a native ground of pleasure, the scene
of an excess that defies reason, that takes dominant culture and its rigid power-
laden version of the body to task. The body of the left is an unruly body; a bad
child thumbing its nose at the parent’s bourgeois decorum; a rebellious daughter
transgressing against the phallocentric patriarch. The nightmare of that body is one
that is deformed, maimed mutilated, broken, diseased. … Rather than face this
ragged image, the critic turns to the fluids of sexuality, the gloss of lubrication, the
glossary of the body as text, the heteroglossia of the intertext, the glossolalia of the
schizophrenic. But almost never to the body of the differently abled.
(1995: 5 italics in original)

Cyborgs, robotics, bodily augmentation, technological innovations in prosthetics,

digital technologies and responsive materials can all suggest seductive, gorgeous and
unexpectedly novel forms of engagement with corporeality. But scholars writing from the
standpoint of disability persistently ask – what kinds of bodies are assumed here, and which
technologies are noticed, which ignored? Vivien Sobchack, for example, in her seminal
writing on prosthetics (2006), unpicks the problematic romanticisation of disability-as-
metaphor that is predominantly concerned with rethinking normal bodies, not with better
understanding the complex intersections of ability and disability. She contrasts this to her
own experiences of living with an artificial limb. Whilst prosthetics and other forms of
bodily augmentation are often written about as excitingly disruptive, this is only because
they disrupt the abled body. This is not reflected in the experience of disabled people, where
technologies play different and various roles – both practically useful and complicatedly
reinforcing a ‘publically perceived normalcy’ (2006: 23).
Technologies, then, (both old and new) cannot be separated out from their embodied
use in particular situations – both materially in everyday life and conceptually in theory
and critique. In ‘Where does the person end and the technology begin?’ Peter Anderberg
illustrates this very directly. He describes how his wheelchair naturally augments his own
body, and then considers why technologies that support disabled people are named and
imagined differently to those used that support ‘normal’ bodies, as well as the anxieties and
discomfort such ‘assistive devices’ produce in non-disabled people.
In ‘The prosthetic imagination: enabling and disabling the prosthesis trope’ S. Lochlann
Jain also explores the tendency to mythologise prostheses, and the contradictions between
an imagery of ‘superhumanity’ and the actualities of technologies that both enable and
disable, dependent on the social, spatial and material practices through which they are
enacted. By considering the writing of Mark Wigley on prosthetics and architecture (1991)
as an example, she shows how actual bodies come to disappear in conceptual framings of
body–technology interactions; and how technologies become generalised, naturalised and
de-politicised as ‘obviously’ enabling and improving.
186 Technologies/materialities

This leads Jain to ask the question ‘how do body-prosthesis relays transform individual
bodies as well as entire social notions about what a properly “functioning” physical body
might be?’ The next two contributors to this section investigate this in relation to the often
ignored and more mundane technologies of everyday life – disability aids and public toilets.
Bess Williamson in her article ‘Electric moms and quad drivers: People with disabilities
buying, making, and using technology in postwar America’ explores the aftermath of the
US polio epidemic from the 1930s to the 1950s, and how it generated a ‘tinkering’ culture
and network amongst survivors and their families and friends. She explores the sharing of
inventive homemade devices for making everyday life easier for disabled people, but also
how these operated as strategies for negotiating ‘ being disabled’ in and against the medical
and social practices of the period. Here, then, the adaptation of existing technologies is
revealed as one of the means through which disadvantaged groups attempt to make sense
of, and survive, in the world. Williamson argues that in this case survivors groups focused
on becoming more integrated and normalised as a ‘form of self-preservation in a society
that presented few options for people with disabilities to live independently’.
In ‘Pissing without pity: Disability, gender, and the public toilet’ David Serlin shows
how – ten or so years later – disability rights activism in the US was increasingly refusing
such a model, instead challenging discriminatory social notions of disability, particularly
around access to public spaces and buildings. As he writes:

for many disability rights activists in the 1960s and 1970s, the built environment
served as an immediate conduit to social tolerance and inclusive citizenship.
Accommodations – physical and social, symbolic and material – such as curb cuts,
wheelchair ramps, and teletypewriter devices, and transportation options such as
kneeling buses were envisioned as technologies of empowerment that would inspire
a more fully democratic society.

Here, demands for accessible public toilets were not just about functional provision, but
also concerned more complex, often competing claims for dignity and equity.
By tracing the history of the disabled toilet as ‘a technology that ostensibly neutralizes
social difference’, Serlin is able to unravel some of these problematic relationships
across disability, gender and sexuality. He explores the effects on toilet design and usage
of an assumption of individuality and independence, rather than of collective care and
interdependencies; and of the erasure of gender and sexuality in provision for disabled
people. He argues that we need to recognise the extent to which the categorisation and
design of public toilets continue to be delimited by the framings of heterosexual male
privilege, whilst at the same time ‘harnessing the power of gender non-normative critiques
of the public toilet’ to explore alternatives.
Finally in this section, Ingunn Moser examines the interrelationships between disability
and contemporary technologies, particularly environmental control systems. ‘Disability
and the promises of technology: Technology, subjectivity and embodiment within an
order of the normal’ explores in detail how one severely physically disabled man (who she
calls Jarle) engages both practically and subjectively with the technologies that give him
some control over his living situation. For Moser, Jarle both subscribes to, and enacts, a
Technologies/materialities 187

particular mode of masculinity as independent, controlling and fully competent, enabled

through a complex array of supporting equipment. This is underpinned, in turn, by
the privilege of individual wealth that (usually) obscures how close he is to potentially
‘returning’ to dependency on others and on wider social policies and services.
Moser takes this as an example of how individual agency is assumed to be located in
normal bodies, and can thus be adapted to disabled bodies through the merely functional
process of ‘making normal’ such bodies via technologies. Yet, what being disabled reveals
is that agency is not located in bodies but mediated between them, and between bodies,
artefacts, spaces and social structures. With abled bodies, the distributed and differential
nature of agency tends to fade into the background and not be noticed. With disabled
bodies, though, such assumptions of individual embodied agency become visible
and immediate, thus present as problematic, because disability ‘does not fit with the
standardized environments that allow agency to flow without constant interruption’.
The process of using technologies as ‘compensation’ for having a disability thus exposes
the underlying inadequacy of assumptions about independent subject-centred agency.
Whilst new technologies are important in enabling disabled people to be ‘competent
normal subjects’, this is gained at the expense of critically challenging individualist,
masculinist and privileged definitions of what constitutes ability. And it perpetuates the
simplistic division between ability and disability, normal and deviant, which constitute
some people as disabled in the first place.
How then can we get beyond the two tendencies critiqued in a variety of ways by the
contributors in this section: either treating particular bodily enhancements as abstracted,
mythologized and weighted with a figurative potential disassociated from real bodies, or
seeing technologies as neutral, unproblematic and practical improvements that can help
to ‘normalise’ disabled people? After all, both of these tendencies have resonances within
architectural theories and practices. To return to Sobchack: this is about how to integrate
conceptual and discursive engagements with everyday, and material practices, rather
than to keep them apart (or even oppositional). Theoretical frameworks are not separate
from, but completely entangled with, practicalities. Ideas about technologies – and the
enactments through which these are constituted – are in fact simultaneously ‘in and out of
focus’ dependent on the specific, embodied context:

…in most situations, the prosthetic as lived in use is usually transparent; that is, it
is ‘absent’ as in the rest of our body when we’re focused outward to the world and
successfully engaged in the various projects of our daily life. Ideally incorporated
not ‘into’ or ‘on’ but ‘as’ the subject, the prosthetic becomes an object only when a
mechanical or social problem pushes it obtrusively into the foreground of the user’s
consciousness – much in the manner in which a blister on the heel takes on an
objective presence that is something other even though the body’s own bodily fluid
and stretched skin constitute it.
(Sobchack 2006: 22–23, italics in original)

In this understanding, technologies do not take on a life of their own. Prosthetic and
other technological devices – including those that take their shape through buildings and
188 Technologies/materialities

spaces – are an integral part of our more general lived perceptions and experiences, and
thus of our assumptions about what is normal and what not. It is therefore important
to critically engage with how different technologies come to be imagined, articulated,
implemented, enacted, adapted and contested; how they can act to enable rather than
disable in different contexts; and how they can be used to reinforce and perpetuate, or
challenge and transform, existing inequalities in everyday social, spatial and material
practices. As all the writers here acknowledge, analysing and then intervening in this
sphere is not an easy or straightforward task. It is fraught with complexities and tensions.
But that is not a reason not to try.

Peter Anderberg (2006)

Excerpt from doctoral thesis, ‘FACE: Disabled People, Technology

and the Internet’ (2006) CERTEC, Division of Rehabilitation
Engineering Research, Department of Design Services, Lund
University Sweden pp 40–47, http://www.arkiv.certec.lth.se/
doc/face/Anderberg_Peter_FACE-doctoral_thesis.pdf.

It is difficult, often meaningless to try to figure out where the person ends and the
technology starts. You touch the ground and feel the pavement with your wheelchair and
when you turn around, your wheelchair turns with you. You are part of a functional system
consisting of your body, your wheelchair and the ground beneath you. The boundaries
you have for experiencing the world go beyond the physical limitations of your skin and
are determined by the system for experiencing the world in which you exist.
In his book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), the cybernetics pioneer Gregory Bateson
illustrates this point with the example of a blind man with a walking stick.

Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the handle of the stick? Is it

bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the stick? Does it start at the tip of
the stick? But these are nonsense questions. The stick is a pathway along which
transforms of difference are being transmitted. The way to delineate the system is
to draw the limiting line in such a way that you do not cut any of these pathways in
ways which leave things inexplicable.
(Bateson., p. 459)

Bateson’s view is that the information received through the cane is directly relayed to
the person’s mental system and processed as any other information received, for example,
by the eye or the finger: “There are lots of message pathways outside the skin, and these and
the messages which they carry must be included as a part of the mental system whenever
they are relevant” (ibid., p. 458).
190 Peter Anderberg

The image of the prosthesis as an extension of the body, and an enhancement of the
bodily functions evokes many connotations and thoughts. In her book, The War of Desire
and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, Allucquere Roseanne Stone (1995) describes
her feelings after attending a lecture given by the physicist, Stephen Hawking. Stone starts
off listening to Hawking outside the overcrowded auditorium through the Public Audio
system (PA), but decides she wants to go in and see and listen to him in person.

Sitting, as he always does, in his wheelchair, utterly motionless, except for his fingers
on the joystick of the laptop; and on the floor to one side of him is the PA system
microphone, nuzzling into the Votrax’s tiny loudspeaker...Exactly where, I say to
myself, is Hawking?...In an important sense, Hawking doesn’t stop being Hawking
at the edge of his visible body. There is the obvious physical Hawking, vividly
outlined by the way our social conditioning teaches us to see a person as a person.
But a serious part of Hawking extends into the box in his lap. In mirror image, a
serious part of that silicon and plastic assemblage in his lap extends into him as well...
No box, no discourse...On the other hand, with the box his voice is auditory and
simultaneously electric, in a radically different way from that of a person speaking
into a microphone. Where does he stop? Where are his edges?
(ibid., p. 4–5)

Stone sees the prosthesis in the shape of a speech synthesizer. Her fascination with
how Hawking “extends” into a piece of technology and her thoughts on his vocal presence
and displacement in time and space, could in one way be seen as typical for the time, at
the beginning of the era of information technology. This “extension” of Hawking into
the speech synthesizer is not fundamentally different from how people can be seen as
extending into a computer or an email or a chat room, when using that kind of text-based
conversation. The limitations of the prosthesis of written communication, as well as the
habit of answering email without too much time for reflection, are limiting factors that
are taken for granted today. One could easily argue that it is the format of an IRL (In
Real Life) lecture that creates a discrepancy between how the prosthesis in the form of
an external speech synthesizer is experienced, relative to using the voice from one’s vocal
cords (internal speech synthesizer). Sarah S. Jain puts it as follows:

Questions of human-prosthesis or human-machine interfaces are central to one’s

active agency in a community embedded in prefigured modes of technological praxis
that always already privilege certain body configurations.
(Jain, 1999: 41)

It is easier for the person using the prosthesis. It is first and foremost about function,
and the desire to perform and control this function. But secondly, the function is inscribed
in a system of internal and external perceptions of this technology, and the integration of
technology into the self is not unproblematic (Sobchack, 1995).
Hernwall uses the concept “cyborg” when considering a human being with his or her
technology as a functional unit. He sees the cyborg as a “human who incorporates technology
Where does the person end and the technology begin? 191

and its affordances into her own essence to the extent that the technology becomes a self-
evident prosthesis” (Hernwall, 2001; translated from Swedish by the author). Hernwall
views the cyborg concept as a chance to move beyond technology’s limitations and focus
on the individual’s opportunities and terms in the utilization of technology. He argues,
with support of Haraway (1991) and Landow (1992), not to separate the human from
her technology and not to evaluate the individual based on norms of technology and its
limitations, but to focus on the potential gain for the individual.
The concepts of cyborg and prosthesis as metaphors with unnecessary or undesirable
connotations are not unproblematic when used to describe a person’s usage of technology.
For the modern person, different products and artefacts as functional aids have become so
natural that they already represent an extension of the human. For disabled people where
technology is often necessary to perform a function, it should also be seen as a natural element.
Technology can be individual and accompany the person, such as a wheelchair, hearing aid or
glasses. Or it can be built into the surroundings such as ramps, door openers, hearing loops,
contrastive signage, etc. This does not make the question of where the borders between man
and technology are drawn uninteresting. But based on the expanded technological perspective
applied in this thesis, the focus on the desired function means the person is central and that
the technology used is problematized from the individual’s wishes concerning the function.

The inﬂuence of artefacts and technology on disabled people

In 1985, you could receive a mobile telephone as a disability aid in Sweden, but today
it is an obvious functional aid for almost all people. What is considered to be assistive
technology versus standard technology is determined by the culture, location and point
in time. Progress often lags behind. In an interview for Time Magazine, the Independent
Living Institute Director, Adolf Ratzka, posed the rhetorical question about the situation
in Stockholm: “I cannot go by ordinary bus,” he says. “Is that because I had polio 37 years
ago, or because the transport authority doesn’t buy buses that will work for everybody?”
(Time Magazine, 1998–1999). Technology for adapting buses has existed for quite a while,
and the only reason why so few buses are adapted are political and financial.
Science and technology studies examine how commercial, political, cultural and social
values and interests steer scientific and technological developments and vice versa. One subject
in the field is Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (Akrich & Latour, 1992; Callon, 1986; Law,
1987). In ANT all actors, human or non-human, are considered equally important for the
analysis and are referred to in the same vocabulary. An example: The mobility of a wheelchair-
user is dependent on a large number of factors, among them, the design of the wheelchair, the
funding to buy a suitable wheelchair, the user’s ability to manage and control the wheelchair,
the organization and accessibility of the environment in which the wheelchair is used, etc. It
is up to the person doing the analysis to find the relevant factors for the action under analysis.
It may seem radical and somewhat ethically shaky to grant objects and artefacts the
same explanatory status as human beings in an actor network. But for the ANT analysis,
the border between humans and machines is not the issue, and their equity in the analysis
“does not mean that we have to treat the people in our lives as machines. We don’t have to
deny them the rights, duties, or responsibilities that we usually accord to people. Indeed,
192 Peter Anderberg

we might use it to sharpen ethical questions about the special character of the human effect
– as, for instance, in difficult cases such as life maintained by virtue of the technologies
of intensive care” (Law, 1992). Ingunn Moser and John Law (1999) have used ANT to
elaborate on disability and ability in a series of stories about Liv, a wheelchair and personal
assistance user. They find that the “links between dis/ability and subjectivity are close –
which means that any study of the materialities of dis/ability is incomplete unless it also
attends to the continuities and discontinuities of subjectivity” (ibid.). Liv is inscribed in an
enabling network, with technological aids and personal assistants, giving her a considerable
amount of agency in some of the environment she exists in, less in others.
Moser and Law see Liv as a cyborg, “in the sense, that she is irreducible to a unity,
even though ‘she’ is also a unity” (ibid.). They make a convincing argument in showing
how dis/abilities are created in networks made up of heterogeneous, material, and specific
entities as described from this particular ANT perspective.
Myriam Winance (2006) has studied how persons with neuromuscular problems test
their wheelchairs. With Actor-Network Theory as a starting point, and also leaning towards
phenomenology, she analyses the network made up of the wheelchair user, wheelchair,
technical personnel, etc. The negotiation of various compromises and improvements
during the trial period gradually transforms the entities involved, including the person’s
identity, and the relations between them. […]

About the need to deﬁne assistive technology

The US National Council on Disability has summarized the focus on the qualitative
and quantitative difference in the use of technology as follows: “For Americans without
disabilities, technology makes things easier. For Americans with disabilities, technology
makes things possible” (Radabaugh, 1988). Among all the definitions of assistive technology,
I want to cite two. First, the US law text:

Any item, piece of equipment, or product system, whether acquired commercially

off the shelf, modified, or customized, that is used to increase, maintain, or improve
functional capabilities of individuals with disabilities.
(The US technology-related Assistance for Individuals with Disabilities Act of
1988, Section 3.1. Public Law 100–407, August 9, 1988)

Second, the international standard, ISO 9999, which defines a technical aid for disabled
persons as:

Any product, instrument, equipment or technical system used by a disabled person,

especially produced or generally available, preventing, compensating, monitoring,
relieving or neutralizing the impairment, disability or handicap.
(International Standardization Organization, 2002)

The only absolute reason to define assistive technology is the funding people with
disability can receive to obtain assistive devices. If I drive my three-wheeled powered
Where does the person end and the technology begin? 193

wheelchair scooter to work, is it an assistive technology device or is it a vehicle with which

I go to work? When my personal assistant drives it home, because I have to go somewhere
else with a car, is it still an assistive technology device? When my sons borrow the scooter
to drive around the park outside the house because it is fun, does it cease to be an assistive
device and become a toy?
I cannot get off it and walk if I wanted to, but my personal assistants and my sons can. I,
my scooter and the surrounding environment make up a functional system that is necessary
for me to get to work. That is what makes it an assistive technology device for me. But if I
try to go down to the beach, in the fine-grained sand, or go up two stairs, it ceases to assist
me and to be assistive technology, because it does not provide any function in those settings.
But does the actual wheelchair cease to be an assistive device at that moment?
Some of my assistants refuse to sit on my powered scooter when they need to take it
home or anywhere else. Sitting in a wheelchair makes them feel uncomfortable, although
not in a physical sense. Some of them would rather take on the complicated and risky task
of walking next to it, trying to manoeuvre it from the side. One assistant who was driving
it home said that he felt that everyone was staring at him, and he felt so uncomfortable
that he had to stop and get off the scooter and walk around for a while so that everyone
would see that he did not have an impairment. He felt that people’s attitudes towards
him changed considerably when he was driving the scooter. The actual device signals the
disability. That is not inherent in the technology per se, however, but an aspect of the
attitudes towards disabled people is transferred to the technology associated with them.
16
THE PROSTHETIC IMAGINATION

Enabling and disabling the prosthesis trope

S. Lochlann Jain (1999)

Excerpt reprinted from Science, Technology and Human

Values (1999) Winter, 24: 1, 31–33, 38–40.

Freud ([1930] 1962) echoed a common teleological fantasy of the promises of prostheses
by pronouncing:

With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is
removing the limits to their functioning. ... Man has, as it were, become a prosthetic
god. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent: but those
organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.
(p. 42)

Freud’s hesitant caveat surely referred to his own prosthesis, a palate replacing an original
that was removed as a result of throat cancer in 1923. His prosthesis, without which he
could neither speak nor eat, caused him immense pain. Yet, if he went without it for
more than two hours, the tissue circumscribing the chasm between the mouth and nasal
cavity would shrink – necessitating yet another agonizing fitting session and prosthesis
(Wills 1995). Freud’s speculations on godlike magnificence stem, perhaps, from his own
all too mortal experience with a technology that simultaneously enabled and wounded
him. Freud’s simultaneous embodiment of faulty technology and extreme optimism about
technology’s promise illustrates the contradiction that I explore in this article.
First introduced into English in 1553 as a term of rhetoric meaning “attached to” or
“setting forth” or, literally, “adding a syllable to the beginning of a word,” prosthesis did
not come to bear the medical sense of the “replacement of a missing part of the body with
an artificial one” until 1704 (Wills 1995, 215). As a trope that has flourished in a recent and
varied literature concerned with interrogating human-technology interfaces, “technology
as prosthesis” attempts to describe the joining of materials, naturalizations, excorporations,
The prosthetic imagination 195

and semiotic transfer that also go far beyond the medical definition of “replacement of a
missing part” (Bateson 1971; Brahm and Driscoll 1995; Gray 1995; Grosz 1994; Scarry
1994; Seltzer 1992; Sobchack 1995; Stone 1995; Wiener 1985; Wigley 1991; Virilio 1995).
There can be no question that one is constituted by interaction with one’s physical
surroundings. Hegel argued that the object takes the person from abstract to actual, and
Marx claimed that one’s humanity is contingent on working with the world. As a number
of recent theorists point out, the use of tools and artifacts requires a degree of incorporation
into the body; Elaine Scarry (1994, 97) calls this process the “labor of animation.” Yet,
surprisingly little work has been done on the everyday social, economic, and semiotic
mediations that occur between persons and objects in the technologically infused spaces
of life in the United States. Perhaps this is the fascination held out by “prosthesis” as a
potential theoretical tool with which to account for the ways in which technologies are
always and never constituent of the body. On the other hand, the proliferation of its use
has overburdened it; theories themselves can be, after all, both enabling and wounding.
My stakes in the trope of the prosthesis are twofold. First, I believe that the ways in
which human bodies are marked, maimed, constituted, conjured, extended, and wounded
by both the physical and the auratic properties of commodities is an imperative concern
that arises in areas as diverse as tort law, product design, health insurance, and marketing.
My second concern is how a promising trope that might in some measure account for the
technological extension of bodies can also take into account the variety of bodies and the
social construction of abilities. Certain bodies – raced, aged, gendered, classed – are often
already dubbed as not fully whole. This article, then, cavorts along three overlapping,
richly intertwined (and ultimately inseparable) axes of identity: social (race, gender),
physical ability and disability, and another category that considers identity as a correlate
to technology. “Prostheses” are discursive frameworks, as well as material artifacts. Thus,
the concept of prosthesis gives rise to a set of key questions: Which bodies are enabled and
which are disabled by specific technologies? How is the “normative” configured? How
does the use of the term prosthesis assume a disabled body in need of supplementation?
How might the prosthesis produce the disability as a retroactive effect? Where and how is
the disability located, and in whose interests are “prostheses” adopted?
With these questions in mind, […] I examine the rhetorical ways in which prosthesis
encodes disability and the notion that the prosthesis compensates for some sort of physical
disability – although this disability may be in relation only to the realm of the possible
rather than a handicap in the way in which it is classically conceived. […]
Mark Wigley (1991), in his influential article “Prosthetic Theory: The Disciplining
of Architecture,” provides a […] set of assumptions about the enabling functions of
prosthesis, situated more closely in the body and intimate spaces of everyday life. (He)
takes the departure point as the body, although his larger thesis integrates architectural
theory into the figurative body of the university: the architectural discipline itself figures a
“prosthesis.” His article is interesting first of all because it has provided a model for other
arguments about prosthesis that similarly rely on metaphors rooted in the (disabled) body,
and also because of the specific assumptions about the body that underpin the theory.
Wigley writes that the prosthesis is “always structural, establishing the place [to which] it
appears to be added” (p. 9; emphasis added).
196 S. Lochlann Jain

A blurring of identity is produced by all prostheses. They do more than simply extend
the body. Rather, they are introduced because the body is in some way “deficient” or
“defective,” in Freud’s terms, or “insufficient,” in Le Corbusier’s terms. In a strange
way, the body depends on the foreign elements that transform it. It is reconstituted
and propped up on the “supporting limbs” that extend it. Indeed, it becomes a side
effect of its extensions. The prosthesis reconstructs the body, transforming its limits,
at once extending and convoluting its borders. The body itself becomes artifice.
(Wigley 1991, 8)

The significance of this argument lies in its testimony to the difficulty of delineating
the physical and psychic boundary of the body in the circuits produced through bodies
and their relationships to material and social structures. I take Wigley’s comments to be
emblematic of a particular reading of prosthesis within a conventional mind-body dualism
that directly follows his own quotation of Lou Andreas Salome’s claim that the body is
always a prosthesis of consciousness, and Freud’s contention that consciousness itself is
a prosthetic attachment. In this version of the body and its prosthesis, the body is always
already a prosthesis of the mind, the mind of the drives; and the semantic content of mind,
body, and prosthesis is evacuated. Indeed, the body undergoes complete erasure as it takes
on the nuances of the superbeing, as in Freud’s ideal of the “prosthetic god.”
Wigley’s (1991) notion of the defective and insufficient “body” depends on the
transformative capacity of supportive limbs that reconstitute the entire collaboration as
“artifice.” But the unspecified deficiency, the generalized defect or absence, seems to
naturalize the general form of the prosthesis and the body alike. If the prosthesis presumes
an enhancement to the “natural” body in this account, then bodies and prostheses are
already naturalized rather than being understood as socially constructed. In asserting that
the interface of body and prosthesis is not a one-way intervention and that boundaries
are easily blurred, analyses such as Wigley’s are useful. However, Wigley stops short
of genuinely considering how interfaces between the body and prosthesis operate in
dynamic tension with the body, and he (perhaps unwittingly) takes for granted a politics
that considers the body, as a general category, to be a “side effect” of technologies of
production. This version of prosthesis naturalizes the enabling facets of technology such
that a microscope becomes just more vision, or a printing press just faster, permanent
speech. Furthermore, the metaphors of prosthetic extension are presented as if they are
equivalent in someway, from typewriters to automobiles, hearing aids to silicone implants,
allowing each of us to extend ourselves into the world on the liberal premise of free choice.
The disabled body appears here again as a generalized form in need of “propping up.” The
metaphorical model for this general theory gets lost in “the body” and the “supporting
limbs” in a simultaneous apotheosis (the article is illustrated with all sorts of quaintly
dated pictures of prostheses, not of amputees) and disavowal (no real discussion of bodies
and the multiplicity of “disabilities”). Both the prosthesis and the body are generalized in
a form that denies how bodies can and do “take up” technologies of all kinds. However,
the specificities demand to be read faithfully. How do body-prosthesis relays transform
individual bodies as well as entire social notions about what a properly “functioning”
physical body might be?
The prosthetic imagination 197

Not calibrating the differences in disability, ability, and godlike ability leads to the
obliteration of issues of bodily expectations; that is, what it means to be a productive and
consumptive agent at the turn of twenty-first-century capitalism. I emphatically do not
mean that distinct boundaries can or should be drawn and maintained between some
naturalized and organic “body” and various forms of prosthetic attachments; rather, I
mean to bring into relief the material differences of absences. For example, both artificial
legs and automobiles are media of mobility that also can be the cause of multiple sites
of wounding (from blistering and cutting in the first, to pollution and road kill in the
second). Both require and assume certain political, biological, and semiotic conditions
of possibility that are enabling in certain capacities for certain people and disabling for
overlapping sets of bodies and interests. But the differences in social constructions of
“needs” remain unaccounted for by Wigley’s (1991) theorization – the material differences
of the deficiencies, or defects, that “need” supplementing or correcting are not specified.
17
ELECTRIC MOMS AND QUAD
DRIVERS

People with disabilities buying, making and

using technology in postwar America

Bess Williamson (2012)

Excerpt from American Studies (2012) 52: 1, 5–29.

In 1958, a young mother named Ida Brinkman reflected on her life after contracting polio.
Five years had passed, she told the readers of the Toomeyville Junior Gazette – a magazine for
polio survivors – since she had become paralyzed in her arms, legs, and abdomen. After
a two-year stay at the Toomey Pavilion, a rehabilitation center in Ohio, she admitted she
was “secretly frightened” about how her home life would be, using an iron lung at night,
a “chest shell” respirator during the day, and a wheelchair to get around (Brinkman 1958).
“This is beginning to sound pretty grim,” she wrote, admitting concern about resuming
her life as a wife and mother; still, she continued, it really hadn’t been so bad. At home,
her husband Johnny had taken up shopping duties, while her three children helped keep
house and prepared their own breakfasts. A cartoon accompanying the article showed Ida
in a wheelchair, a tube at the center of her chest connecting her to an electric respirator,
as her little daughter gazed at her quizzically. “Bonnie gets acquainted with her Electric
Mom,” read the caption. “To my glee,” Ida reported, “she accepted me.”
Ida Brinkman’s life as an “Electric Mom” extended beyond the plug-in chest respirator
that drew her chest muscles up and down. She ticked off a number of tools she and her
husband selected and, in many cases, altered to support a busy and active life at home.
Johnny constructed a flat aluminum connector for the hose of her respirator, making the
breathing apparatus less bulky. The electric Hoyer lift that Ida used to get into and out
of bed included “a new wrinkle added to it ala hubby [sic]”: a shorter hook that could
be used to help her into the car, effectively making two lifts out of one. Ida’s father built
a portable wooden ramp that was “especially practical for steep declines”; she used an
extended cord and headset for the telephone; and, in case of “urgent s.o.s.” while alone
with her children, she had an “alarm box which can be set off by a kick of a foot” (ibid. 15).
Electric moms and quad drivers 199

In a photograph in a later issue of the Toomey J Gazette (as the magazine came to be known),
Ida appeared propped up in bed, reaching past the customized respirator tube to type
with a “mouthstick” – probably a simple dowel with a sharpened tip – clenched between
her teeth. Surrounded by her collection of medical, homemade, and standard consumer
technologies – the chest shell and “mouthstick,” the hospital bed, an over-the-bed desk,
and the typewriter – Ida showed herself in action as a writer and editor.
Ida Brinkman was one of a growing number of people with significant physical
impairments who lived at home in mid-century America. Given innovations such as the
“iron lung” respirator and advancements in spinal surgery, people who survived disabling
diseases and accidents were more likely to live long, relatively healthy lives after the 1940s.
The new medical specialty of “rehabilitation” emphasized a return to home, rather than
long periods of convalescence, as the end goal of treatment. Despite these improved
prospects, however, individuals with paralysis, missing limbs, weakened joints or restricted
breathing left the hospital for home lives full of physical obstacles. Accommodations
now familiar in the United States, such as wheelchair ramps, automatic doors, accessible
toilets, and “kneeling” public buses were not widely extant until the late 1970s and 1980s
(Percy 1989, 110). The American National Standards Institute published “Specifications
for Making Buildings and Facilities Accessible to and Usable by Handicapped People” in
1961. While these standards were officially adopted for new construction in many states
and municipalities, few accessible buildings and streetscapes were actually built in the
1960s. Features such as curb cuts, wheelchair ramps to public buildings, and accessible
restrooms were not common sights in American cities until the mid-1970s, and in many
locales were not widespread until new federal regulations were adopted in 1977, following
nationwide protests by disability rights groups. Before that period, people with disabilities
could expect minimal assistance in navigating public spaces, let alone the built-in obstacles
of the postwar home.
In the Toomey J Gazette, Ida Brinkman and dozens of other people with disabilities
documented their work as tinkerers, taking a “do-it-yourself ” approach to available
consumer and technological products. Adapting specialized medical and assistive
equipment, altering their own houses and everyday household tools, and using forms of
transportation – especially customized automobiles – to move beyond the home, these
individuals used technology to fill a gap left by postwar medical treatment of disability.
The growing rehabilitation movement in American medicine presented an optimistic
view of disability, trumpeting the individual’s ability to “overcome” given proper care
and training. The message that new specialists delivered was equal parts encouragement
and pressure, particularly when it came to physical mobility and access. Prodding people
with even severe paralysis to learn to walk, eat, and care for themselves without outside
assistance, specialists found the solution to accessibility in individual effort, not physical
accommodation. For people with disabilities and their families, technological tinkering
could alleviate some of the burden of everyday access.
People with disabilities documented their technological experiments in community
periodicals of the time and in retrospective memoirs and oral histories. The Toomey J
Gazette provides a remarkable source of first-person accounts of technological adaptation
in the 1950s and 1960s. The sometimes-annual, sometimes-quarterly magazine began with
200 Bess Williamson

125 mimeographed copies compiled by “three horizontal and two vertical editors” – three
women paralyzed by polio and two volunteers they had met undergoing rehabilitation at
the Toomey Pavilion (one of whom, Gini Laurie, remained at the editorial helm throughout
the magazine’s run). Circulation grew to 2,000 in one year and exceeded 10,000 by 1967.
The Gazette focused with great detail on the logistics of everyday life for those with
significant physical impairments. The editors defined their audience as primarily “respos,”
or those who had had respiratory cases of polio, but eventually included people with
spinal cord injuries and other “quads” and “paras,” medical shorthand for quadriplegics
and paraplegics. As many as three quarters of the articles in a given issue addressed
technological issues, from user reports on assistive devices in the regular “Equipment”
column, to an eclectic mix of do-it-yourself and imagined products under the headings of
“Oddments and Endments” and “Brainstorms.”
Although this publication provides the most extensive store of amateur technological
reports, other periodicals targeted towards physically disabled readers also addressed these
activities. In the Paralyzed Veterans of America’s Paraplegia News, which began publication
in 1951, a different population shared suggestions on such things as new automatic and
remote-control appliances, preferred commercial and homemade solutions for wheelchair
ramps, and customized, hand-controlled cars. Personal documents and oral histories
gathered from the generation who survived the peak epidemic of polio fill out the picture
of a population who managed daily activities through technological adaptation.
These accounts reflect the demographics of people with disabilities who were able
to live at home, create their own forms of access, and share them through community
publications during this era. The polio survivors and veterans featured in the Toomey J
Gazette and Paraplegia News represented two small slices of the population of people with
disabilities who garnered disproportionate public attention and resources. In the years
following World War II, the U.S. government funneled significant resources into helping
disabled veterans transition into civilian life, promising that they, like their non-disabled
fellow service-members, would share in the prosperity of postwar life. Likewise, during
and after the peak polio epidemic of 1937–1955 – a period when more than 415,000 cases
of the mysterious and terrifying virus were reported (declining only after Jonas Salk’s
discovery of a vaccine) – polio became central to a new public discourse on charity and
public health. In the 1940s and 1950s, organizations such as the National Foundation
for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP, also known as the March of Dimes) launched campaigns
including mailings, advertisements, television shows, and public events, cementing
disability – and specifically polio – as a key target for private philanthropy (Oshinsky 2005,
Wilson 2005, Brandt and MacPherson Pope 1997).
In addition to these attributes of relative privilege among the disabled population, the
writers for disability-community periodicals narrated a version of adaptation within the
relatively limited arena of middle-class, largely white America. In the twelve-year run of
the Gazette, there were only three photographs of identifiably non-white Americans: two
of them, of apparently African American men, appeared in an article about activities at a
residential institution, reflecting the disproportionate representation of poor and nonwhite
persons among the institutionalized population. The majority of photographs and articles
presented adults who were young and white, and lived with parents or spouses. The
Electric moms and quad drivers 201

technological work they did also reflected these demographics, with mentions of single-
family houses, cars, and a variety of consumer gadgets at the ready. The format of these
community magazines also echoed the mass media of their time, with reports on home
renovation and consumption delivered in the bright, optimistic tone of magazines such
as Ladies’ Home Journal or Popular Mechanics, with their respective gendered associations.
Emerging from the rigidly regulated world of postwar domestic life, these accounts
present a view of technological work as both a triumph and a defense. On the one hand,
the buoyant tone of many of the accounts related the joy of finding tools and arrangements
that improved everyday routines. On the other, these writings depicted a population
highly conscious of the stakes of rehabilitation. As disability historian Henri-Francois
Stiker has observed, the modern concept of “rehabilitation” hewed to existing categories of
respectability and acceptance (1999). For each group considered viable for rehabilitation,
there remained those considered incapable or unworthy of “return” to mainstream
society. Adapting to the physical spaces and tools of white, middle-class life was crucial to
maintaining status among the “acceptable.” The enthusiasm of innovation and discovery
in these narratives often shields an underlying fear about the possibilities of failure.

Technology from hospital to home

For many people learning to live with new disabilities, the trials of finding useful and
usable technologies began in the hospital. As patients moved from surgery or emergency
medical care to rehabilitation, their doctors, insurance companies, and medical
administrators exerted control over choices of medical equipment and physical treatment.
Members of the medical establishment often ignored or dismissed patient input, assuming
that whatever medical supply companies or research programs produced would be good
enough. The difficulties encountered by people with disabilities in acquiring, fitting, and
using assistive technologies introduced them to life on the margins of American culture.
For many, experiences negotiating with and circumventing the medical equipment system
instilled a sense that consumer products and technologies provided useful raw materials,
not end products. Suitable, comfortable, and appealing tools for everyday life would
require further intervention.
Rehabilitation treatment, whether in long-term residential facilities or outpatient
clinics, involved a panoply of “adaptive” or “assistive” technologies. When acute cases of
polio caused paralysis in the chest cavity, patients battled the peak of symptoms in an “iron
lung” respirator, a full-body-sized tube with bellows-like air pressure mechanisms that
forced the lungs to expand and contract. Rehabilitation doctors and therapists encouraged
“weaning” from the iron lung, but many severely paralyzed patients continued to rely on
the iron lung either full-time or for limited periods each day, particularly while sleeping.
Respiratory polio came with a variety of other accoutrements, including “chest shell”
respirators that were less powerful than the iron lung but wearable in a sitting position;
rocking beds, which used a see-saw motion to force air in and out of the lungs through
gravity; and standing beds, to which patients were strapped in order to come to a vertical
position and stretch their legs (Wilson 2005: 154). Patients with partial or even complete
lower-body paralysis wore steel braces to support and straighten their legs and corsets to
202 Bess Williamson

make their spines straight. The expense of this equipment was offset by support from
charitable groups such as the NFIP, private insurance, or veterans’ subsidies for many, but
the tasks of selecting, fitting, and adapting these tools were battles of their own (Wilson,
2005: 134).
The equipment that people with disabilities obtained through hospitals often fell short
of ideal fit and function. Choices of equipment were limited: wheelchairs came in three
sizes (adult, junior, and child, with the occasional addition of “adult narrow”), and braces
in just small and large versions. Moreover, equipment was assigned based on a doctor’s
prescription, so the type of device might reflect an overly aggressive rehabilitation plan.
Polio survivors remembered painful hours of trying to walk in steel braces and balancing
precariously on crutches. Throughout the mid-twentieth century, doctors insisted that
all but the most severely paralyzed patients should be able to walk, so long as they had, in
the words of orthopedist Dr. Philip Lewin, “one good arm and an arm good enough to
hold a crutch, [and] at least fair intelligence” (Wilson 2005: 154). Patients often dreaded
fittings of whatever medical “appliances” they used, as well as follow-up appointments
with doctors and therapists who might assign new, stringent exercise routines and brush
aside complaints about discomfort. Mary Grimley Mason wrote in her memoir of polio
that a tight new brace “felt as if a hundred little fingers were pinching me up and down
my legs,” and that the brace-maker adjusted it only reluctantly, mumbling that she “was
probably just not used to them” (2000: 23).
At a time when Americans had access to an ever-widening array of consumer goods in
hardware, grocery, and department stores, the market for medical equipment remained
firmly separate from mainstream consumer culture. Though the number of Americans
who used assistive technologies was significant – one survey conducted in the late 1950s
counted just under a million Americans who used wheelchairs, arm or leg braces, or
artificial limbs (Brandt and MacPherson Pope 1997: 2–3 ) – manufacturers made few direct
appeals to users, opting instead to target marketing to medical providers and hospitals.
Medical professionals and equipment suppliers asserted that patients needed their help
and guidance. Mid-century practitioners would likely agree with the doctors, prosthetists
and orthotists interviewed for a survey in 1976: they all agreed that “consumers [should]
avoid the risks of shopping on their own in all instances” (Bruck 1978: 147).
Even when patients did order their own equipment, they encountered an industry not
organized to serve the individual buyer. Many wheelchair companies produced a variety of
metal goods, of which hospital supplies were just one category: for example, the Colson
Corporation, one of the largest wheelchair makers of the mid-century, manufactured carts
and casters, and, as an offshoot, wheelchairs. Their catalogs devoted dozens of pages of wheels
and carts before one or two with wheelchairs. Descriptions were brief, with listings simply
declaring “sturdy construction” or touting easily replaceable, smooth-running “ball-bearing
wheels” (Colson-Cleveland Co. n.d.). The images in Colson’s catalog showed wheelchairs
in hospital settings, not in homes or in public. In these trade materials, wheelchair companies
affirmed the message that these were products for medical, not consumer use, and that
people who used wheelchairs did not fit easily into home or public environments.
In addition to prescribing assistive equipment to help patients “overcome” disability,
rehabilitation specialists acknowledged the difficulty many people with disabilities would
Electric moms and quad drivers 203

still have operating everyday products and navigating standard environments. At the New
York Institute for Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, leading rehabilitation expert Dr.
Howard Rusk included a “Self-Help Aids” workshop where staff showed patients simple
tools for daily activities. For example, eating utensils could be altered with metal loops
or foam padding, or razors and combs given extended handles for easier manipulation
(Lowman and Rusk 1962). Few of these devices were manufactured products, but instead
were devised over the years by staff and patients themselves. Rusk and his New York
Institute colleague, Edward Lowman, wrote in articles and books of the lack of mass-
market products for everyday lives of people with disabilities. They suggested, however,
that many solutions could be found among the “gadgets” of mid-century consumer culture.
“The ‘gadget era’ has particular implications for the person with a physical limitation,”
they wrote in a 1953 volume entitled Living with a Disability, urging readers to look beyond
medical supplies. They encouraged patients to “try the hardware department, and other
stores, or seek help from your classified telephone directory for further assistance on
what’s available or new,” and noted that the do-it-yourself magazine Popular Mechanics was
“full of useful suggestions” (Rusk and Taylor 1953).
“Self-Help Aids” of the postwar era are artifacts of Rusk’s and other rehabilitation
specialists’ assumptions and expectations about disability. Disability historians have traced
the many ways in which cultural values influence medical prescriptions. For example,
the ever-present goal of “walking again” was a relatively new development in the mid-
twentieth century. In earlier periods, when one’s gait was socially paramount, this goal
was not a primary interest since walking imperfectly was seen as worse than not walking
at all (Ott 2002). The “independence” that doctors and therapists, and even patients,
envisioned for life outside the hospital entailed adjusting oneself – “helping” oneself – to
fit into a society with virtually no accommodations for disability. Traces of the “Self-Help”
approach to rehabilitation remained as people with disabilities and their families sought to
address the realities of life in the houses, on the streets, and among the products of 1950s
and 1960s America. The so-called “gadget era” did present many potentially useful objects
for people with disabilities, though few of these were manufactured with that intention.
As chronicled in the Toomey J Gazette and Paraplegia News, people with disabilities made
creative use of available products and materials to improve their own comfort and pursue
their own interests. As they renovated and rearranged their houses, selected useful products
from the mainstream marketplace, and altered others to make them useful, people with
disabilities found ways to use technology to their own advantage. In doing so, they asserted
their own presence in a world that largely ignored them.

Constructing a life at home

In his memoir of polio, Charles Mee remembered stumbling home the night the virus set
in. Out on a high school double date at a friend’s house, the ache in his belly and weakness
in his legs became too much to ignore. Mee described making his way home on rubbery
legs, a trek of “maybe fifteen blocks… these were small-town suburban blocks, brick and
wood frame houses from the twenties and thirties mostly, some new ranch houses with big
lawns both front and back; I knew just which back yards I could cut through” (Mee 1999).
204 Bess Williamson

This was the neighborhood he would leave that night to go to the hospital, and the same one
to which he would return after treatment for acute polio and rehabilitation for paralysis in
his legs. The particular setting of Mee’s upbringing was common to many polio patients.
The disease disproportionately affected white, Western and Northern communities of the
United States, areas in which rigorous use of modern sanitation reduced the chances that
children would develop immunities through exposure in infancy, and where geographic
mobility increased the spread of the virus. People of all regional and class backgrounds
who became disabled in the postwar decades returned from hospital care to a world that
was not built for them. Details in architecture and landscape they may never have noticed
before – the slope of a driveway, the height of a countertop, a tricky doorknob – now had
new significance.
The worlds that polio survivors described in the Toomey J Gazette would have been
familiar to Mee. Many of the magazine’s correspondents depicted lives in single-family
houses in the suburbs or small towns, surrounded by consumer technologies and
accompanied by a nuclear family. The work they described, too, echoed familiar activities
of middle-class, mid-century domestic life. Whether sewing their own slipcovers and
curtains, installing cabinets in their kitchens, or soldering and welding in their garages,
middle-class homeowners performed a variety of creative and skilled work to maintain
and improve their homes, furnishings, and automobiles (Goldstein 1998). Do-it-yourself
activities allowed men and women of the 1950s and 1960s to express individual taste and
style in the mass-produced consumer culture of postwar America. These projects carried
high stakes for people with disabilities. Eating, dressing, bathing, and getting around
the house provided a sense of personal independence, particularly for those who, like
Ida Brinkman and her fellow “respos,” required family or attendant help in many basic
activities. If suburbanites who built additions to their subdivision houses and accessorized
their cars did so to distinguish themselves as tasteful or creative, people with disabilities
did the same work to fit in, to prove their worthiness of inclusion in a society where many
considered the severely disabled to be incapable or unworthy of rehabilitation.
For households with a physically disabled family member, the house itself often
presented a technical challenge. Small, single-family houses were common in many
American communities, from urban neighborhoods built in the 1920s and 1930s for a
new industrial working class to the rapidly expanding suburban “Levittowns” constructed
in the post-World War II years (Clark 1986). The efficient, modestly scaled Levittown
Cape Cod houses that were first built in 1947 on Long Island included doorways 28 to 29
inches across and hallways not much wider. Standard-sized wheelchairs, which typically
measured 25 to 29 inches in width, not to mention iron lungs and rocking beds, fit
awkwardly into these spaces.
Contributors to the Toomey J Gazette wrote of small and large home renovations to
accommodate wheelchairs and other equipment. One “Brainstorms” column included the
suggestion of cutting a hidden swinging door into the existing wall adjacent to a doorway,
providing space to move equipment when needed. With the hidden door “papered to
match,” the house’s décor could remain complete even with the new presence of unwieldy
equipment. Other suggestions hinted at the same problem. Readers wrote in with
descriptions of improvised “wheelchair narrowers,” contraptions that consisted of wire
Electric moms and quad drivers 205

hangers or a belt looped around the handles to draw a chair inward by an inch or two
to fit through these passageways. Commercial versions were also available, promising to
squeeze a wheelchair in by as much as four inches using a hand crank mechanism.
As they conducted patchwork renovations on their houses, families sought to balance
practical concerns of disabled and non-disabled inhabitants. One couple sent the Toomey J
Gazette photographs of the clever ramp built by the husband for his wife. The long ramp,
calibrated to keep a gentle slope, hugged the side of the house, leading to a side door. Since
this addition blocked the front stoop, the man added a trap door for the ramp that could be
raised off of the stoop to give access to the steps below. Inside houses, barriers built into the
layout were even more difficult to remedy. In some cases, families had to move or conduct
extensive renovations to accommodate a disabled relative.
Ed Roberts, a prominent participant in the Disability Rights Movement, was almost
completely paralyzed from the neck down after his teenage case of polio. His family
moved to a new house after he returned from the hospital so his hospital-style bed could
fit in the dining room (Roberts 2000). The family organized activities together around
Ed’s bed rather than transfer him to a wheelchair and strap him into a corset for everyday
activities. His wheelchair was of limited use beyond the threshold of the house, given poor
street-level accessibility during his adolescence in the late 1950s.
Over the weeks and years following rehabilitation, families continued making
adjustments to their everyday environments. Women who took on homemaking roles
after polio or other paralyzing conditions became consumer product testers, vetting new
gadgets and materials from the standpoint of their own physical needs. The 1968 issue of the
Gazette featured an eleven-page section on “Homemaking” with forty readers’ suggestions
on arranging kitchens, doing laundry and cleaning, and cooking from wheelchairs or with
limited manual strength or dexterity (TJG 1968, 16–27). Their notes describe everyday life
within households where floor plans, furniture, and appliances posed obstacles. Readers
wrote of such practices as filling a pot on a stove one cup at a time, as the height of the
standard stove made it awkward for a wheelchair user to lift a full pot from sink to stovetop.
To use outlets at the back of countertops – hard to reach from a wheelchair or with limited
mobility – they connected extension cords, while mirrors hung over stoves to provide a
view over back burners. Some contributors described the challenge of using small drawer
handles and stiff faucet heads with shaky or paralyzed hands. “I walk my fingers around
the sink to the water faucet,” wrote one; another used “a long wooden spoon with four
nails in the bowl section” to twist the small handles (Figure 17.1). Some wrapped rubber
bands around “small slick knobs,” while one contributor, perhaps frustrated with various
experiments, suggested that “if you are unable to use the hardware on drawers and cabinets,
just skip it and fasten on inexpensive towel racks for easy pulling.”
People with disabilities balanced the frustration of contending with the design of mass-
market products and furnishings with pride and delight in finding the right tools for a
given job. Contributors advised careful selection, suggesting that fellow readers “[t]hink
about weight as opposed to ease of handling… Handles are quite different on knives. Very
individual decision is needed here.” This kind of individual decision-making, based on
one’s relative strength and coordination, as well as personal taste, engaged people with
disabilities in an intensive form of shopping. The women homemakers – as well as some
206 Bess Williamson

FIGURE 17.1 Faucet turners in “Homemaking,” Toomey J Gazette 1968, 18

Reprinted by permission of Post-Polio Health International.

bachelors and husbands – who wrote to the Gazette took careful note of brand names,
noting specific models of automatic can openers, electric knives, and mixers they found
most promising for persons with limited hand strength. For those who fumbled with glass
and ceramic dishware, new plastics offered more than just colorful or airtight storage:
“Bless Tupper Ware [sic]” wrote one contributor, “you can drop it and it doesn’t fly open
and spill contents.”
The Gazette’s special “Homemaking” section echoed the tone and look of mainstream
domestic literature. The section featured a two-page drawing of ways to arrange kitchen
equipment, with crisp outlines of pegboard storage, lazy Susans, and pull-out shelves to
hold efficient, organized rows of pots and pans, dishes, jars, and bottles. The outlines of
dishware and familiar appliances recall the geometry of mid-century consumer magazine
layouts, which showed products floating in space or tidily arranged in ideal kitchens. […]
Although their needs were more specific than those of homemakers concerned about
storage space or matching belts, contributors to the Toomey J Gazette showed some of the
same creative excitement over the world of consumer products conveyed by [mainstream
magazines]. A page from a Spring 1960 Toomey J Gazette featured sixteen different designs for
homemade “mouthsticks” – tools used in writing, typing, and other actions in replacement
of hand movement – in a cheery, sunburst layout (Figure 17.2). People with limited use of
their arms and hands used these sticks, assembled from various available materials, to type,
write, dial the telephone, and do other small tasks using their mouths for leverage.
In the mouthsticks illustration, the simple implements radiated out from a sweetly
outlined mouth. One stick with a paintbrush attachment pointed inward, completing the
illustration and suggesting the action of “mouthstick” painting, a common hobby taught
in rehabilitation centers and often celebrated in the Gazette. The materials used in the
“mouthsticks” were of the moment, incorporating the novelties and synthetics that were
newly available for affordable consumption in postwar America (Meikle 1995). Most were
made of simple dowels or pens, with rubber erasers or eye-dropper tips to provide a soft
surface to be gripped between the teeth. Some incorporated more novel materials, such as
Electric moms and quad drivers 207

FIGURE 17.2 “Mouthsticks,” Toomey J. Gazette Spring 1960, 8

Reprinted by permission of Post-Polio Health International.

the rubber heel of a doll’s shoe, a cigarette holder, and a spring-loaded clamp that could
be operated with the tongue. The illustration of these different options and the cheery
mouth at the center takes a cue from the visual culture of the 1950s: we can almost imagine
a similar layout in an advertisement or magazine editorial showing kitchen utensils or
lipsticks. In these collections of readers’ inventions, the Gazette translated some of the
light, joyous appeal of mid-century consumer culture into the world of highly specific and
personal assistive equipment.
The upbeat, optimistic tone in which Toomey J Gazette contributors described finding
the right drawer-pull or the best page-turner suggests a distinctive role for consumption in
the lives of people with disabilities living at home in this era. Disabled people’s interactions
208 Bess Williamson

with the world of products and spaces reinforced their difference from the mainstream. In
these intra-community documents, they presented technical adaptation as part of familiar,
expected activities of household life, akin to the housework or home decoration discussed
in women’s home magazines of the time. Layouts such as the “Homemaking” article
depicted the tasks of finding and customizing consumer goods as components of class-
and gender-specific roles of the postwar household. In a final category of adaptation – the
use of automobiles – people with disabilities took a creative approach to technology to take
part in public life as well.

Access on the road

Although people with disabilities could create a modicum of access within their own
houses, they could do little to change the abundance of street-level barriers in American
cities and towns. Accessible architectural features in public buildings such as curb cuts,
widened doorways, and public toilets with spaces for wheelchairs were virtually unknown
until the 1960s, when the American National Standards Institute first provided a guide to
these measures. Even as local and state governments adopted this standard, compliance
was uneven. As one polio survivor described his life after returning from rehabilitation in
the 1950s, his family’s alterations to their house to facilitate wheelchair use were “enough
to help, but not enough to get me accustomed to living in any sort of specially constructed
world” given pervasive barriers beyond the household (Wilson 2005: 137).
In this era before ramps and curb cuts, people with disabilities found ways to move
about in their communities, albeit with great difficulty and unpredictability. Some
wheelchair users told of riding in the street to avoid curbs, entering traffic until they
found driveways or other breaks in the sidewalk. They relied on friends, family, or passing
strangers to help them get over curbs and up steps, an uncomfortable and often frightening
experience. Portable ramps – both commercially manufactured and homemade – could
be used to traverse a small number of steps, but required the help of a companion to set
up and take down these cumbersome devices (Brinkman 1958: 15). Some industrious
inventors devised more complicated devices, such as the “outdoor elevator” described by
Vince La Michle in a 1959 article in the Toomey J Gazette. Powered by a 1/6 horsepower
motor, the elevator raised or lowered at one inch per second and was, according to La
Michle, “certainly easier than a ramp.” Whether rudimentary or complex, these devices
were attempts to bridge the gap between desires to enter the public world and physical
barriers in the American landscape.
One of the most-discussed tools in the Toomey J Gazette and the Paraplegia News was
not a piece of “assistive” equipment, but an iconic technology of the twentieth century:
the automobile. Historians of American car culture have used the term “automobility” to
describe the way in which the personally driven motor vehicle became linked with a sense
of freedom and independence (Wajda and Shuemaker 2008, Flink 1988, Hounshell 1984).
For drivers and passengers with disabilities, automobility had an extra layer of meaning,
as it offered a chance to move freely past street-level barriers such as steps and curbs. In
pursuit of what the Toomey J Gazette called “quad driving,” people with disabilities became
auto enthusiasts of a very distinctive kind. They took advantage of new technological
Electric moms and quad drivers 209

devices in the mainstream automobile market, including the automatic transmission and
various add-on accessories. Others enlisted the help of family members and independent
mechanics to assemble and accessorize cars that could be driven by hand or with one leg.
“Quad drivers” operated on the fringes of an existing technological culture, deploying car
technologies to achieve their own form of automobility.
The first devices that allowed people to drive with limited or no use of their legs targeted
an elite audience. De Soto developed a custom hand-operated model for President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt in 1933, which he test-drove at Warm Springs, the polio rehabilitation
center in Georgia that he founded and visited throughout his presidency. In the following
year, Warm Springs’ in-house magazine, the Polio Chronicle, extolled the promise of several
new, patented hand controls to let “the President and other polios become their own
chauffeurs.” Self-driving was not a necessity for many Warm Springs patients, since they
came from social circles where employing drivers was the norm, yet hands-on experience
had its own appeal. Despite Roosevelt’s enthusiasm, the hand controls of the 1930s and
1940s were difficult and dangerous to operate. Driving a manual-transmission car entirely
by hand meant juggling levers for brake, clutch and accelerator pedals, all the while
operating the steering wheel. Inventors tried several approaches to dual clutch-brake hand
control, including buttons and switches allowing the driver to use the same handle to
depress the clutch alone, or the clutch and brake pedal at the same time. Still, these left the
driver with no option for using the clutch and brake pedals independently: for example, to
ease the brakes off slowly when starting on a hill.
The greatest technological improvement for drivers with disabilities was not a new
hand control, but the automatic transmission. Automakers introduced a few models with
automatic transmissions in the early 1930s; they became widely available in the 1940s.
This new technology coincided with a new demand for cars for people with disabilities,
particularly disabled veterans, who could receive a government benefit of up to $1,600
towards the cost of a hand-controlled or otherwise adapted vehicle. This subsidy made cars
and driving a distinct component of veterans’ culture, with models and accessories discussed
in a special “Hand Controlled” column in the Paraplegia News. The column’s author, Joe
Jordan, wrote of the special connection veterans had to cars, noting that “there is very little
controversy and possibly near unanimous agreement that ‘mobility,’ our effort to get around
once again, rates a high and very special place among [veterans’] problems”(Jordan 1951, 7).
As Jordan noted, however, not all available vehicles worked well for the needs of disabled
drivers. Even with an automatic transmission, drivers had to vet the specific configurations
available, since many name-brand “drives” still required some clutch-shifting by foot. The
Oldsmobile Hydramatic, for example, which had a clutchless shift mounted on the steering
column, was “widely used” among veterans, according to Jordan.
In the pages of the Toomey J Gazette, people with disabilities and their families showed off
a broad variety of customized cars that went far beyond commercially available models with
hand controls and automatic transmissions. Fred Taberlet’s “Para-car,” described in a 1968
Gazette article, was a Citroen 2 with the top and back completely cut off to make room for
an elevating floor. Accompanying photos featured Taberlet lifting himself, wheelchair and all,
into the driver’s position, eliminating the need for help in climbing in or stowing a wheelchair
(Figure 17.3). The customized vehicle had not one, but two sets of hand controls, so that Fred
210 Bess Williamson

FIGURE 17.3 Para-Car, in “Equipment,” Toomey J Gazette, 1968, 54

Reprinted by permission of Post-Polio Health International.

could rotate himself completely and drive the car forward or backwards, keeping him from
having to crane his neck to see while driving in reverse. Fellow Gazette contributors showed
off other creative approaches to driving. One British reader displayed a pair of leather “mitts”
that helped him grip his hand controls. For those with more coordination in their legs and feet
than upper extremities, an American entrepreneur developed “a kind of ski boot attachment”
that could be used to operate the steering wheel by foot.
“Quad driving” was for passengers as well. For people whose impairments meant that
they would never drive themselves, riding in a car was a way to participate in public without
being strapped into a wheelchair, let alone contending with steps, curbs, and the stares of
other people. Ida Brinkman named drive-in movies as a favorite activity of her family and
showed off a special head rest she used in the family car. Other families went to dramatic
lengths to include their disabled relatives in car travel. More modest than Fred Taberlet’s
Citroen convertible, but no less inventive, were the alterations the Ray family made to
their family car so they could travel with their daughter Susan and her reclining wheelchair
and respirator. Susan’s father Cecil, a Baptist minister (and “mechanical whiz,” according
to his wife), removed both front and back seats on the passenger side of their 1955 Ford
station wagon and installed a smooth platform for her recliner. He moved the post between
doors and re-hinged the rear door, making a double-wide entrance for Susan in her chair.
The Rays traveled with a small homemade trailer with compartments for extra respiratory
equipment and doors on both sides for easy access. The family reported traveling in this
car from their home in San Antonio, Texas, to the Southern Baptist Convention in Miami,
Florida, and national parks in the Smoky Mountains, Yellowstone, Mesa Verde, Arches
National Monument, and the Grand Tetons (Toomey J Gazette 1961, 18–19).
The customized cars driven by people with disabilities and their families likely turned
heads in town, but they were not alone on the road. Local mechanics who installed
specialty equipment had experience customizing cars for other uses, such as hot-rodding
or camping. They might even come across familiar equipment. For example, many catalogs
and articles on adapting cars for use by people with disabilities suggested installing a knob
for the steering wheel to aid driving with a prosthetic or a single hand. These knobs were
not exclusive to the community of disabled drivers, but were available as options from
Electric moms and quad drivers 211

major car manufacturers throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Though they ostensibly offered
a more secure grip for any driver, they were known colloquially as “necker’s knobs” for
one-handed drivers who kept one arm around their dates. Disabled drivers had most in
common with fellow tinkerers who altered sedans, station wagons, and buses for long
travel. As the auto historian Roger White has explored, in the days before the commercial
introduction of “Recreational Vehicles,” car owners made motor homes by removing
back seats to make room for beds, hanging curtains for privacy, and installing shelves to
hold amenities like camp stoves and washtubs. One driver described the joy of a “carefree
Gypsy life” to be found in extended trips in his custom motor home (White 2000).
People who altered familiar technologies to work for their own disabled bodies shared
much with their nondisabled counterparts. As with household technologies, these tools
took on different meaning for a population for whom everyday mobility could be difficult
or impossible. “Quad driving” provided a version of access that people with disabilities
could not experience on the sidewalks of their hometowns, but it also allowed disabled
drivers to participate in the American hobbies of picking out, tinkering with, and finding
adventure in automobiles.

Technology and rights in the twentieth century

These disabled tinkerers and inventors join a long history of consumers who reconfigured
products of the mass consumer culture for their own needs. Historians have traced
examples of consumers who altered mass-market technologies for their own distinctive
uses, from rural farmers who used early automobile motors to power appliances in their
houses, to indigenous groups who appropriated tourists’ video cameras to tell their own
stories of cultural endangerment (Kline and Pinch 1996, Eglash 2004). For those on the
fringes of society, appropriation can be the only means of finding tools to operate for
one’s own needs – be they mechanical, personal, or cultural – when manufacturers and
advertisers target other populations. In claiming consumer citizenship in these ways,
people with disabilities acted from a position of marginality, but did not seek to resist
or subvert mainstream culture. Their technological efforts were acts of integration, not
resistance, into the normative roles for men and women of their class and race.
These technological efforts to “fit in” to the spaces of postwar life were a form of self-
preservation in a society that presented few options for people with disabilities to live
independently. When “Electric Mom” Ida Brinkman confessed to Toomey J Gazette readers
that she had been “secretly frightened” about her return home, she voiced a feeling many
readers and writers of the Gazette surely felt. The insecurity with which people with
disabilities lived during this time should not be underestimated, particularly for those whose
injuries or impairments necessitated daily assistance. The specter of being locked away in an
institution hovered over many, especially those who were poor or whose disabilities resulted
from injuries or diseases not supported by the March of Dimes or other charities. Those who
returned home from rehabilitation were hardly exempt from these worries. In less optimistic
narratives than those of the Toomey J Gazette, some polio memoirists reported isolation and
mistreatment in their home lives, with their parents or spouses who left them in bed for
days, withheld help in bathing or eating, or, worse, took out their frustrations in emotional
212 Bess Williamson

and physical abuse. Even people with severe disabilities who, like Brinkman, had families
willing and able to support them had to wonder what would happen if family members
died or could no longer assist them. Starting with the “daily life” training they received in
hospitals, people with disabilities got a strong message that they needed to show continual
progress and a good attitude, lest they be labeled “bitter” or “uncooperative” (Wilson 2005:
154–155, Longmore 2003, 233). While they experienced some excitement from creative
work on their kitchens, cars, and houses, these technical tasks were also a constant reminder
that the burden was on them to adapt, not on the society at large to provide accommodations.
Whether they performed this technological work themselves, or with the help of handy
family members, adapting to the inaccessible built environment remained a private affair.
In the eleven-year run of the Toomey J Gazette, there were only small hints at a sense of
political identity emerging from this community network. In a 1959 editorial, Sue Williams,
who took on a primary editorial role alongside “vertical” editor Gini Laurie, warned readers
of the Gazette of the need to turn the attention directed towards polio cases into long-term,
sustained support. “The ‘iron lung story’ that has been told about each of us was a heart-
wringer and a purse-opener,” she wrote, referring to the pitying gaze of the mainstream media.
“Now that we cease to be a sensation in this way, there is quiet un-newsworthy work for us
to do,” she continued, including insisting on long-term home care funds to alleviate readers’
dependence on their families for care. Four years after the discovery of the Salk vaccine, these
“polios” were aware that their time in the spotlight was coming to an end. Others who lived
during this period later reflected on their experiences of pressure and condescension. Mary
Lou Breslin, who grew up with a polio-related disability in the 1950s and 1960s and later
became active in the Disability Rights Movement, remembered feeling pressured to present
an image of flexibility and positivity, despite the everyday strains of operating as a wheelchair
user in public. She described this false front of confidence and ease as “shucking and jiving,”
drawing a parallel between this behavior and African American minstrelsy (Breslin 2000).
The comparison Mary Lou Breslin made between herself as a successful rehabilitant
in postwar America and African Americans who performed to white expectations reflects
the perspective of one looking back, after an awakening to disability rights, at the “bad old
days” of the 1950s. Like many who participated in social movements of the later twentieth
century, Breslin saw the optimism and homogeneity of postwar culture as a false veneer
hiding tensions that would later become apparent in the upheavals of the late 1960s and
1970s. The Toomey J Gazette and other disability-community periodicals conveyed a more
positive tone as individuals shared their stories of returning to family and home. Searching
for accessible tools in the “gadget era” – as Howard Rusk and Edward Lowman dubbed
it – was a practical approach to the problem of outsider status in postwar society. In an era
before civil rights laws required some measure of physical access in the built environment,
people with disabilities used and adapted technologies of everyday life to close the gap
between the promise of inclusion and the reality of the world in which they lived.
18
PISSING WITHOUT PITY

Disability, gender and the public toilet

David Serlin (2010)

Reprinted from Harvey Molotch and Laura Norén (eds)

(2010) Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of
Sharing, New York: New York University Press pp 167–185.

In April 1977, a coordinated group of disability rights activists staged protest actions at
the Department of Housing, Education, and Welfare in Washington, D.C. and in eight
of its regional offices across the country. These demonstrators, many of whom used
wheelchairs or mechanical ventilators, were fighting for the full-scale implementation of the
Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and its significant Section 504, which was established to extend
civil rights legislation of the 1960s by prohibiting programs that received federal funding
from discriminating against people with disabilities. Historically, people with disabilities
had been either segregated within or isolated from the social world for so long that their
public presence typically solicited pity rather than registering recognition. In San Francisco,
disabled activists deliberately defied that history by occupying the Health, Education, and
Welfare offices for twenty-five days, fed and cared for by their friends and attendants as
well as by local unions, Bay Area countercultural groups, and Oakland’s Black Panthers that
recognized in their struggle much of what other civil rights organizations, both radical and
mainstream, had tried to achieve in the 1960s and early 1970s (Johnson 1983, Shapiro 1993).
Section 504 was an heir to the anti-discrimination laws that emerged from the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 and from under Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs of the
mid-1960s that were used to redress social, structural, and architectural manifestations
of a segregated society. As articulated by activist Judy Heumann, “[w]hen you erect
buildings that are not accessible to the handicapped, you enforce segregation” (Zames
Fleischer and Zames 2001: 68). For many disability rights activists in the 1960s and 1970s,
the built environment served as an immediate conduit to social tolerance and inclusive
citizenship. Accommodations – physical and social, symbolic and material – such as curb
cuts, wheelchair ramps, and teletypewriter devices, and transportation options such as
214 David Serlin

kneeling buses were envisioned as technologies of empowerment that would inspire a

more fully democratic society. Such accommodations were also intended to challenge the
legacies of “separate but equal” treatment, which for the disabled was manifest as separate
vehicles and spaces rather than vehicles and spaces that were integrated (Zames Fleischer
and Zames 2001: 93–102)
The lack of available toilet facilities during the occupation of federal offices in San
Francisco did not prevent disabled activists from sustaining their protest but in fact may
have shifted its terms, since their inability to use the toilet was both symbolic of and
material evidence for their exclusion from the public sphere. As historian Joseph Shapiro
has written, “[s]ome of the most severely disabled protesters were literally putting their
lives on the line, since they risked their health to be without catheters, back-up ventilators,
and the attendants who would move them every few hours to prevent bedsores, or who,
with their hands, would cleanse impacted bowels every few days” (1993: 67). One could
argue that the decision to tolerate unpleasant and potentially lethal personal circumstances
in order to promote democratic goals suggests that in those difficult days of protest the
human need to eliminate was more than a courageous act of civil disobedience.
By lifting the veil on their most intimate bodily functions, protesters demanded
recognition that the piss and shit of the disabled were produced not by androgynous
bodies or amorphously asexual bodies but by bodies shaped by the same kinds of material
and experiential needs as the able-bodied. Providing public provision for disabled people
thus raises broader issues of what it means to recognize “special needs” in the context of
claims, sometimes competing and complex, for dignity and equity. This runs counter to
the idea that providing, in minimal material terms, a place for the disabled to go to the
toilet solves the problem.
How then do we begin to understand the disabled toilet as a technology that ostensibly
neutralizes social difference if it exists within a public sphere that privileges able-bodied
status—and a gender-normative able-bodied status at that? The premise behind the
disabled toilet, after all, is that it transforms the public restroom into a level playing field;
and once this field is so made, no one gets – or deserves – any further special privileges or
consideration. Once there is compliance with the legislation, such as the US Americans
with Disability Act (hereafter ADA), or some other regime of physical accommodation,
the architectural and political deed is done. Yet this presumption of equality obscures
the complex logic of the situation, at least in part because equality before the law is a
paradigm that has been organized historically around white male able-bodied privilege.
As anthropologist Carol A. Breckenridge and philosopher Candace Vogler have written,
“The ‘person’ at the center of traditional liberal theory is not simply an individual locus
of subjectivity (however psychologically fragmented, incoherent, or troubled). He is an
able-bodied locus of subjectivity…who can imagine himself largely self-sufficient because
almost everything conspires to help him take his enabling body for granted (even when he
is scrambling for the means of subsistence)” (2001: 350 emphasis added).
The discourse of equality, then, is not always a sophisticated mechanism designed to
generate respectful difference between parties with shared access to social or political
power. Given what we know about the pressure toward assimilation experienced by many
ethnic and sexual minorities in the United States, the discourse of equality also can be a
Pissing without pity 215

blunt instrument used to flatten difference. As disability historian Henri-Jacques Stiker

has argued, the discourse of equality for the disabled can be as oppressive as it is liberating,
marking “the appearance of a culture that attempts to complete the act of identification,
of making identical. This act will cause the disabled to disappear and with them all that is
lacking, in order to assimilate them, drown them, dissolve them in the greater and single
social whole” (2000: 128).
Much anxiety still remains at the core of contemporary encounters with difference,
especially as the able-bodied must continue to grapple with tolerating the Other while
valiantly struggling to defend its status as the default position of public culture. And few
sites, it seems, are as fraught with encountering the terms of difference and navigating
the conditions of equality as that of the disabled toilet, as evidenced by the arcane rules of
social etiquette and awkward confrontations that take place at the borders of tolerance and
patronizing gesture. A dam of unintended consequences can break through the discomfited
silence, as the “normal” person seeks ways to not notice, avoid looking like they are trying not
to notice, all the while busily defending their own capacity for privileged accomplishment.
The disabled toilet in the US emerged genealogically in parallel to other dilemmas
of liberalism that continue to haunt discussions of difference. In the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, the emergence of gender-segregated public and commercial
spaces such as schools, gymnasiums, and bathhouses were closely linked to the influx of
immigrants from Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and the Middle East to large and medium-
sized American cities. The example of the gender-segregated bathhouse did not by itself
establish any legal or architectural precedents for disabled toilets, but it did make material
the presumption among civic leaders that there was a demonstrable link between creating
accessible public and commercial spaces and facilitating the hygienic and economic uplift
of those at the margins (Bérubé 1984, Serlin 2004). Following the establishment of a public
bath by the New York Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor in
1852, free municipal baths, swimming pools, and showers for the residents of cities such
as Boston, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco were considered
politically and morally necessary by social reformers concerned about problems of poverty,
overcrowding, sanitation, and hygiene among the immigrant groups.
While public toilets became increasingly common throughout much of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries in commercial spaces, public parks, government buildings, train
stations, and transportation terminals, people with disabilities were not among those
populations around which the design and functionality of public toilets were organized. By
contrast, able-bodied individuals were able to meet and exceed conformity to moral and
bacteriological expectations of good health in the public sphere. Even today, people with
disabilities, who carry the stigma of dependence and lack of control over their bodies, have
often been perniciously associated with failures, deliberate or otherwise, of personal hygiene.
As the various social and political movements of the 1960s bore their fruit, authorities
responded with national design standards for updating existing facilities or building new
ones (Figure 18.1). In the US, the federal Architectural Barriers Act of 1968 implemented
the now-familiar curb cuts and ramps for wheelchair users. Along with the Act came a host
of proposals to make resources such as public toilets accessible, though the first innovations
in toilet design such as grab bars, lowered sinks, and so forth were initially developed in
216 David Serlin

the 1960s for private homes and institutions specifically established for the disabled rather
than for public spaces. Only later did their installation in public toilets become reality, with
the rules finalized in 1980. The new stalls, known as A117.1 [in the US], were built at an
increased depth of 66 inches, ten inches larger than the previous standards, and were to
be built on a very slight incline from the floor so that wheelchair users could navigate and
position themselves more easily within the stall and ambulant but visually impaired disabled
people could “feel” a slight step up that physically distinguished the stall area from the rest of
the public toilet. The A117.1 also required metal grab bars behind and to the left side of the
commode that could be used by the toilet patron or his or her assistant in order to help set the
body in the appropriate eliminating position (Goldsmith 2001: 79). There were analogous
modifications to existing sink designs to incorporate levers with large, wide paddles that can
be moved easily rather than faucets that demand greater muscle coordination and strength.
These related standards of accessibility became law, in the form of the 1990 ADA, which
brought with it a host of other legal mandates for equal access. It was not uncommon even
in the 1970s and 1980s for disabled people traveling on public transportation, such as trains
or airplanes, to have to wear adult diapers or use catheters and collection bags for the length
of their journey due to inappropriate or non-existent facilities (Serlin 2006).

FIGURE 18.1 Contemporary (ca. 2010) photograph of wall-size display map for multi-user
public restrooms, Kyoto, Japan. The map is tinted in conventional pastel colours (pink on the
left, blue on the right) to indicate intended users, but it also deploys Braille lettering as well as
universal access icons to indicate separate wheelchair-accessible stalls near entrances as well as
the locations of sinks, urinals, and both Western and traditional (squat) toilets
Source: Photograph licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Pissing without pity 217

To a large degree, the exclusion of people with disabilities from the composition of the
public, which went largely unchallenged until the disability rights movement of the early
1970s reached critical mass, grew from the stigma historically attached to numerous forms
of visible disabilities in the public sphere (Charlton 2000). It is true that veterans and
survivors of at least some types of catastrophe had their injuries exhibited as examples of
patriotic sacrifice. Their bodies, in the late eighteenth century and beyond, were usefully
deployed rhetorically to promote national ideologies in times of crisis and war (Serlin
2006); in the US, the federal government acknowledged the specific needs of its paraplegic
and amputee veterans from the Civil War onward. By contrast, many cities in the United
States expanded nineteenth-century municipal vagrancy codes to prohibit people with
physical disabilities from appearing on city streets. As literary historian Susan Schweik
has argued in her recent monograph The Ugly Laws, many of these laws were not lifted
until well after World War Two (2009). Those individuals who were not institutionalized
or cared for at home or through local institutions or federally mandated resources such
as the Veterans Administration were left to fend for themselves. Able-bodied personhood
remained the default position, and the goal of rehabilitation was to integrate the disabled
person back into society, but often with only primitive ideas and techniques for making it
happen. So even wealthy disabled people who otherwise could design their own large and
elegant bathrooms were forced to use chamber pots and other makeshift receptacles before
the evolution of toilet designs dedicated to non-standard or non-normative body types,
something that did not begin until the 1960s.
For much of the twentieth century, manufacturers of commodes, urinals, sinks, and
faucets as well as the walls, doors, and floors that comprised standardized public bathroom
fixtures were oblivious to the body with special needs (Ogle 2000). Innovations in toilet
design lagged for a number of reasons—the social exclusion and disaffection of the disabled
from all corners of public life, for one. But a second factor, perhaps ironic, was the ascent
of mid-twentieth-century research sciences such as ergonomics, industrial design, and
anthropometry that adopted a rather rigid and uncompromising sense of the “normal”
physical body as the basis for design. This may have run parallel with the zeal for a generally
conforming landscape with normative assumptions of physical ability as part of the iconic
vision of an American nation. Any sort of distinctive body type perceived to be deviant was
considered repugnant. The deployment of scientific authority and legislative barriers in the
social control of difference is a testament to the power of putatively objective discourses that
increasingly helped shape understandings of those who constituted the public, and those
who did not, for much of the twentieth century (Carter 2007, Igo 2008, Terry 1999).
Disability itself comes in wide variations and it pays close attention to those variations
to anticipate the range of potential needs. For people who use canes and crutches, for
example, grab bars or roomier stalls may be a pleasing feature but ultimately an irrelevant
one. On the other hand, grab bars on or near urinals may be a useful accommodation
for an ambulant disabled man who is visually impaired or who uses a walker (Goldsmith
2001: 180–183). And blind people have very different sets of needs. It is important that
things be maintained in standard locations, something that can conflict with innovations
designed to help those with other types of disabilities as well as the general public’s desires
for stylistic novelty and functional design improvement.
218 David Serlin

This raises the question, as can often come up in such discussions, are: to what degree
should those with disabilities strive to accommodate the world as it is, and to what degree
should that other world change because there are disabled people in it? Put in a more positive
way, what are the benefits to others of taking into strong consideration those with non-
conforming traits? Many types of people, disabled or otherwise, have benefited from ADA
and accommodations that exceed them. Clara Greed, in particular, has emphasized how
many of the design principles employed in disabled toilets – doors without handles, roomier
stalls, lowered sinks, and interior spaces that allow one to move around other patrons – help
those who do not identify as disabled, including the elderly, the temporarily disabled, large-
sized people, and parents pushing strollers. Ramps and more commodious spaces help those
traveling with suitcases or making a temporary pit stop while delivering goods.
On a more profound analytic front, the disabled toilet and its attendant controversies
shows us something more about the nature of “dependency”; it flags the possibility that
autonomy may not, in itself, be without limits as a desirable social goal—not just for
the disabled, but for people in general. Autonomy often rests on a culture of deference
without intimacy, granting others the “right of way” without having the patience for
empathy. The people who encounter each other in public toilets, men especially, act as
independent agents tied together through little more than an ethos of benign neglect. At
the same time, the homosocial space of the public toilet is, by its very nature, an intimate
one that creates numerous opportunities for bonding and that also holds the potential to
be erotically charged. The combination devolves to the disadvantage of those who might
need help that would take the form of conversation or touching. Able-bodied culture
disdains any kind of mutually supportive activity in public toilets beyond small talk and,
perhaps among women, the daring move of passing a toilet roll beneath the stall door.
For the disabled, the accommodative technologies available are psychic compensations for
their dependence; they render invisible, at least temporarily, the vulnerability and need for
“help” that dare not speak its name. This happens conjointly with the desire by authorities
to lower costs by dispensing with human care personnel – nurses, social workers, domestic
caregivers, and so forth – whose role is not sufficiently valued to encourage their retention.
Better to replace them with architectural supports or mechanical devices. Indeed, for some
disability rights activists, the person who offers toilet assistance – a set of skills largely
associated with hospital care or rehabilitation medicine – is regarded as a residual effect of
the medicalization of the disabled body and thus anathema.
Ultimately, however, what is accomplished by technologies in the public toilet is the
loss of the exchange that otherwise might occur between human beings working with
each other (Figure 18.2). Not only does the relationship between the disabled individual
and the technology undergo a shift, but then so does the social connection. That is, the
privileging of independence may underestimate the social and ethical values that accompany
dependence: reciprocity, caring, and cooperation. This has profound implications not only
for how we understand the disabled toilet user, but also for how we understand the social
networks in which both the disabled and able-bodied are embedded.
In her brilliant collection of essays on the theme of interdependence as a form of
political organization, Love’s Labor (1999) philosopher Eva Feder Kittay offers a feminist
critique of political philosopher John Rawls’s influential work on the transformative
Pissing without pity 219

FIGURE 18.2 Contemporary (ca. 2010) photograph of the interior of single-user accessible
toilet stall, Hamburg, Germany. While the flexible armature and flush buttons (both in hygienic
stainless steel) surrounding the commode are familiar amenities of Western toilet design, the
rope rigging and horizontal hold bars, which allow a wheelchair user to manoeuvre him- or
herself comfortably onto and off of the toilet, are unusual for a public toilet
Source: Photograph licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

possibilities of cooperation and mutual obligation in a democratic society. Kittay argues

that Rawls imagines a democratic ethos in which all citizens share in dividing labor equally
among all “fully functional” members of the society but fails to recognize that within
any social system there invariably will be individuals designated as dependents – children,
the elderly, the temporarily infirm, and chronically disabled – as well as those who are
220 David Serlin

designated as caregivers, those on whom dependents rely for basic human needs. At the
core of such a critique, Kittay argues, is the recognition that the lack of gender specificity
in Rawls’s model presumptively positions a heterosexually masculine and able-bodied
figure at the core of democratic discourse since women do the disproportionate amount
of caregiving in our culture and have been, historically speaking, positioned more often
than not as dependents themselves. “To model the representative party on a norm of a
fully functioning person,” Kittay writes, “is to skew the choices of principles in favor of
those who can function independently and who are not responsible for assuming the care
of those who cannot” (p93).
Kittay’s critique of Rawls’s work has much to do with how we interpret the privilege
given to the body that is “fully functioning” as well as the body that eschews dependence as a
marker of weakness, vulnerability, and disempowerment. Dependence, especially as it relates
to the care of the self, is characteristically regarded as an obstacle to masculine self-realization
and therefore a badge of emasculation. Manuals written by physicians and orthopedists for
the care of disabled veterans during and after World War Two, for example, traditionally
emphasized male self-reliance as part of the recuperation process in order to restore and
maintain heterosexual masculinity (Serlin 2004: 39–48). And because of the freedom
traditionally accorded to the male, heterosexual body in the public sphere, any body that
requires some form of special accommodation or has particular needs is often regarded as
feminized, as dependent. As a result, those who are recipients and/or facilitators of caregiving
fight social stigmas on multiple fronts.
Although Kittay recognizes the potential for the dependent to challenge expectations
of both a gendered and able-bodied public body, the greater hurdle to mutual respect and
cooperation, it seems, is the way in which independence is valorized unproblematically as
the ideological commitment to which the disability rights activist must pay unwavering
loyalty. As Kittay writes,

It is a source of great inspiration and insight in the disability community that

independent living, as well as inclusion within one’s community, should be the goal
of education and habilitation of the disabled. But this ideal can also be a source of
great disempowerment…[The] focus on independence, and perhaps even on the
goal of inclusion when inclusion is understood as the incorporation of the disabled
into the “normal” life of the community, yields too much to a conception of the
citizen as “independent and fully functioning”
(1999: 171–2)

Kittay repudiates the value placed on the linkage between “independent and fully
functioning” and what can be socially productive and socially valuable citizenship. In so
doing, she is in effect contesting the classical demarcation of a gendered female private
sphere versus the male public sphere. Privileged access to a public toilet fuses with privilege,
male and able-bodied, more generally. The disabled toilet, then, is that which collapses the
private – that which is gendered as female, domestic, and altogether dependent – into
the public sphere, so that the disabled toilet becomes a type of non-male space that is
conspicuously neither publicly male nor privately female. Although the disabled toilet was
Pissing without pity 221

perhaps envisioned as a material embodiment of equal access and democratic equality, it

also expresses, by its nature, the masculine principle that slippage of gendered difference
risks display of weakness and dependence.
One aspect of male performativity is the use of urinals, themselves totems of masculinity.
But for certain types of disability, use of the urinal becomes problematic and this poses
gender-identity difficulties as they turn to toilets as urination receptacles. Hence a manual
for health professionals and rehabilitation specialists published in the early 1980s counsels
on the need to teach disabled men to sit on the commode for “both bowel movements and
urination,” ensuring that it “avoids the difficulty that some handicapped men and boys
have in aiming urine while standing so that it does not splash on the seat, floor, or clothing”
(Bettison 1982: 24). The task here, it seems, is on how to give disabled men, and boys as well,
the repertoire for performing bodily control, overcoming avoidance of a characteristically
female toilet posture. Failing to build up men’s inner reserves would efface their distinction
with women, destabilizing the historic male compulsion to demarcate and maintain the
feminine private sphere as entirely separate from the masculine public sphere.
For all newly disabled people there are challenges in acquiring and mastering toilet
skills. Men bring special baggage of not only their own immediate pragmatic goals but
also gender-based dependency anxieties. These come into play in dealing with, as an adult,
the most intimate bodily functions: how to raise and lower one’s self from a wheelchair
to a toilet seat, for instance, or how to wipe one’s self while balancing on grab bars – and
maintaining dignity. On a routine basis, an ambulant person who is visually impaired must
negotiate the space of a public toilet alone and deal with problems, like paper towel holders
placed well outside of one’s ordinary reach or toilet paper that has somehow gone missing
from its usual place. There may be a slippery puddle, perhaps due to a missed maintenance
call, that involves danger. In his biographical analysis of the life of Leonard Kriegel, a polio
survivor who grew up in the 1940s, the historian Daniel Wilson has written, “[w]hat had
changed [for Kriegel] was not the masculine values he embraced but the locale in which
they operated[:]…not on the athletic field or on the field of battle but in the rehabilitation
hospital and on the streets of Brooklyn as he struggled to rebuild his body and to confront
the barriers of an unaccommodating society” (2004: 122).
Among the challenges to dealing with the anxieties at hand, are the (literal) disabled
signs that announce and confirm one’s bodily separateness and, at times, re-group gender
identities. Such a recalibration is evident in a photograph (Figure 18.3) taken in May 2004
at the London Chelsea Flower Show, held annually since 1913 (now on the grounds of
the Royal Hospital) – the “world’s greatest flower show” as proclaimed on their web site.
In the photograph, one can observe the banner reading “Ladies and Disabled Toilets.”
Event planners know that crowd management is an organic part of any toilet landscape,
manicured or otherwise, but, as those who have waited in the ladies’ line know all too well,
it is not always done right. In this case, the disabled share designation with the gender that
is dependent and charged with caring for the dependent – children, the elderly, and the
infirm. Under the prominent banner, toilets for disabled users are not only spatially linked
to those of women but also are conceptually linked to that classic category of dependency,
while the other population – men – maintain their unproblematic identity as separate
creatures. Men share lines, let alone toilet stalls, with no one. Such a spatial polarization
222 David Serlin

FIGURE 18.3 Bathroom queue for ladies and disabled, London Chelsea Flower Show, May
2004
Source: Photo by the author.

of facilities and choreographies becomes still more significant when one realizes the
deliberate planning and attendant expenses involved in laying out the facilities, designating
these as demarcated social spaces, and creating the actual signs. This is a gendering of
public toilets by design as well as the gendering of disabled toilets by default.
In her memoir Waist-High in the World, writer Nancy Mairs observes that “[m]any of
us with disabilities require some assistance, but with the right facilities we can maintain
dignity for ourselves and those who care for us” (1996: 96). Such an insight suggests that
Mairs understands that the technology of the disabled toilet does not necessarily eliminate
the dependent relationship between the disabled person and his or her caregiver in the
vaunted name of independence for its own sake. Instead, it transforms the relationship so
that disabled people maintain some level of privacy and self-esteem while acknowledging
Pissing without pity 223

the mutually beneficial dynamic inherent in the caregiver/cared for relationship. Yet how
does one provide the disabled toilet user with an environment in which he or she can use
a facility that is both specially marked for accommodation and yet unmarked in terms of
categorizations that stigmatize?
In the US the Rehabilitation Act of 1973’s Section 504 and the Americans with Disabilities
Act of 1990 remain cornerstones of federal legislation for people with disabilities: those who
benefit from these rights, as well as the people who give them care. It is worth recognizing,
however, that federal guidelines for enforcing or invoking the ADA deliberately presume
a disabled body that is unmarked or unaffected by differentials of gender, race, ethnicity,
class, or sexuality, let alone differentials of bodily difference and bodily normativity. As
Jennifer Levi and Bennett Klein have shown, the ADA as well as the federal Rehabilitation
Act explicitly exclude from protection any persons who claim to have been discriminated
against on the basis of “transvestism,” “transsexualism,” or “gender identity disorders not
resulting from physical impairments” (Levi and Klein 2006: 77) The last of these exclusions
is a reference to the controversial strategy by some trans people to attain an “official” medical
diagnosis that confirms that their gender dysphoria constitutes a disability. Using gender
dysphoria as a medical diagnosis conflicts with many disability rights activists’ disavowal
of the medical model of disability, which claims that non-normative bodies should be
rehabilitated and “fixed” through technology to meet the expectations of a society deeply
invested in the concept of physical and psychic wholeness.
The insistence on homogenizing the experiences of disabled toilet users is reminiscent
of a process that disability scholar Patrick White has described as the heterosexualizing
of the blind, in which he shows how institutions and textbooks for the visually impaired
have deliberately controlled and encouraged particular kinds of sexual intimacy and
gender performance in situations where young blind people will interact with one another
(2003). Perhaps it is precisely this fear of sexual and gender nonconformity that surrounds
ADA rules against protection for trans people and that, furthermore, has permitted the
ADA to flatten out or erase outright the specific and often irreconcilable elements of one’s
private (and therefore gendered) bodily experience that constitute the terms of one’s
public (and therefore gendered) disabled identity. This misrecognition of the importance
of gendered and sexual difference in the experiences of people with disabilities reinforces
the impression that disabled citizens are interchangeable with one another. Disability is
their assigned master status, with no other social or cultural identifications appropriate or
necessary. Those identifications, in other words, are meaningless within the language of
tolerance and formal equality and, insofar as they are recognized at all, they are gender-
neutral. But as we have seen, the discourse around public toilets has never been gender- or
sex neutral but is inflected through and through with gendered prescriptions for autonomy
and self-reliance as well as, of course, with rights and privilege.
The sociologist Erving Goffman, in his 1977 essay “The Arrangement Beween the Sexes,”
argued that toilets were spaces in which the socially constructed expectations of gender
equality, the hard-won efforts of the sexual liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s,
did not hold sway. Segregation would remain. As Goffman asserts, “The functioning of sex-
differentiated organs…[does not] biologically recommen[d] segregation; that arrangement is
totally a cultural matter….[Yet] toilet segregation is presented as a natural consequence of
224 David Serlin

the difference between the sex-classes, when in fact it is rather a means of honoring, if not
producing, this difference” (1997: 316 emphasis in the original). While Goffman may have
regarded the gendered toilet as a retreat from or an alternative to the androgynous sexual
politics of the mid-1970s, disability rights advocates in the main accepted gender segregation.
For them, accessing the women’s or men’s room was a way of entering the social, not retreating
from it. Many were surely willing to take on and accept the terms of a deliberately delineated
sexual difference if it meant being able to use a public toilet in the first place.
Yet even with its problematic and inherently homophobic and transphobic language
regarding gender and sexual difference, we cannot in good conscience dismiss or dismantle
the ADA’s policies without recognizing the enormous achievement that the bulk of its
legislation represents for human rights in the United States and for disabled people
around the world (Figure 18.4). The work of contemporary transgender and genderqueer
activists who are taking on the public toilet as a site of gender liberation borrows liberally
from disability rights activism (Chess et al. 2004). Perhaps a more effective challenge
to the ADA’s policies regarding trans and gender non-normative populations might be:
how might a non-gendered toilet policy transform the way that we talk about gender and
disability, recognizing that the use value of public toilets is too often defined and delimited
by the historical legacies of heterosexual male privileges within public space? In other
words, in what ways can we harness the awesome power of the ADA to enact effective

FIGURE 18.4 Contemporary (ca. 2015) photograph of signage for a single-user “All Gender”
toilet at San Diego International Airport, USA. Although the sign itself does not announce
wheelchair accessibility, the Braille lettering works in tandem with icons representing a variety
of gendered positions, including that of infant caregiver, to suggest the accommodation of
diverse bodily and social needs. The single-user toilet is in fact wheelchair-accessible
Source: Photograph courtesy of the author.
Pissing without pity 225

spatial accommodations for people with disabilities while also harnessing the power of
gender non-normative critiques of the public toilet?
There have indeed been some practical solutions offered up. Since the 1960s, a growing
group of architects, urban planners, and education specialists as well as those in the fields
of rehabilitation medicine and palliative care have been actively thinking about disability
and the built environment, including the status of public toilets (Goldsmith 2001). One
response, coming primarily from the practitioners of architecture and planning, is the call
for “universal design” – that is, the concept of user-centered design for all ages and body
types that eschews uniform notions of a single, able-bodied, ergonomically-normative
subject – or a single user. Single-occupancy unisex facilities provide an example. Space
otherwise given over to the separate men’s and women’s rooms (and perhaps more space
as well) is re-articulated as a series of small walled-in enclosures, each large enough for
wheelchair access and that of a helper. Each has a sink as well as toilet. People who identify
as transgender would not have to make a choice, and those observing them would not be
in a position to remark or reject. The stand-alone outdoor pay toilets now common in
Europe and appearing in a few US cities such as New York and San Francisco are a variant,
with the New York versions at least of sufficient size to accommodate wheelchair users.
But there are drawbacks, both in terms of ecological and financial costs. Use of urinals
requires less space and less money for installation and maintenance than does toilet use.
Current urinal models are waterless, resulting in ecological benefit. A plausible answer is to
install urinals in a single unisex facility where men who wished to do so could use them for
urination and both men and women could use toilet stalls as desired. Those with physical
disabilities would use whatever appliance they preferred. This is a radical solution because
it requires both men and women to share the intimate space of the rest room. It also, of
course, eliminates the efficiency of restricting the disabled to one or two “special” spaces;
every stall must be large. In the case of stand-alone pay toilets, provision of wheelchair
access decreases the number of street locations large enough to accommodate them.
Numbers of architect-scholars treat all this as a design as well as a political and moral
issue. Some have recognized public bathrooms, as in the words of Raymond Lifchez and
Barbara Winslow, “a focal point of the drive to create a barrier-free community” (1980:
90). Lifchez and Winslow were involved in the formation of the Center for Independent
Living, Inc., founded in Berkeley, California, in 1972 by disabled students at the University
of California, which became a paradigm for disabled community activists around the world
and remains an active model for developing services and initiating anti-discrimination
legislation. Indeed, the Center for Independent Living was among those Bay Area-based
organizations that dispatched its activists to occupy the offices of the Department of Health,
Education, and Welfare during the April 1977 protest actions. From its inception, the goal
of organizations like the Center of Independent Living has been to work simultaneously
on developing legal strategies for protecting the disabled individual alongside those for
transforming the built environment. Activists collaborate directly with urban planners,
architects, technology specialists, and civic leaders to conceptualize urban landscapes with
the toilet playing a central role.
The disabled toilet exemplifies the tension between autonomy and equality at the core
of classical liberalism: how far do we go to reconcile the protection of individual freedoms
226 David Serlin

with the need to satisfy the majority’s needs and preferences? How much expense and
inconvenience must the majority “suffer” to provide not only adequate numbers of rest
rooms for the disabled, but equipped for their diverse needs and respecting their own sense of
dignity, gender-based and otherwise? Disabled people’s use of public toilets focuses attention
on the issue in particular ways. As historian Patrick Joyce has written, urban public space
has long been the site of negotiation of this tension. It was in large cosmopolitan cities like
Manchester and Vienna during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries where European
citizens learned how and where to exercise both civic autonomy but also civic restraint in
their direct physical engagement with urban thoroughfares, public squares, and municipal
parks. Public spaces thus became political theaters where the productive strains of liberalism
were not only exhibited but were materially manifest. While liberating individuals from the
typical constraints of social life, the new urbanity restrained particular kinds of behaviors
in an ongoing need to perpetually negotiate power relations that remain both dynamic and
unresolved. As Joyce writes, “If forms of power and human agency, and of bodily competence
and of knowledge, are carried in the material world, and in the use of objects,” then one
might characterize the history of modern liberalism as a narrative of a “strange and complex
history of objects and material processes” (2004: 98 emphasis in the original).
Disabled people’s use of the public toilet has indeed its own “strange and complex”
history, part of which is the naturalization of the able and gendered body. Variations from
this human model have, in countries like the US, enlisted an attitude of tolerance but not
a fulsome embrace of the opportunities for celebrating and learning from difference. As
always, more is eminently possible.
With a stance perhaps appropriate for a pioneer composer and performer, the British
musician and disability activist Alan Holdsworth (a/k/a Johnny Crescendo) coined the
slogan “Piss on Pity” in 1992 (Ervin 2002). It describes the attitude felt by many disability
activists toward the patronizing compassion of the non-disabled, exemplified by the
Annual Labor Day Telethon for the Muscular Dystrophy Association hosted by Jerry Lewis,
that promotes maudlin sentimentality instead of self-empowerment (Longmore 1997).
Combining the image of pissing as a natural biological function with the image of pissing
as an aggressive act of individual and group disobedience, the “Piss on Pity” movement
forces a recalibration of the stigma attached to disability, as propagated shamelessly by
the medical-industrial-entertainment complex. Pity is not good enough and, indeed, it is
destructive. Toilets remain contested terrain with the question remaining of how, truly, to
make all toilets, and all toilet users, equal before the law of the commode.
19
DISABILITY AND THE PROMISES OF
TECHNOLOGY

Technology, subjectivity and embodiment

within an order of the normal

Ingunn Moser (2006)

Excerpt from Information, Communication & Society

(2006) 9: 3, 373–395.

The topic of this article is the promises of technology for disabled people. Technologies, and
especially new information and communication technologies, are thought by many to hold
the power to bridge and even undo disability. But how to interrogate such promises? The
objective here is to provide a set of tools and resources for such an inquiry, and offer analyses
and discussion of the generative and transformative power of technologies in the lives of
disabled people. For this endeavour I draw on recent work in disability studies as well as
social studies of science and technology (STS). The point of departure is that ‘disabled’ is
not something one is but something one becomes, and, further, that disability is ordered and
enacted in situated and quite specific ways. A set of questions follows from this. First, there
are questions about how people become, and are made, disabled in practice, and, in particular,
what role technologies and other material arrangements play in enabling and or disabling
interactions. Second, there are questions about what is made of disability (and ability),
what is made of the disabled subject and body, and, even more specifically, what positions,
capacities and competences are enabled through the mobilization of technologies. What are
the normativities enacted, what does one seek to achieve, and what specific configuration of
subjectivity, embodiment and disability can we see emerging? And last, but not least, there
are questions about the limits to the power and productivity of technologies and the way
of becoming abled and/or disabled they contribute to, and what they exclude and suppress.
To explore these questions, I work through a set of excerpts from two interviews with a
man I call Jarle, ethnographic notes from these visits, and a videotaped television interview
given by him in another context. The data were collected as part of a study of the uses
of new technologies in the lives of disabled people in Norway. I start by addressing the
228 Ingunn Moser

question of what it is actors seek to achieve in their interactions with technologies. I draw
out the normativities at work, ask what positions and capacities they establish, and how
they are made possible and achieved in practice. […]
The argument I develop is, first, that in this context of the Norwegian welfare state and its
extensive apparatus of public services and measures, the mobilization of new technologies
works in a powerful way to build an order of the normal and turn disabled people into
competent normal subjects. However, such a strategy based on compensation achieves its
goals only at a very high price: by continuing to reproduce boundaries between abled and
disabled, normal and deviant, which constitute some people as disabled in the first place.
There are thus limits to normalization. And so, notwithstanding their generative power,
technologies working within an order of the normal are implicated in the (re)production
of the asymmetries that they and it seek to undo. In this sense, the strategy cannot succeed.
It continues to produce disability along with ability.

The productivity of technologies for the subject

In the following, then, my interest and concern is with what subjects are enabled and
enacted in interactions with technologies and other material arrangements, as well as how
they are enabled in practice. For this I adopt the notion of ‘subjectivity’ in its semiotic
and poststructuralist usage, as referring to a location of consciousness, knowing, thinking
or feeling. This is a very open definition that makes very few assumptions about where
or what kind of location this is, and so provides me with an undetermined framework
for tracing the making, shaping, embodying and delineating of subjectivities empirically.
I use the term ‘subjectivities’ in the plural to emphasize that a subject position is not
something one has, occupies or is structured into, once and for all, but rather a set of
differently structured positions one moves between and is moved through, more or less
fluidly. Whenever I refer to ‘the subject’ in the singular, this refers to a position that draws
together, unifies and hides a more complex set of subjective capacities.
I also make an analytical distinction between capacities for action and capacities
for consciousness, thinking and feeling. This must, however, not be understood as an
argument about what a subject is, or how the subject should be conceptualized, a priori.
The theory and ordering of the subject proposed here is more local: it comes from the
materials and is based on what I have found to be crucial component parts that go into
making subjects in the specific context and interactions I have studied. In this normalizing
mode of ordering disability, becoming a subject also involves agency. It is distinguished
and separated out from subjectivity as the external and embodied expression of an inner
subjectivity. These capacities can, however, be broken down further into their component
parts, and in the following I do this in order to explore more carefully what it takes to
become a subject, and what kind of configuration this builds or seeks to achieve.

Making active and independent agents

So agents express and demonstrate a capacity to act in the world, to initiate and cause things
to happen. Two components of this capacity turn up repeatedly in my materials: activity and
independence.
Disability and the promises of technology 229

One example is a video I got from Jarle. Before his accident, he used to be team captain
of the national team in 8-way formation skydiving. On the tape he sent me, he had collected
his own appearances on television. It starts with a report on TV2 news on the national team
training for the upcoming World Championships. The next cut is made one year later, also by
TV2 news. It recalls how the hope of a medal snapped as the team captain was struck down
by an accident and broke his neck. But now, the news presenter tells us, Jarle is on his way
back to life. Then we see Jarle driving around in an electric wheelchair in the garden outside
the rehabilitation hospital. He drives down to look out on the fjord, and then returns. He
drives up towards the reporter and the wheelchair comes to a halt. Jarle explains that he is
paralyzed from the fourth cervical vertebra and down – which is exactly the critical limit for
the ability to breathe on one’s own. ‘I am dependent on a ventilator, 24 hours a day’, he says,
‘but I can do without it for twenty or twenty-five minutes if I have to.’ The first question the
reporter directs at Jarle is: ‘Has your life become totally inactive?’ Jarle’s answer is prompt:

No, in no way. At the moment life is just beginning to take shape again. Now I finally
do many things that abled people do, too: I go to the movies, I go out socializing, and
I have mates. I am just starting to build my own house, and I will have my own car.
Actually a lot of very normal things.

It almost goes without saying that the normativity enacted in the interactions in this
television report is active agency. This is clearly what Jarle seeks to establish. But it is
obvious that the TV2 reporter also values active lives. The crucial thing, however, is that
this is taken to apply to disabled as well as abled people. The reporter’s question about
whether Jarle’s life has become totally inactive first takes up the medical voice that Jarle
himself introduced when he gave a description of his situation – locating the disability
within his body, as a condition in and of the body. But it takes up this medical voice only in
order to reject it: the question asks to be refused and to be displaced into another discourse.
It firmly establishes that inactivity is not a good, but it does not relegate disabled people to
lack, and to passivity. The moral lesson of this report is that disability can and should be
bridged. It establishes active agency as norm for the disabled as well as for the abled.
But, returning to the video, it is striking that even more important than the reporter and
Jarle’s words is what the television report shows about how Jarle practices active agency. After
the introductory presentation, the report starts with a camera following him and his electric
wheelchair around in the garden. Without further commentary, this demonstrates how Jarle
steers and controls the movements and functions of his wheelchair by way of chin control.
What we learn is that he can start and set the wheelchair running, move and steer it in different
directions, make it go faster or slower, bring it to a halt, regulate the sitting position etc. –
simply by pushing a stick with a switch mounted on a rack that goes from the back of the
wheelchair to the front and up to his chin. It allows him to move within a tree-like menu of
opportunities, through which the system scans automatically. By triggering the switch, Jarle
can initiate action and so practise active agency. The form he demonstrates it in here is mobility.
So this is how it works: the electric wheelchair enables Jarle to move around as he
wishes – at least as far as the environment is accessible to his wheelchair. It was granted
to him by the social security authorities – and so indirectly by Norwegian policy on
230 Ingunn Moser

disability – which guarantees everyone the right to free technical aids, provided it can be
convincingly argued that they contribute to better functioning and/or the capacity for self-
support. And in a quite straightforward manner, this is what the electric wheelchair does
for Jarle: it works like a prosthesis to compensate for bodily functions such as walking on
legs and having the use of one’s arms and hands to control the wheelchair.
But there is more to it. By attaching himself to the electric wheelchair, Jarle gets an
opportunity to be mobile, but also to practise active agency in ways that surpass simple
function: he can be spontaneous and make unexpected moves. Acting on the spur of the
moment, he can visit a friend or go to the cinema. And these are also manifestations of a
capacity for independence. Independence, here, is a practical and material matter. It means to
manage on one’s own, without having to ask for help from family, friends, carers or assistants.
But it also means to be free – or sufficiently disentangled and self-sufficient – to be able to do
things that were not planned. And spontaneous action, it seems, is particularly effective as a
demonstration of active and independent agency: it is one thing to be enabled to act, as in the
way the wheelchair enables mobility, but quite another thing to be able to act spontaneously.
The attribution of spontaneous action to a disabled person like Jarle emphasizes his capacity
to initiate and cause things to happen independently rather than being moved by others.
What becomes clear here, then, is that independence may require a lot of technologies and/
or other material objects and arrangements to which one becomes attached. Independence
is not simply about disconnection, but also about the shifting out and replacement of some
attachments (or dependencies) by others. It is also about the distribution and delegation of
tasks: moving for instance from attachments in the form of delegating tasks to people to
delegating, instead, to things, technical aids in the widest possible sense, or even parts of the
physical environment. Becoming independent thus turns out to involve discrimination,
a process where you find out what kinds of attachments and dependencies are necessary,
optional, good, not so good, better or worse than others.

Building positions of centred control

I now turn to subjective capacities and competences and how these are made possible. At this
point, I also turn ‘inwards’, to what is taken to be inside the human and inside the human
mind or brain in particular. Another story: I first met Jarle in a seminar where he gave a
presentation on the possibilities smart house technologies offer to disabled people. Using
his own situation as example, he described how his new voice-based environmental control
system finally allowed him to live at home and control his own life. He invited me to come and
visit him in his new house. When I arrived, however, Jarle could not work the environmental
control system as he normally would with a microphone, headset and a transmitter at the
back of the electric wheelchair. He had been given a new electric wheelchair and the system
was not mounted on it yet. But he could still show me around and demonstrate his house,
he said, because he could also control it from his bed. He worked this by way of a suck-
and-blow-system, a switch that is activated by sucking or blowing in a pipe, almost like a
straw, in front of his mouth. Turning the system on, the computer started scanning through
and reading all the alternatives aloud. When it got to where Jarle wanted, he blew the pipe:
the television turned on, it switched to another channel, the sound was turned off, and the
Disability and the promises of technology 231

television was turned off again. He could also call for assistance, adjust the bed, open doors
and windows, regulate the light, control the blinds or turn down the heating. We moved
from the bedroom to Jarle’s office. He worked the computer in the same way by sucking and
blowing, with a digital keyboard on the screen, a small box on top of the computer sending
out infrared beams, and a small reflector tag between his eyes to control the marker on the
screen. Using this computer, he told me, he had organized the plan for the step-by-step
achievement of his goal – to build himself a house and move back to live in his own home.
He made budgets, calculated costs, set up schedules and deadlines, wrote applications and
appeals, negotiated with architects, building authorities, banks, local authorities and the social
security authorities – and kept track of everything that needed to be done. He concluded:

I can work the computer exactly the same way as ‘a normal’ (person) … Indeed,
this is a big step in the right direction of raising my quality of life. In principle, I
control my whole life via my voice, microphone, chin, sucking and blowing, and the
environmental control system.

What Jarle demonstrates here is centred control. This is a normativity that was repeatedly
enacted in stories I got in interviews. To get control over your everyday life is seen as a
good, and as an obvious right. It means that disabled people should be informed and be
making the plans and decisions concerning their own situation, and that they should have
the initiative and be taking action in matters concerning themselves.
So centred control is a competence that implies that the person knows, has an overview
of the situation, can control it, and is in a position to act upon it. As such it is a capability
that is linked with and goes into other related capacities such as discretionary choice,
autonomy and strategic planning and management, as well as active and independent
agency. When Jarle claims control, all of these capacities, and positions, are involved.
Different combinations of these components of subjectivity are important in different
situations, but they all contribute to – and rest upon – a centring of the subject.
And this, I want to argue, is also what the environmental control system and the
computer do for Jarle. They bring together and make available tasks and functions that
would otherwise have been distributed in time and space. The environmental control
system also arranges these tasks and functions in the order of a menu, a hierarchically
structured, tree-like menu, so that they can be distinguished, overviewed and acted upon.
In this way, it builds a centre of control and action, a position raised above the matter of
the practices itself, and places Jarle in the middle – the centre – of it. It is structured in
the same way as a command and control centre in a railway or air traffic control system.
Using technology, paths are built that direct and collect information and control at certain
defined locations that become centres of knowledge and action.
But Jarle is not only above and outside the action and the mundane realities he has
knowledge and control of. Even if he is strongly centred and placed in a position where he
can control important parts of his everyday life, this is only possible as long as he is linked
to his environmental control system. That is, he – his body – must remain attached to a
set of ordered relations between elements such as cables, infrared beams and apparatuses,
transmitters and receivers, the electricity network and its cables, a computer, a software
232 Ingunn Moser

program in which the many possibilities are programmed, a fuse box the size of a wardrobe,
switches, remote controls. What this shows is that subjectivities, such as centred control,
are made possible by and emerge in such embodied relations and arrangements. They
include, but are not limited to, Jarle’s body or, say, his mind.
Jarle both subscribes to and enacts this norm of centred control as he mobilizes technical
aids. He describes it as a big step forward, raising the quality of his life. In principle, he
says, he controls his whole life via his environmental control system. In practice, as my
visit demonstrated, it is a bit more complicated. For instance, the system does not always
work. And Jarle needs people looking after him every hour of the day, in case mucus needs
to be sucked out of his lungs, to change the ventilator tube, to turn him in bed, to feed
him, and so on. It is the local authorities that are responsible for providing him with the
necessary healthcare services. But if they say no, we cannot afford it, or we don’t have the
necessary personnel – then Jarle has no control whatsoever.
This was the case when Jarle was released from hospital, and the local council had simply
reserved a room for him in the local nursing home. But this was out of the question for Jarle,
and teaming up with a nursing officer on the one hand and a computer and telephone on the
other, together they made a plan that was going to make it possible for him to move home.
Moving to his new house was a move from a sociotechnical order premised on hospitals
and large institutions, to one treating the home as private sphere and the (ex-)patient or
resident as citizen. This move was made possible in part by earmarked grants from the state
to the local councils to build residences where disabled people could live in their own way,
like abled people. At the same time caring services were reorganized to develop more flexible
home services and in particular a new care scheme called ‘personal assistance managed by
users’. This means that while Jarle is still dependent on care and assistance, he has escaped
the most dreary routines of the nursing home and the caregivers are turned from professional
experts into personal assistants. Living in his own place, Jarle is also allowed – and required –
to take care of his finances. A series of new social security rights is also attributed to him: he
is granted the right to an individual rehabilitation plan, to technical aids and to a car.
What Jarle’s story suggests, and what I want to argue, is that centred control, and the
autonomy, discretion, strategic planning and management that go into it and also contribute
to it, is not only a question of rationality and ability to speak for oneself – a competence
of the mind that just needs assistance (technically or otherwise) in order to be expressed.
Rather, these are capacities that are made possible in and produced by specific ordered and
ordering socio-material arrangements. It is the layout of and distributions in the current
arrangements, including computer and environmental control systems but, crucially, also
a place of one’s own and the ‘personal assistance’ that together allow (and require) Jarle to
choose and decide for himself.

The subject of technology: the competent normal subject

What the above analyses suggest is that Jarle’s agencies, subjectivities and embodiments,
together with the relations, practices, materials, technologies, and collectives they are
enacted in, all tend to become ordered in specific ways. They become ordered, and also
contribute to ordering. Further, the analyses also suggest that the enactments are related,
Disability and the promises of technology 233

and often implied in each other. The questions that follow here, then, are how these
different enactments go together to make a particular kind of subject, and what kind of
ordering this subject is involved in.
My argument is that the mode of ordering disability at work here is geared towards
normalization. It works by way of compensation to build and fix in place an order of
the normal, and to turn disabled people into competent normal subjects. This order is
enacted, and enacts itself, in and through subjects and bodies, technologies and physical
environments, healthcare practices and relations, policy documents and social services,
rehabilitation methods and grants for the manufacturers of technical aids, the media and
even more distant locations and practices. The links between enactments of this order
– for instance in everyday life on the one hand and policy documents and discourse on
the other – go through an extensive apparatus of social services and other compensatory
measures and means that include for instance the adaptation of physical environments and
provision of technical aids. Indeed, it is the collection, articulation and translation of the
normalizing mode of ordering into a welfare state ideology and public policy on disability
that has become embedded in an extensive apparatus of public services and measures that
lends it its strength in the ordering of disability in Norway.
But what specifically is it that normalization strives to enact and establish? How can we
describe the specific composition, form and character of this competent normal subject
and how does it arise from interaction with technologies? And, finally, what does it make
of disability, as well as of ability? I will start with agency. What my data and analyses show
is that the normal competent actor is discontinuous, bounded and detached. Normally,
and ideally, agency is seen as a capability given in the individualized subject and in the
naturally ordered and bounded body – as a sort of disposition or available functionality.
Disability, however, is constituted as a breakdown of this normal order of the body,
undermining the capability to act. As such disability is seen to constitute dependency,
and the disabled body to be unbounded and continuous, at best relying on a network of
relations that enables one to act.
The strategy for compensating for disability within normalization also builds upon this
image of agency as distributed in relations: one approaches normality, here in the form of
a capability for action, by putting in place a functional network of relations. This set of
material arrangements may include both people and technologies. However, it is only the
disabled body and person who is seen to be an actor produced in a network, with shifting
boundaries, and to be dependent on agency that is distributed and delegated. The normal
competent actor is seen to have natural, inherent and bodily bounded agency.
This is also apparent in how technologies used by disabled people are described in ways
unlike those used by abled people. Technologies used by disabled people are conceived
of as ‘assistive technologies’ or ‘technical aids’, and disabled people are constituted as
dependent upon these. It is not usually suggested that abled users depend on aids or need
them in the same way. So here is a paradox, and a contradiction, within normalization: on
the one hand the norm is a bounded, and a naturally bounded actor. On the other hand,
normalization proceeds by way of a theory of agency as a network effect.
But my argument is that agency is not a capability or property that belongs inherently in
particular and bounded human bodies. Agency is always mediated. People are not actors,
234 Ingunn Moser

they are enabled to act in and by the practices and relations in which they are located, and
they become actors because agency is distributed and attributed. The difference is that with
standardized abled actors, this distribution, the arrangements and even the bodies tend to move
into the background and become invisible. With disabled actors, however, the heterogeneous
materiality and embodiment is much more present and visible. And the reason it does not
disappear into the background is that it is constantly problematic. It does not fit with the
standardized environments that allow agency to flow without constant interruption.
I think that this situation (with one theory of agency for the presumptively normal actor
and another for the abnormally disabled) is one reason why active and independent agency
is so important to many disabled people. One may very well be enabled to act, but then
one might find that agency is not attributed to the enabled actor but to an other that acts
by enabling. In this situation, active and independent agency, as in the form of spontaneous
action, are capabilities that contribute to the creation of a bounded actor. Despite the networks
and relations they rest upon in practice, demonstrations of these capabilities help make
boundaries and discontinuities. The enactment of active agency attributes – and centres –
agency in the body and the subject. Independent agency works to produce a bounded and
discontinuous actor. When it comes to the ordering of the subject, the data and analyses
show that the competent normal subject is composed of a set of subjectivities including
autonomy, discretionary choice, centred control, and strategic planning and management.
As noted, they all contribute to – and rest upon – a centring of the subject. In this way, these
subjectivities contribute to building a distinction between body and mind.
Again the mode of ordering geared towards normalization operates with two theories
of subjectivity, one for the subject that is taken to be normal, and another for the potential
subject-to-be. And again my argument is that just as agency is always mediated and emerges
in relations, so subjective capacities and competences such as autonomy, discretionary
choice, centred control and strategic planning and management are also always the
distributed effects of relations. Subjectivities are locations or positions that are made
possible in relations, practices and collectives that reach far beyond the individualized
human mind – and body. And yet what the above demonstrations also show is that the
competent normal subject is centred. The norm is that it is centred. But how does this
work? How can things be distributed and centred at the same time? My suggestion is
that, within the distributed relations, paths are built that work to centre the subject, to
build centres of knowledge, reasoning, thinking, consciousness – and agency. The point,
then, is that centredness, autonomy, discretion, and also independence and active agency,
are achievements which rest upon distribution – but where the distribution usually, and
ideally, disappears into the background. And also, in the same way as the environmental
control system that works to centre Jarle rests upon distributions and networks of relations,
so too do other centred locations of knowing and consciousness.
The remaining difference however is, again, that whereas the standardized environments
and forms of embodiment of abled normal subjects seem to become invisible, and have
the ability to perform ‘disembodied mind’, non-standard, disabling, and even normalizing
and so enabling networks usually do not. With disabled subjects materiality resists: there
are always bad passages, missing links and problematic bodies which mean that the
distributions remain visible and present in the situation.
PART V

Projects and practices

Professional practice guidance on disability, accessibility and inclusion has been available
for many years, underpinned by legislation in many different countries (Mace 1985;
Goldsmith 2001, 2012). There are also many other published resources aimed at enabling
architects and other built environment professionals to think about disability, diversity and
design more generally (Anthony 2001; Pullin, 2011; Tauke et al. 2015).
As with other sections of this Reader, contributions have been selected that build on,
but also engage critically with, these resources. This is particularly by thinking about
disability differently – as something that helps us engage with what constitutes normality;
as diverse lived experiences which designers can learn from; and as a way of generating
alternative ways of ‘doing’ architecture.
This perspective is important because disability within architecture and urban design
practice is often assumed as a loss and a lack, something to be both ‘accommodated by’
and ‘ameliorated through’ the design of built space. Whilst movements for inclusive
and universal design and accessibility have been of crucial importance, informed both
by disability activism and by generations of committed designers and policymakers, such
approaches can also be critiqued and rethought. As already noted, designing a ‘normal’
environment and then ‘retrofitting’ it for people with disabilities is argued by many
disability studies scholars as ‘enforcing normalcy’ (Davis 1995) instead of critically and
creatively challenging the grounds on which those environments are made in the first
place (in particular see Hamraie, Dolmage and Price, this volume).
In recent years, for example, many disability activists have been campaigning for a shift
from interpreting disability as a loss or tragedy, and towards valuing the richness of bio- and
neuro-diversity. Rather than aiming to enable disabled people to become ‘more normal’
such approaches emphasise the gains that corporeal and intellectual differences can bring
(see Silberman 2015, for example, on autism). In Deaf culture, the concept of Deaf Gain
is defined as a reframing of ‘deaf ’ as a form of sensory and cognitive diversity that has the
potential to contribute to the greater good of humanity (Bauman and Murray 2013, 2014).
The first piece in this part, on the development of Deaf Space, demonstrates what Deaf Gain
might look like in practice. It originated at Gallaudet University, the only higher education
institution in which all programmes and services are specifically designed to accommodate
deaf and hard of hearing students, and was undertaken as a participatory process through a
series of courses offered within the university syllabus, thus enabling students to research
and co-design principles and spaces that start from Deafness. As Hansel Bauman, who led
on the creation of DeafSpace principles, has said, ‘The clarity with which a deaf person
communicates relates to the clarity and clutter of what’s around them. Space becomes an
essential part of how you communicate’ (O’Connell 2012). In ‘Deaf Space’, reproduced
here, Todd Byrd graphically – and poetically – describes the spatial and design implications.
In ‘Along disabled lines: Claiming spatial agency through installation art’, Amanda
Cachia also forefronts the unique qualities of disabled bodies. She explores the work
of two artists – Wendy Jacob and Corban Walker – who have worked with lines to map
out what Cachia calls ‘a new geometry of space’, informed by the respective experiences
of autism and dwarfism. These installation projects thus act as a commentary on, and
disruption of, normative embodiment and its associated assumptions both about artistic
practice and about what constitutes ‘proper’ gallery space.
238 Projects and practices

Cachia is deeply interested in shifting normal assumptions about disabled subjectivity

and agency through art, opening up for critique how rarely it is addressed in art theory (see
Siebers, this volume), and also explores how ‘the disabled body offers new perspectives
on architecture itself: on its simultaneous limits and possibilities, and how it might be
disrupted and transformed to account for a wider variety of body types and movements’.
Thinking about what can be learned from diverse disabilities is not to ignore the very
real (and various) effects of living with impairment. But it is to recognise that disabled
people are already experts in engaging with the built environment, as they negotiate its
complexities on a daily basis. Disabled people are not just passive users of services and
buildings, but can offer something powerful back to architects and other built environment
professionals. In ‘The Ramp House: Building inclusivity’, Thea McMillan and Katie
Lloyd Thomas write about one particular design process where a foundational aim was to
involve the whole family, including daughter Greta who is severely disabled. This, then, is
not a story of ‘special needs’ and accessibility requirements but of what the writers call an
‘ongoing process of inclusivity’ where the new building has grown to embody a resonant
set of relationships between the people in the house, and the many others who have been,
and/or are involved. As they put it, ‘for support workers, carers, friends and visitors, the
Ramp House can alter perceptions of what a disabled person can do, replacing limitations
and practicalities with possibilities and dreams’.
In the next piece, ‘Resistant seating’, Sophie Handler also works within a participatory
process, in this case with older people in East London, UK. The project not only engaged
with the diverse experiences of ageing, but also started from an examination of how sitting
down in public comes to be ‘normally’ enacted in particular forms rather than others (see
also Liz Crow, this volume). From this point of view, the necessary but often impromptu
need to sit down for older people becomes a ‘mis-use of space’; can even be re-imagined as
an act of resistance. By designing a series of small devices – as with the tinkering described
by Bess Williamson in this volume – the right to sit down in public becomes a ‘discrete, if
still defiant, kind of adaptive action: to accommodate personal needs where the designed
environment fails’.
In the final contribution to the collection, Sara Hendren starts from one of the devices
commonly associated with disabled people, the ramp. Her intention is to defamiliarise its
simple and ‘ordinary’ geometry – both to explore alternative potentials that may have been
missed, and to open up for study an often overlooked (and thus underrated) technology.
Re-thinking and redesigning the ramp as a moveable and multi-use artefact enables it, she
suggests, to take on new kinds of poetic life.
The projects and practices here, then, despite their variety and angles of view, are
energised by similar concerns. That is, they all make creative interventions that are deeply
informed by diverse disabled peoples’ experiences, underpinned by the belief that working
in this way can challenge some of the simplistic and unspoken assumptions that persistently
act to make disabled people marginalised and invisible within ‘normal’ architectural and
built environment design. In a multitude of smaller and bigger ways, they start from the
belief that architecture – as a discipline and as built space – has a lot to gain by learning
more about how to think and do dis/ability differently.
Projects and practices 239

Todd Byrd (2007)

Reprinted from Gallaudet Today: the Magazine, Spring 2007,

http://www.gallaudet.edu/university_communications/
gallaudet_today_magazine/deaf_space_spring_2007.html.

A yellow ball bounces down the steps of Clerc dormitory, out the door, and rolls across
Hanson Plaza [at Gallaudet University]. Gaining momentum, it careens down the Lincoln
Circle sidewalk and takes a turn at the Hall Memorial Building, cutting a trail across
campus. The ball symbolizes a Gallaudet student, but it is more accurate to say that it
represents any deaf person, whose language and culture are best suited to an environment
that, like the ball is spherical and free flowing. Dr. MJ Bienvenu, ‘74 & G-’83, chair of the
Department of ASL and Deaf Studies and co-chair of the James Lee Sorenson Language
and Communications Center (SLCC) Planning Committee, calls a three-year, student-
centered Deaf Space project to explore the architectural needs of deaf people, “personally
and professionally exciting.” She asks, “If no one was using sign language, how could
a visitor to Gallaudet know it is a university for deaf people?” Not by looking at the
buildings. “If you look at Gallaudet and at Harvard [University], both have dignified and
prestigious buildings, but the two places are very different,” said Bienvenu. So, what about
the campus environment represents deaf culture and experience?
The same question was asked earlier by campus constituents serving on the SLCC
Planning Committee. “We need a place of identity, so we began looking at what deaf space
entails,” said Bienvenu. Seeking an answer, the planning committee held workshops to
develop a model. Putting a finger on aspects of the campus that are not conducive to deaf
sensibilities was easy – a stairway may appear aesthetically attractive, but prove to be a
barrier to sign communication. Natural lighting, such as in the Jordan Student Academic
Center (JSAC), is pleasing, but can be too harsh on sunny days and too dim when the sky
is overcast. In these cases, artificial light can bridge the extremes. Blind spots in hallways at
corners, or a door that is opened suddenly can prove hazardous to two signers engrossed
in conversation. “So, we had a great understanding of what we wanted,” said Bienvenu,
“but we needed an architect.”
242 Todd Byrd

Guidance in interactive design

Identifying exactly what constitutes deaf space proved much more elusive than what does
not. So, a quest began for a definition. At one workshop, committee members, deaf faculty,
students and administrators took pen and paper and set out across campus.
This inclusive group identified several qualities they would like to see enacted on
campus: more facilities like the SLCC that will connect campus groups and encourage
interaction; architectural features that retain historical links to the past but incorporate a
look to the future and eliminating potential barriers that wouldn’t be an issue for hearing
people but impede conversation for deaf people – widening narrow sidewalks and, when
possible, replacing stairs with ramps.
Plans for a course to further investigate these concepts were first made public by
architect Hansel Bauman, a speaker at the 2006 Graduate Hooding exercises. Bauman,
whose business is based in California, is one of the architects in the SLCC project due
to his expertise in designing academic buildings that foster interaction. Bauman said the
class is actually an outgrowth of the SLCC design process: “We began to realize there are a
lot of benefits in using the concepts [of open space and a deaf-friendly environment] that
are being applied to the SLCC to all new campus facilities and renovations.” Bauman said
that he and his brother, Dr. Dirksen Bauman, a professor in the ASL and Deaf Studies
Department, Dr. Benjamin Bahan, also a professor in the department, and others from the
deaf community often have long conversations about the interaction between architecture
and cultural studies. From these discussions, they conceived the notion of having these ideas
developed through a course at Gallaudet. Former Provost Jane Fernandes and President
Emeritus I. King Jordan agreed that the program had great potential and approved adding
it to the deaf studies curricula.
Hansel Bauman said it makes sense that this class is offered through the Department of
ASL and Deaf Studies. “Architecture is one of the key ways a culture manifests itself in the
physical world,” he explained. “Deaf culture centers around the language. The language
has all the elements of architecture – the spatial kinesthetic of sign language, the desire of
deaf people for the visual access that open space affords/lends itself to express the deaf way
of being.” So, exactly what does that mean when it comes to designing a building with a
deaf person’s needs in mind? “That’s what we’re working toward,” he replied.

Maluma or takete?
Space that comprises free flowing, circular movements is associated with the anthropological
term “maluma,” which conjures up images of a soft, flowing aesthetic – the essence of deaf
language and culture. The opposite of maluma is “takete,” a rigid, sharp, angular aesthetic.
When designing homes for a hearing person, for example, the architect is conscious of the
desire to create walls that enclose space – takete – which translates into a feeling of security.
But in performing the same task for a deaf person, for example, the architect needs to be
cognizant of the desire for visual access, which means less walls, and in their place “implied
enclosures” – maluma. This can be accomplished through designing partial walls that are
less than floor-to-ceiling height, or using building materials such as clouded glass as an
alternative to brick, concrete, or drywall to create rooms that afford privacy yet preserve a
Deaf space 243

sense of openness. The strategic placement of skylights and artificial lighting, and installing
vertical glass panels next to doors are other ways that enhance the architectural aesthetic
embraced by deaf people
The Deaf Space class began in the fall semester with eight graduate students, and for
the spring semester expanded to 12 students, two of whom are undergraduates. The fall
semester class was six credits and combined two deaf studies classes – one on visual studies,
taught by Benjamin Bahan, and the other on cultural studies, led by Dirksen Bauman.
Hansel Bauman co-taught in both classes.
The theories on what constitutes deaf space that were discussed by the students and
their professors during the fall semester were applied to student life on Kendall Green.
Students paired up and analyzed each dormitory, documenting through drawings and
photographs what supported interaction and what didn’t. The students were given a
practical application: the design for the Clerc dormitory, which is slated for an overhaul.
They presented their concepts to the architects and design team working on the renovation,
and their ideas were incorporated into the design work. “So the students had a very
direct and important impact on the project,” said Hansel Bauman. They also charted the
development of Kendall Green since it was founded in 1864. In addition, they conducted
case studies of other universities where students were afforded significant input in the
architectural designs of new buildings or renovations, therefore giving them a sense of
belonging and ownership of these facilities.
Like many college campuses, academics and day-to-day life lead separate existences
on Kendall Green – the cafeteria and dormitories taking up the north sector of campus
and academics to the south. While some people think it’s a good philosophy to separate
the two functions, others feel that the separation detracts from the college experience
and that life and study should be intermingled. That concept gives the deaf space class
the challenge of creating an environment that is more of a community. Included in the
University’s current Facilities Master Plan – a list of planned capital improvements
projects through 2012 that is on file in the Washington, D.C. Office of Planning and
Zoning – is for Ballard North and West to be demolished and replaced with apartment-
style housing, and to replace the Hanson parking garage with a campus green, said Hansel
Bauman. “So, the University did have some foresight in deaf-friendly space,” he said. An
idea generated by the students that is not in the Master Plan, he added is an additional
student center, separate from the JSAC. “There is a feeling now that there is nowhere on
campus that is welcoming,” he said. “This would be a hub, a homey touch that would be
a common gathering place.”
The students were able to test their theories over the spring semester in a studio – a
former computer room in the basement of Benson Hall – where they created drawings
and models. For example, Hansel Bauman displayed a model of Clerc Hall, based on
the students’ ideas. The design of the ground floor gives the impression that it is part of
the surrounding landscape. A ramp for wheelchair users leads to a second-floor entrance,
lending barrier-free access to deaf people walking while engrossed in conversation. The
ramp is symbolic of the “third person” in deaf culture – typically, when three deaf people
walk together, two converse while the third acts as a guide, looking out for obstacles and
charting the course.
244 Todd Byrd

Looking beyond the campus

Signing cafes. Movies by deaf filmmakers enjoyed while sipping cappuccino served by
ASL-trained wait staff. A visual media center showcasing the works of deaf artists from
around the world. Housing for Gallaudet faculty, students with families, and deaf senior
citizens. These are just some of the ideas the deaf space students would like to see at “New
Town at Capital City Market.”
The D.C. City Council enacted legislation last December calling for development of 24
acres immediately west of Kendall Green that is characterized by a market and wholesale
businesses. Since Gallaudet owns about 3.7 acres of the parcel, making it the largest
landowner in the market project, the class wants to make the deaf community’s needs
known while development plans are being drawn up.
The students feel that the market – and its close proximity to the New York Avenue/
Florida Avenue/Gallaudet University Metro Station – presents an ideal opportunity to
enhance Gallaudet’s visibility. They reason that the market is already a glorious potpourri
of languages and cultures, and that representation by deaf entrepreneurs should be
added to the mix. They foresee deaf-owned businesses, advocacy agencies for the deaf
community, restaurants and shops whose staff know ASL, and art galleries and theaters
for deaf artists. They also envision deaf-friendly, green buildings that draw their electricity
from alternative energy sources.
The deaf space group also investigated ways the market project can meet Gallaudet’s
housing needs. The results of a survey they conducted show that only 26 of 225 Gallaudet
faculty live near the University. This means as soon as their daily teaching duties are done,
faculty usually make a hasty retreat from campus. While this may help them beat rush hour
traffic, it prevents them from staying for evening events and interacting with the community.
Gallaudet students who are married and/or have families face a housing shortage. The 36
apartments at the University are full and have a waiting list of 40. And what about a place
near Gallaudet for deaf senior citizens to live with their peers? The solution, the deaf space
students say, can be found by incorporating housing into the market’s planning.

Visualizing the possibilities

While defining deaf space is a work in progress, there is no question that the concept has
jolted the imaginations of the students who have taken the course. It has inspired them to
consider the possibilities, using the power of architecture as a catalyst. At presentations to
the campus, where they share their ideas, the atmosphere is electric with the excitement
they exude. And it is contagious, as members of the audience come forth time and again to
fuel their ideas. They envision a new Gallaudet – a model place that will further its global
role as the leader in deaf education by becoming the leader in language, culture, the arts,
and international development.
What began as a study on deaf space has evolved into thesis projects for some students.
For example, Matthew Malzkuhn is writing his master’s thesis on deaf space in deaf
people’s homes. Another graduate student, Thomas Halseth, completed his thesis on the
Gallaudet Library and its lack of deaf space design principles.
Deaf space 245

Malzkuhn’s research focuses on deaf homeowners who are designing new homes or
renovating existing ones, to document the ways they make their home environment “fit
their deaf ways of being,” he said. “Up until now, deaf people usually were understood
through two categories – education and language,” said Malzkuhn. “Do these categories
fully explain how we live our lives? Do they tell us about deaf people’s cultural values?
They barely even scratch the surface. … These are some of the questions that I am
addressing through my thesis.”
The Deaf Space project has given Malzkuhn food for thought about the deaf community
and the ways it expresses itself. “When we look at other cultures and their habitats, we can
learn a lot from just exploring the space they occupy. How would that be different with
deaf people? We have such uniqueness in how we form our spaces.” He added that when
classmates Robert Arnold and Ryan Commerson suggested a sign for deaf space that comes
from the French Sign Language sign for three-dimensional, it dawned on him that deaf
people are “spherical people,” he said. “I hadn’t put much thought to that. … it (the deaf
space symbol) shows that we communicate in a spherical way, using sign language… . We
converse in a circle, we arrange ourselves in a circle – the list goes on. It blew my mind.”
For other students, the Deaf Space project offers a welcome chance to get in on a new
study on an important yet overlooked aspect of deaf people’s lives. When Commerson first
learned about the Deaf Space project, he was anxious to become involved. “Deaf people
have never had a place of their own in terms of architectural ownership, so my interest was
piqued by an opportunity to create a space that reflects our identity,” he said.
Commerson, a graduate student whose concentration is in cultural studies, finds it
serendipitous that the program began last fall when the University was embroiled in protest.
“The protest was about leadership and university philosophy. As a result, we were faced with
a challenge to revisit the academic rigor, shared governance, and history of isolation from the
academic community, so this project served as a perfect model to emulate in its innovative
research and collaboration of administrators, faculty, staff, and students,” he said.
What struck Commerson after getting involved in the project was how deaf people
“intuitively and collectively know what kind of space reflects our identity and being.” He
said it was only a matter of weeks before the class developed a set of principles to guide it
in its research. “Personally, I’ve come to a conclusion that the deaf space principles would
benefit everyone all over the world, not just deaf people, because humans are naturally
collective and tactile,” said Commerson. “For me, the Deaf Space project is just one
more validation that being deaf is truly a great thing; that being a visual-tactile oriented
member of a collectivist culture has something of value that can be shared with the world.”
Malzkuhn shares Commerson’s viewpoint on why the architectural principles of deaf
space make sense in almost every design project, and adds, adamantly, “They are beyond
practical. They are absolutely necessary.”
Winston Churchill said, “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape
us.” If the spark that has started with the students in the Deaf Space project becomes a
flame, then the rising generation of deaf leaders will certainly play a role in molding the
future of the deaf community.
Will these ideas be implemented? Who will invest in these projects? Will they change the
world? Today, there are no answers, but the vision had been formed, and a dialogue has begun.
246 Todd Byrd

FIGURE 20.1Examples from the DeafSpace Design Guidelines. Reprinted by permission of

Hansel Bauman
In 2005 architect Hansel Bauman (hbhm architects) starting working with Gallaudet’s ASL (American Sign
Language) Deaf Studies department to create the DeafSpace Project, an initiative that sought to develop
architectural guidelines based on how deaf people interact with their built surroundings.
Over the next five years, the DSP developed the DeafSpace Guidelines, a catalogue of over one hundred
and fifty distinct DeafSpace architectural design elements that address the five major touch points between deaf
experiences and the built environment: space and proximity, sensory reach, mobility and proximity, light and
colour, and finally acoustics. Common to all of these categories are the ideas of community building, visual
language, the promotion of personal safety and well-being.
These are being developed by Dangermond Keane Architecture (DKa). http://dangermondkeane.com/
deafspace-design-guide
21
ALONG DISABLED LINES

Claiming spatial agency through

installation art

Amanda Cachia (2016)

This essay explores how contemporary artists, Wendy Jacob (http://wendyjacob.net)

and Corban Walker (www.corbanwalker.com), configure a new disabled geometry of
space through their site-specific art installations that examine experiences of autism and
dwarfism, where the ubiquitous line is the primary mode of engagement. The artists
capture how disabled bodies uniquely move through space in order to claim spatial agency
over public environments that commonly serve “normative” audiences and art works.
Specifically, through the design of custom-made installations and objects, they call into
question how to look, and offer the viewer the opportunity to re-think the traditional
and ostensibly normative way their own embodiments move through a three-dimensional
installation in a gallery or public space. By discussing Wendy Jacob’s Between Spaces
tightrope performances (2007), her collaboration with an autistic boy in Explorers Club
(2009), and Corban Walker’s Trapezoid installation (1997), I will suggest that their works
offer experiences that shed light on complex embodiment in a bid to politically re-orient
the viewer’s perceptions of disabled subjectivity that is rarely addressed in contemporary
art theory and praxis. Additionally, offering alternative accounts of spatiality through the
phenomenology of the disabled body offers new perspectives on architecture itself: on
its simultaneous limits and possibilities, and how it might be disrupted and transformed
to account for a wider variety of body types and movements. Through the contemporary
work discussed in this paper, architecture is re-imagined and re-built.
Following this, I am interested in how audiences might become more aware of what
Tobin Siebers calls “disability aesthetics” (2006, this volume). He defines disability
aesthetics as a complex embodiment, where the atypical body is marked by nuance rather
than deficiency or deviancy. If installation itself, then, is characterized by a viewer’s
embodied experience with the art and the spaces it creates, how can complex embodiment
add new layers to this framework, especially where disabled viewers and/or artists’ bodies
bring this explicitly to our notice? If installation art has always challenged the so-called
normative embodied experience through work that helps us to see in new ways, how
248 Amanda Cachia

might it also offer perceptions of disabled corporeality that add rich new layers to this
lineage? Ultimately, I will suggest that the disability aesthetics – and geography – that
Jacob and Walker lay out is one that sets an important new agenda within contemporary
art practices and architectures, where their unique user perspectives of space should be
applied to, as Aimi Hamraie puts it, “a theory of body-environment relations focused on
social justice” (2013, see this volume).

Disability, geography and spatial agency

According to geographer B. J. Gleeson, “disability is a profoundly socio-spatial issue”
(1996: 388). Apart from being rooted in the ableism of the medical and social models,
disability oppression is also connected to the material forces of architecture and the design
and geography of urban space, because disabled people inhabit space that is distorted. By
this, Gleeson means that the “physical environment is structured in ways that exacerbate
the distorting effect of disability, through careless design and signage, for example, which
inhibit the access and mobility of disabled people” (1996: 389). Disabled people must
therefore inhabit and endure distorted space, which is the social space of the ostensibly
“normal” person. But what would happen if the disabled subject were to create their own
idealized, yet practical space to “fit” their complex embodiment, thereby transforming the
generally inaccessible geographic landscape in their everyday lives?
Theorist Elizabeth Grosz asks if architecture can construct a better future for our
citizens, and suggests that while architects must keep social and political problems in
mind, it is better if they dwell on exploration and invention, as architecture is a key mode
of experimental practice. She says, “architecture is a set of highly provisional ‘solutions’
to the question of how to live and inhabit space with others” (2001: 148). If there is an
acknowledgement of multiple bodies and complex embodiment, then architecture needs
to experiment with how this might become manifest through design. What can we learn
about this through exploring art installation inside the normative space of the white cube
of an art gallery, or a public art installation outside the walls of a gallery or a museum?
Can artists “disable” normative space by obstructing or offering new modes of mobility or
other multi-modal, architectural sensations?
In Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture (2011) Awan, Schneider and Till offer
numerous art installation projects where contemporary artists are challenging normative
models of how urban space is designed. Referencing Henri Lefebvre’s 1974 book, The
Production of Space, they suggest that social space must draw on the contribution of others,
rather than relying on a fixed template of expert authorship. Social space is dynamic and
evolving, where multiple actors can contribute to its progress at different stages. Social space
is also not neutral, and indeed, nor is the gallery. Instead, it is political, and so charged with
the binaries of power/empowerment, interaction/isolation, control/freedom and more. As
the authors of Spatial Agency note, “…every line on an architectural drawing should be
sensed as the anticipation of a future social relationship, and not merely as a harbinger of
aesthetics or as an instruction to a contractor” (2011: 30). How, then, can transformation be
achieved with lines beyond those that are drawn on architectural plans? Engaging with how
Jacob and Walker use line offers one way of thinking and designing differently.
Along disabled lines 249

Awan et al. suggest that it is through the concept of spatial agency that artists and
architects might find opportunity to contribute new thinking around oppressive or
marginalizing spaces, and in ways that need to be articulated in a broader spatial field,
beyond artwork or building as product. I will suggest that Jacob and Walker enact this
very spatial agency for the benefit of disabled subjectivity through their practices. While
it is true that altering the embedded socio-spatial dynamics in the environment or in the
gallery will not necessarily lift all that oppresses disabled people at large, it is a beginning
in order to think about how spatial agency may contribute to challenging the “normative”
user experience of contemporary art and even architecture. Spatial agency as it applies to
disability will insist on a type of mapping of disabled corporeality, tracing the complex
embodiment of multiple disabled experiences, ranging from autism to dwarfism. How do
the bodies of an autistic child or a man with dwarfism push back against spaces that are
prohibitive to them, or inaccessible? The body–environment interactions of Jacob’s project
with an autistic boy, and Walker’s engagement with scale and architecture in his combat
against the “staturization” of space (“the dominant preference for able bodies of an average
height” (Kruse 2010: 184)) both speak to how these engagements can be political sites and
contribute to the lexicon of spatial agency, and revised spatial identities. I’d like to explore
how the flesh of the complex body in conversation with architecture, the environment and
its spatial elements and qualities can also contribute to knowledge production in art theory
and praxis, and perhaps more broadly in terms of lived architectural space (Seamon 2010).

Disembodying the gallery: applying the Corban rule

Contemporary Irish artist Corban Walker’s work often relates to architectural scale and
spatial perception, utilizing industrial materials such as steel, aluminum and glass, drawing
on minimalism to highlight different perspectives in relation to height and scale. Walker
has anchondroplasia, the most common type of dwarfism. He is four feet tall and creates
his sculpture stacks in direct proportion to his body using the “Corban rule,” a precise
mathematical calculation he devised, wherein he uses his own height as measure of his
art. This spurs viewers to think about the built environment in different terms. Walker has
talked about how he tries to get viewers to bend, crouch, twist or turn as they encounter
his works from new positions. For example, in his Trapezoid installation (Figure 21.1) the
viewer sees several rows of stainless steel wire lines strung from one side of a gallery wall
to the other, suspended approximately four feet above the ground. Then upon walking to
another section of the gallery, the lines begin again, and repeat themselves, threading from
one side of the room to the next, using the standard dimension of four feet as an elevation
point from the ground, reaching up to the lowest row of the steel lines. Walker is using
his height as a measuring point for the elevation of the lines, so that he is disrupting the
average-height viewer’s spatial flow as they walk through a gallery space.
Walker thus provides a point of view that refuses the typical, normal or average. Bending
down to see the installation shifts “standard-sized” audiences from their usual, unthought
about looking straight-on viewpoint of an artwork. Walker wants to focus on drawing
people downwards, closer to the ground, into a dimension equivalent to the “Corban
scale.” As Walker is four feet tall, he usually has to crane his neck to look up at people’s
250 Amanda Cachia

FIGURE 21.1 Corban Walker (1997) Trapezoid, Ridinghouse Editions, London, March 6th –
April 19th (catalogue)
Photos courtesy of the artist.
Along disabled lines 251

faces or reach up to shake someone’s hand in his everyday reality. Trapezoid reverses this
“staturization of space” (Kruse 2010: 184). As the name implies, the artist is hoping to
ensnare the visitor into this throng of lines, disrupting their smooth path so that they are
forced to consider an alternative perspective in viewing space at a different scale – a re-
staturization through spatial disorientation for average-height visitors.
Walker disembodies the gallery frame through this disruption in space by the effective
use of lines, therein claiming an alternative spatial agency in a domain that usually privileges
the average-height viewing position, where paintings are hung at a so-called universal and
standard eye-level. Walker’s work critically intersects with many conventions in art history and
exhibition curation, such as Rudolf Arnheim’s belief that “the viewer creates a decisive center,”
and thus that average height is the idealized viewing position that affects everything around
him or her (1982: 16). But how and what is seen by a viewer depends on their spatial position
and their orientation towards an art object or event. For Arnheim when paintings or objects
are seen head-on within the vertical dimension, they are seen well because they are viewed at
a comfortable distance. He says this comfort is disrupted when works of art are engaged along
the horizontal plane, because “this is the dimension of most of our actions in space” (1982:
13). If our feet “get in the way of our eyes,” it will cause a strange optical situation, because:

the eyes are meant to look forward, to scan the environment in search of whatever
shows up vertically as friend or foe. For the eyes to look down, the head or body has
to bend, and even then the object underfoot cannot be viewed perpendicularly. It will
be seen at an angle and therefore distorted, and that angle changes continuously as
the person, engaged in his business, moves across the floor. The viewer’s eyes are too
close to encompass and analyze any extended horizontal pattern as a whole. Different
portions present themselves in the visual field as the viewer changes position.
(1982: 116)

Indeed, Arnheim’s discussion fits squarely within the realm of visual and optical
sensations experienced by the dwarf, who is positioned at an alternative height from the
average-height person and gazes upon different portions of the visual field in comparison
to others. Arnheim here also perfectly (and unintentionally) describes Walker’s strategy
and therefore his spatial agency in Trapezoid: for Walker is already aware of the spatial
disorientation that ensues when one is forced to look downward, bend, crouch or twist in
order to look upon a fixed object or move without visual or physical obstruction. By forcing
his “normal” viewers to encounter some discomfort, or at least, temporary distortion, he
asks them to take notice of the daily realities of disabled people’s geographies.
Through the lines of string or stainless steel, the ideal of the framed painting is also negated
as there are now additional conceptual and multi-modal layers to consider. The viewer is
forced to reflect on the physical context and “their own participation in the production or
experience of any meaning in the encounter with art objects” (1982: 116). This is the axis
in which the work of Walker spins, as his work provides embodied encounters to the public
that act to reveal the artificial construction of conventional gallery spaces and “normal”
viewing experiences. Here the aesthetics of disability renders alternative meanings that
make explicit and expressive the often hidden inter-relationships between body size, art
252 Amanda Cachia

object and movements through space. The Corban rule adds a fascinating and evocative
intervention and juxtaposition with other human scale devices, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s
Vitruvian Man (1487) and Le Corbusier’s Modulor (1943). The Modulor, in particular, is an
anthropometric scale of proportions devised by the Swiss-born French architect. It is based
on the six-foot height of an English man with his arm raised. These measurements do not
represent the diversity, form and shape of all bodies, and these measurements translated
into architecture and our built environment create barriers for disabled people. These art
historical aesthetic ideals of perfection, proportion and beauty are found in classical and
modernist art, and in architecture through concepts such as the Golden Section. This is “an
average measure conforming to man” (Wolfflin 1994: 169). Michael Davidson has talked
about how for eighteenth century German art historians and writers Gottfried Lessing
and Johann Winckelmann, “a realistic depiction of a ‘misshapen man’ is less important

FIGURE 21.2 Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, c. 1487, pen and ink with wash over metal
point on paper
Collection of Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice
Along disabled lines 253

FIGURE 21.3 Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, 1887–1965) Le Modular 1945.

for its verisimilitude than for its demonstration of artisanal superiority. What is clear …is
that the ability of aesthetics to define affective and sensory response depends on – indeed,
is constituted by – bodily difference” (Davidson 2015: 26). Regretfully, the widespread
representation of a bodily ideal in Vitruvian Man (Figure 21.2) and the Modulor (Figure 21.3)
in art history and architecture contributes to ableist attitudes and discrimination against the
disabled minority. This is because there is an internalized, almost unconscious assumption
of able-bodiedness in art and architecture theory and praxis – if the assumption becomes
“disrupted” by non-normative corporeal forms, then these forms have historically been
rejected, and marked as pathological, diseased, and “other.” Walker’s own Corban rule
works as an antithesis to these deeply entrenched ideals.

Tracing a line: minimalism, post-minimalism and Jacob

Wendy Jacob is an American artist whose work bridges traditions of sculpture, invention
and design, and explores relationships between architecture and perceptual and bodily
254 Amanda Cachia

experience. Given Jacob’s interest in body and space, she has said it was natural for her
to find a way into disability studies. Recent projects have involved collaboration with
architects, engineers, circus performers, and working with deaf and autistic individuals.
In 2007, Jacob developed a project entitled Between Spaces, which involved a professional
tightrope walker (whom she recruited from a local circus company) balancing and
walking on a thirty-eight-foot practice tightrope wire. The tightrope walker moved from
a third floor gallery by stepping out the window and crossing six feet to the stacks of an
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) library next door, which involved traversing
over a thirty-foot drop (Figure 21.4). The performance only lasted minutes, and it was
only by chance if a visitor happened to be in the space to witness it.
A precursor to this project, Line, Cambridge (2005), was when Jacob ran a tightrope
wire through the living room of a home in Cambridge and had a performer cross it
while the family dined in the next room during Thanksgiving (Figure 21.5). Jacob’s lines
are effectively cutting through public and private space by way of open windows, thus
demonstrating the permeability of assumed borders, but also slicing through any “normal”
neutrality of architectural and social space.
These projects led Jacob to focus on Explorers Club in 2009, which was a series of
photographs documenting two years of explorations through the meandering logic of
a line, and chronicling the adventures of a twelve-year-old autistic boy named Stefano
Micali, as he shapes and defines urban space according to his particular visual and spatial
perspective. According to a discussion I had with Jacob in November 2013, Stefano found
it reassuring to trace public and private space with string or tape, given his concern around
how space is ordered. Jacob has said that “although his sight is perfectly fine, [Micali] has
challenges integrating visual spatial information, particularly large, open spaces. He has
devised tactics for framing or subdividing space, such as wearing eyeglass frames, even
though he doesn’t need corrective lenses, and running string around his room” (Badger
and Jacob 2011: 4). Given Jacob had been working on projects where she was altering
space with lines as discussed above, it made sense for her to work with Micali, who had
a similar interest. He decided to call their project and its ensuing activities Explorers Club.
They spent the next two years travelling all over Boston and Cambridge by laying
down and unrolling long lines of vinyl marking tape and temporarily restructuring and
organizing the city with florescent orange lines. Jacob explains that her project was not
about the condition of autism per se, but rather “the experience of being with a particular
person (Stefano) and his particular way of organizing the world” (2011: 4). What is it to re-
imagine the world through an alternative perspective? What new ways of thinking about
space might develop? At first, Jacob had Micali divide up her studio with tape to create
smaller rooms, which eventually led to the division of space with masking tape at the
MIT gym, followed by going outdoors, including even the subway system. While Micali
laid out the tape, Jacob attempted to document the process, and another friend would go
behind reeling in the yards and yards of tape (Figure 21.6).
Through Jacob’s projects involving line, the artist is conveying how bodies in space
can be expressed differently. She does this by using tightropes and vinyl tape as modes
of interruption, definition and spatial agency. In her projects where lines cut through
architecture, the artist effectively “disables” any assumptions that built space has a
Along disabled lines 255

FIGURE 21.4 Wendy Jacob (2007) Between Spaces, Wolk Gallery and Rotch Library, MIT,
September 20, 2007
Source: Photos courtesy of the artist.
256 Amanda Cachia

FIGURE 21.5 Wendy Jacob (2005) Line, Cambridge, Performance at 21 Bowdoin St, Cambridge,
Massachusetts
Source: Photo courtesy of the artist.

definitive form or function. Through the interjection of bodies moving unusually or

atypically from one space to another, we come to understand that architecture is malleable
and open to manipulation and even political ends. In Micali’s negotiation of space and
his urban environment, he finds it useful to lay down lines as a means to manage his
spatial anxiety and, in the process, he offers opportunities for his non-autistic collaborators
to experience a familiar space differently. Weaving through and under miles of tape, the
participants began to understand how passages through space can be experienced through
an alternative complex embodiment. Like Duchamp in First Papers of Surrealism, Jacob
is reinforcing the rupture of the generalized or universalized “we” in the habitation of
Along disabled lines 257

FIGURE 21.6 Wendy Jacob with Stefano Micali (2009) Explorer’s Club, Boston, MA

Source: Photos courtesy of the artist.

258 Amanda Cachia

space, and instead reminds us of bodies as singular and independent entities, traversing
many paths (Demos 2001). She says that the more typical pedestrian who cuts through
space likely doesn’t think about alternative “non-normal” patterns of mobility, and while
Jacob’s intent is not politicized from the outset, she realizes that making work from the
perspective of one who is autistic comes with connotations of otherness that is steeped in
histories of oppression and invisibility. Echoing Duchamp’s project of displacement via his
twine spiderweb, Jacob destabilizes conventional codes of path-making and way-finding
in the division and splitting up of space with Micali (Kachur 2001) (Figure 21.7).
In “Topological Pathways of post-Minimalism,” Eric de Bruyn expresses how important
it became for minimalist artists to develop a different geometry in order to “map this
multidirectional, intensive experience of space” (2006: 34). De Bruyn was referring to
artist Dan Graham’s observation that some post-minimalist sculptural practices were
deviating from the Euclidean geometry so readily found in Minimal sculpture during the
1970s. Graham called this geometrical shift a topological “process of alteration,” where
the artist is “composing the composition” rather than starting with an authorial template

FIGURE 21.7 John D. Schiff (1907–1976). Installation View of Exhibition ‘First Papers of
Surrealism’ Showing String Installation. 1942. Gelatin silver print. 7 5/8 × 10 inches (19.4
× 25.4cm). Gift of Jacqueline, Paul and Peter Matisse in memory of their mother Alexina
Duchamp. 13-1972-9(303) Philadelphia Museum of Art. Marcel Duchamp: © Succession
Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2016
Photo credit: The Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY.
Along disabled lines 259

or frame (de Bruyn 2006: 34). Within this space, de Bruyn proposes that there are no
fixed boundaries, and “no central position of focus are available to the observer” (2006:
35). Following this, I am particularly interested in the question that de Bruyn poses –
“what critical relevance does this history of the topological pathways of postminimalism
yield for us today?”(2006: 37). I would suggest that the topological pathways of post-
minimalism has yielded rich ground in which artists like Jacob and Walker can explore
the subjectivity of disability. Jacob and Micali’s Explorers Club and Jacob’s Between Spaces
have clearly constructed an “other” topological pathway that has similar scope and vision
to the work of post-minimalism in their aspirations to compose, and stay connected to,
a “deterritorialized space of drifting signs and bodies” (2006: 40). Like the work of Dan
Graham, Jacob and Micali are transgressing the “striated space of an institutional practice
of art” (de Bruyn 2006: 40) because their line-making is not contained to the minimalist,
Euclidean grid of the white cube gallery space. Instead, the florescent wobbly lines and the
tightropes are harnessing a more complex relationship to the public spaces of full networks
of information and spatial encounters. From a Foucaultian perspective, de Bruyn says that
Graham’s (and I’ll add Jacob’s) topology moves “outside the spatial matrix of disciplinary
power,” essentially liberating the disabled subject from reductive frameworks and models
that aim to confine and constrain” (2006: 41).
By placing art works into urban space, Jacobs releases them to a larger and more public
world than the gallery. Rudolf Arnheim says that the frame “defines the reality status of
works of art as distinguished from the setting of daily life.” It has a visible detachment
from reality, and “confines the range of the picture” (1982: 52). But if for Arnheim, such a
distancing is central to artistic appreciation, for Jacob the art is challenging precisely because
it cannot necessarily be distinguished from daily life, and nor can the viewer be certain that
they are looking at this work from the outside. The viewer is now implicated in the work,
blurring the lines between inside/outside, control/freedom and more. Both Between Spaces
and Explorers Club also offer the “lived reality of the urban milieu” that happens to include
complex embodiment (De Bruyn 2006: 45), and so the works both talk back to normative
attitudes to space and its average occupation.

Conclusion
In the contemporary art installations of Corban Walker and Wendy Jacob, a new disabled
geometry of space is configured, that starts from “non-normal” experiences expressed
and interrogated through the power of lines that rupture, interrupt and decenter. Most
critically, Jacob and Walker’s works powerfully contribute to a theory of body–environment
relations, where disabled subjectivity can offer new experimental modes of thinking and
being through art, architecture and space that is never neutral, always political, and always
dynamic. There can no longer be an assumed “average” or normative uniformity in how to
engage or respond to a work of art when we remember all the variegated forms of knowing
and being in space; just as there can be no one universal design in architecture or single-
point perspective to buildings and public spaces. These artists disrupt any certainty of an
aesthetic or spatial given, by revealing that the juxtaposition between bodily relations in
space is much more heterogeneous than typically assumed. The participant conditions of
260 Amanda Cachia

both artists and audiences are now mediated and individualized through psychological,
sensory and social modes that do not claim homogeneity or standardization. Rather, making
work based on corporeal complexity offers a form of critical artistic practice centered
on experiential engagements with viewers that insists on revealing the particularities of
different embodiments-in-space. In these processes the potentialities of material space are
also opened up, to re-orientation and radical interpretation.
22
THE RAMP HOUSE

Building inclusivity

Thea McMillan with Katie Lloyd Thomas (2016)

Isabella has known her friend Greta, an eleven-year-old girl who is a wheelchair user, since
they were little. She remembers the traditional two-storey terraced house Greta grew up
in their friendly seaside neighbourhood of Portobello, Edinburgh, where Greta attends
mainstream school, and is a familiar presence. When a neighbour noticed it was getting
harder for Greta’s architect parents, Thea Chambers and Ian McMillan, to manage the
stairs with her she suggested they take a look at a backstreet lane nearby where it might be
possible to build their own home. Thanks to the generosity of Arthur who had run the
garage at the end of the lane for many years, they were able to purchase a plot and started
to design the Ramp House – an inclusive family home for Greta and her sister Bea, where
the whole house would enable Greta to lead a barrier-free included life.

Isabella: The Ramp House is really thoughtful, it doesn’t feel unusual that it has a big ramp
instead of stairs and it’s very well designed because it has everything that Greta needs and all the
equipment she needs, but it’s not in the way. There’s a wee hidey bit that has a beanbag and little
fairy lights – somewhere for Greta to chill out which is really cool. The house is really interesting.
It has lots of things you wouldn’t think of like the hot tub. It’s really bright and spacious and I
don’t think any room feels tight. Even the small chill-out room feels nice because it’s bright and
colourful. I think Greta likes it because her mum and dad can do less for her, and they don’t need
to carry her up stairs or move furniture to let her move around the place. It’s probably easier and
less stressful.

This essay comes out of a series of conversations between Thea and co-writer Katie
Lloyd Thomas, and many others, like Isabella, who have been and are involved with the
house. We present the planning, building and inhabitation of the house as an ongoing
process of inclusivity, and we endeavour also to construct an inclusive piece of writing
that welcomes and is structured around the voices and responses to the house of those
who use it. We suggest that making the experience of a disabled child the starting point
262 Thea McMillan with Katie Lloyd Thomas

of a design process transforms the way she and the family live, and opens up potential
rather than limiting expectations. The house physically embodies an alternative spatial
experience. For visitors, moving through and around it challenges their own perceptions
of disability as they too use space differently. Importantly too, the designing, building
and inhabiting of the house has opened up new possibilities for catalysing and including
wider communities, even transforming social relations – for local people who participated
in making the building happen, and for support workers, friends and relatives who use it
with the family.

Designing and inhabiting an inclusive home

Thea: We are often confronted with the physical barriers that the built environment presents; in
our own home we were able to design a fully inclusive place. Using a ramp to access all levels
provides an equality of space to us all. We have designed spaces along the ramp, connecting both
horizontally and vertically, so that the experience of the house changes as it unfolds. As we inhabit
the house, we can see how this provides variation, complexity and flexibility in the everyday use
of the house, how many spaces can be used concurrently and how it reaches its potential when it
is inhabited: movement around it, by foot or on wheels brings the experience to life.

The design process started as soon as Thea visited the plot and started imagining
how a house could be built there which would be inclusive both in terms of its spatial
organisation and in the process of its coming into being. From the beginning, the whole
family were involved in envisaging the arrangement of future spaces and activities. Greta
and her sister participated in the design process straight away; working with models to test
out and understand different spatial arrangements, and once the project was on site they
visited it regularly.

Thea: The models were especially important for Greta’s understanding of the space; we made them
large enough that Greta could easily look into them, which gave a sense of how it might be to be
in there, and of all the connections between the different spaces [Figure 22.1]. They also helped us
discover the most important connection that we wouldn’t otherwise have seen; making a balcony
between our bedroom on the ‘first level’ and the living space on the ‘ground floor’. (We noticed how
habitual our use is of the terms up ‘stairs’ and down ‘stairs’ and tried to find other ramp-oriented
terms that could describe inhabitation as happening at different ‘levels’ instead.) Now that we are
in the house this connection enables a lot more independence for Greta, as she can be in the sitting
room with friends and I can see that she is fine and happy, without anyone realising.

The design process consisted of regular Sunday family sessions around the kitchen
table, and included everything from the initial concept (the ramp) right down to choosing
materials. Bea designed the coursing of the Caithness stone walls for the ground floor
of the house, learning to use Microstation Computer Aided Design (CAD) so that she
could compare the different possibilities and choose one. She and her friend Jessica even
built the IKEA wardrobes just before they all moved in. This involvement of the whole
family in the design process has continued into the occupation of the house when Bea
The Ramp House 263

FIGURE 22.1 Greta with one of the development models for the Ramp House

Source: Photo by Thea McMillan.

will sometimes start talking about ways to redesign parts of the house. Greta hearing this
reminds the family to include her in these conversations, and so the house keeps evolving,
around the everyday of its very specific occupants as they all find different ways to use it.
Just before they moved in the family had a design session writing notes on a large
exploded model (Figure 22.2). It showed them how different each of their perceptions was
about how the spaces would be used. Now they are inhabiting the spaces, Thea says she
can see that it is quite possible for each member of the family to use each space differently.
This may have come about from the reversed design process with which they designed.
First they got the ramp to work on the site. Then they designed spaces off the ramp for
all the different things they wanted to do. This has led to a house that encompasses many
different ideas and ways of being.

Thea: Something we didn’t fully appreciate until the house was built and we were occupying
it was how important all the connections – visual, audio, as well as the physical – would be for
our everyday life. Greta cannot follow us independently so being able to understand where we
are going around the house, and to hear us talking with her from many different places keeps her
involved, and shows her an expectation of being part of everything. It is the thing that most chimes
with other families with wheelchair-users, who have experienced the difficulties of limitations to
their children’s independence, and are delighted to see spatial solutions to this.
264 Thea McMillan with Katie Lloyd Thomas

FIGURE 22.2 Development model with comments inscribed on the surfaces

Photo by Thea McMillan

The house caters for the many dimensions of family life, but it also provides
transformative spaces for Greta’s other activities with people from outside the family.

Greta’s music teacher Francesca has been doing music sessions with her for the past 5 years. She
visits the house once a week and sees Greta becoming increasingly confident about making music
and more willing to express herself by trying different music technologies (on iPad and Eyegaze).
The Ramp House 265

Francesca: Music is a very important part of Greta’s life and making music gives her an
opportunity to feel connected to other people, to engage in conversations while manifesting her
curiosity and liveliness. Greta is growing fast and with that her capacity and desire to be part of a
community, to be heard and make a contribution to the people around her. Music is encouraging
this growth and we all need a space in order to continue growing. The Ramp House gives Greta
this space, in the same way as Greta and her music give meaning to that space and bring it to life.
With its echo and acoustic, the house aims to acknowledge and honour Greta’s musical input,
which is genuine, generous, not holding anything back. In this respect, Greta can teach all us a
huge amount and inspire us to reconsider the value of sharing.
It’s just so important having a space for ourselves, in order to develop trust, intimacy and
connection in that relationship. I can see how Greta is comfortable in that space, she is safe
and at ease, and I’m not sure this is always the case within a school. There’s also something
about the music we share and the space we are in… being able to play in an open space allows
new possibilities and a desire to take different paths within music. It feels relaxed, without time
constrictions or a timetable to follow.

The potential of the Ramp House’s spaces often exceed the uses originally anticipated
in the design, including and enabling a wide range of activities and experiences, which
alter everyday living and perception both for the family and its visitors.

The Ramp House as an accessible and equalising experience of space for

all
When Greta’s friend Neve was asked what she thought Greta liked about the Ramp House
her mum thought her answer ‘was a bit literal’. She ‘was hoping for something more profound’.
Neve simply said, ‘It’s just easier for Greta to get about.’ On reflection, though, her mum thinks,
‘Perhaps she’s judging it from the perspective of a child (her and Greta being the same in this
regard) i.e., “You wouldn’t ask me about my house and why I like it, would you?”’

From the viewpoint of a child like Neve who knows Greta and her house well, there is
nothing exceptional about being able to freely navigate your own home. But accessible
space can be about more than getting around without obstacles, it is also about making
spaces that invite access and encourage new perceptions of how space can be used. For
support workers, carers, friends and visitors, the Ramp House can alter perceptions of
what a disabled person can do, replacing limitations and practicalities with possibilities
and dreams. The design was shortlisted for architectural awards, bringing judges and
journalists into the house, and all the publicity has meant that the house is hugely popular
on Open Door Days, with over 900 visitors, encompassing a great range of people including
some who use different kinds of wheelchairs, who all come to try out the spaces. Seeing
Greta using these spaces, and experiencing them themselves allows people to understand
inclusion and accessibility differently, and informs anew how they view the relationship
between bodies, space and movement. The house communicates this directly through the
visitor’s body, extending their notions of how space should and could be used and often
encouraging ideas of spatial play and experimentation.
266 Thea McMillan with Katie Lloyd Thomas

One visitor to the house on a Doors Open Day wrote in the comments book, ‘Stunning example
of imaginative problem-solving and architecture as an expression of / enabler of life. It put the
biggest smile on my face!’
Nye who is in Greta’s class at school and was her neighbour at the old house says the new
house is ‘fun for everyone… You can race down the ramp in a wheelchair or run down it.’
Sarah (who visits the house to clean) comments, ‘This would be a great place for roller-bladers.’

Thea has noticed how much easier the house makes it to welcome people. Even on
Scotland’s Doors Open Day – when the house is opened to the public for one weekend
– it never feels too full. The ramp makes a natural route that enables a flow through
the spaces for everyone, whether by wheelchair or on foot. The house welcomes people
in, starting at the front door that is rarely locked. Although you arrive straight into the
kitchen, the slowing down of the ramp and the variety of articulated spaces coming off the
ramp mean that it doesn’t feel as if people arrive directly into a private space. Although
access is physically meandering, it is visually direct, and for Greta this gives her a chance
to get ready to greet people while they make their way through the spaces and up to where
she sits at the heart of the house. Just as importantly, the house enables Greta to work and
play with her friends in an inclusive way, where there is an equality of their movement and
occupation of space.

Thea: Last time Greta’s friends came round they played Forty Forty Home where Greta and one
of the others were ‘it’. Spatially this worked really well, as there are lots of opportunities to catch
glimpses of people trying to creep down the ramp or stair, and because of this it works especially
well for Greta when she sits in one place.
Isabella: We love playing that game [Forty Forty Home] – it’s really fun! On the main ramp,
half way up there’s a bookcase and you start there and Greta and another person are at the
bottom. You have to get to the pole that splits the kitchen and the living room without Greta and
another friend catching you. You have to be really sneaky because if Greta blinks or makes a
noise, she’s seen you and you’re out.

Thea sometimes wonders how this makes Greta feel, not being able to run the circuit
with the other children in the house, but she senses that Greta feels just as involved in all this
activity and motion – because it is ‘her spaces’ and the connections between them that make
these activities possible. In this house Greta gets to have a spatial experience equivalent to that
of others around her, which is often impossible in the everyday environments beyond that
she encounters. The inclined architectural language of the ramp provides, in fact, a levelling
of spatial experience. It acts as a platform on which Greta and others share a common ground,
changing their perspectives and giving value to her own sense of self as well.

Including the local community in realising and building the house

As a built object – a set of spatial relationships – the Ramp House is inclusive in the way
that it is used and in so far as it challenges and transforms perceptions and assumptions of
The Ramp House 267

disability. But when the family designed the building, they – and their neighbours – also
constructed something else. The building of the house – in the long protracted timespan
from seeing that design could offer them a better way to live as a family, to finding a
plot, raising money, getting permissions, making it work, living in it, and establishing
a place for the house in the imagination of those too distant to visit it – also afforded
an opportunity for those outside the immediate family to act, and be included in the
process of realising the house. For each actor who became part of this collective process,
their involvement was at the same time a moment of understanding accessibility and
inclusivity differently.

Greta was one of the first to visit the plot and meet its owner, Arthur, who has run the garage at
the end of the lane for many years. He could see how much the family needed a more accessible
home, in the heart of their community, and he agreed to sell it to them with a handshake. ‘Greta
moved me,’ he says to Thea, ‘once when I was telling you about the troubles we were having,
she started to cry. It brought me up sharp. Of course disabled people are also taking things in.’

When Chambers McMillan submitted the planning application for the Ramp House
there were fifteen objections – even from some who knew Greta and her family. It was
Arthur who alerted his customers to the situation and suggested that planners might accept
their letters of support (not just the usual objections). And those letters, from local judges,
architects, headmistresses, nurses, engineers amongst others, finally ensured the planning
committee’s unanimous approval of the scheme.

Arthur explains that people from all walks of life, influential and ordinary, bring their cars into
his garage, and as good listeners, they have become the local citizens advice bureau. So all he had
to do was tell them that, ‘there’s a wee girl who needs to have an accessible house in Portobello,
and we can help her’. He had drawings and the description of the project pinned up on the wall,
and because of this planners received around seventy letters of support from people who didn’t
even know the family. ‘To tell the truth,’ says Arthur, ‘I enjoyed the fight’.

Galvanising of the local community not only contributed to the planning committee’s
eventual decision, but also provided Arthur, and others who might not even know the
family, to get involved in the project of realising an inclusive space. Others found more
direct ways to participate in the process. As construction was coming to an end, and the
family were exhausted, they knew they were going to run out of money for the finishes,
floors, storage and kitchen. At their wits’ end, now they were so near to finally moving in
they put out requests for a bit of help on Facebook, and were amazed to discover how many
volunteers turned up to help out with laying floors (Jon, Andrew and Geoff), building the
IKEA kitchen (Francesca and Rowan), bedroom wardrobes (Jess and Bea), shelving (Paul
and Geoff) and concrete pouring for the reflective pool (Roddy).

Thea: A lot of the people who turned up I only vaguely recognised, although I later found out
they knew Greta very well as their children were in her year at school. Many of these people have
become good friends, and they and their children have come to parties and enjoyed using the ramp.
268 Thea McMillan with Katie Lloyd Thomas

Thea says that when she sits in the house and looks around she sees the people who
helped build it. People wanted to get involved, to be part of making this project happen
even if in small ways – the building work was a conduit that enabled them to take part
in the realisation of the Ramp House. Unable to be directly involved with Greta, or to
achieve change on an individual basis, the many letter writers, floor layers and furniture
fixers formed temporary collectives that could together make a difference – building an
inclusive social environment as well as a physical one.

Shifting relations of expertise

The building of the Ramp House has also allowed wider networks of people to become
involved in building Greta’s world and be transformed by it, even if just in small ways.
Its ongoing presence as an accessible hub in the community has changed the way
specialist support workers are involved with Greta and the family; and the house has
helped to alter conventional hierarchies that too often sideline the specialist knowledges
of disabled people and their families. By putting Greta at the centre of the space, and
physically embodying different connections between disabled and able-bodied, amateur
and professional expertise, family and institutional support, the house changes social
relationships. It demonstrates that new alliances and new kinds of relationship are
possible, and as such it takes part in a broader political project towards goals of more
equal involvement between families with a disabled member and professional experts,
support workers and state agencies.
There is a lot of discussion in the Scottish National Health Service (NHS) about
inclusion and patient-centred care but this can be difficult to achieve in the spaces of
hospitals and institutions: so Greta’s family has always invited people to work with her
in their house. The spaces of the house are designed out of the family’s expertise and
deep understanding of Greta’s experience and desires. The house therefore embodies
and communicates that expertise and puts family and professionals on equal footing. It
‘teaches’ experts about possibilities not limitations. This space puts Greta at the centre,
shifting professionals’ emphasis away from what they can do for Greta, to what Greta can
do and how they can support this.

Thea: Using the house every day, we have many people who work with Greta coming into
her space, a space that has been designed to offer her limitless possibilities, when so often our
physical environment is about obstacles and difficulties. When we talk with and work with
health professionals and educators in Greta’s inclusive environment, I think it makes them
see her differently. It also makes them see us differently: the house embodies our expertise and
understanding of Greta, as well as offering the open-ended approach to her potentials and
possibilities that has always been our philosophy living with Greta.

In the house it is easier for Greta and others to work together as a team, ensuring
that she is seen as an equal in their collective efforts. When the team around Greta work
on a level basis, the typical, if sometimes subtle, hierarchy of the NHS and educators is
transformed into an equality of working.
The Ramp House 269

Filip is Greta’s Bobath physiotherapist, which is a specific type of physio/occupational/speech

therapy that enables the family to learn to work with their children and to take that knowledge and
experience back, to practice in their everyday homes. He has known Greta since she was a baby.
Filip: In terms of emotions, it definitely felt different treating Greta in her own space. At
the [Bobath] Centre I feel in charge. In Greta’s space I felt an enormous amount of respect
somehow… and was almost waiting for suggestions from Greta and any of you. I guess if I
am honest, my senses were more ready to invite messages from Greta compared to meeting and
treating her in my ‘familiar’ environment at Bobath Scotland where I feel I am taking the lead
much more.

Conclusion: expanding deﬁnitions of inclusivity

The British Standards Institution (2005) defines inclusive design as: ‘the design of mainstream
products and/or services that are accessible to, and usable by, as many people as reasonably
possible ... without the need for special adaptation or specialised design’. Rather than creating
a ‘normal’ house and then adding on (or ‘retrofitting’, see Dolmage, this volume) elements
that would make it ‘work’ for Greta, designing from a ramped route gives an equality of access
to almost all of its spaces as a matter of principle. (This includes a decision to make one
space – reached by a ladder-like stair with a window framing a sea view – that is knowingly
designed as a kind of retreat from the otherwise fully accessible openness; Figure 22.3).
However, the Ramp House also demonstrates a wider definition of inclusivity in
its procurement, design and building, because of the large range of people involved.
Persuading the planning committee or literally helping to finish the building work became
a vehicle through which the local community could include themselves in supporting
the family and demonstrate the extent to which they valued the project of inclusivity and
wanted to be part of it.
Equally crucial has been the inclusivity generated through the house’s ongoing
occupation and use. The Ramp House does not just aim to include disabled ‘others’. It
starts from a positive engagement with the lived experiences of disability as an inherently
shared enterprise – and so generates spaces that affect all visitors and residents directly
through their diverse bodily registers. This, in turn, opens up our understandings of space
beyond ‘normal’ use and users to other perspectives and new possibilities for occupation.
This produces the ‘levelling’ that Thea describes, that is experienced both by Greta and
the visitors who come to the house, and that is also demonstrated in the way the house
got built. To appreciate that these aspects of the Ramp House are also inclusive, we need
to consider space as more than an object and container for functions and activities. Greta
is not just ‘included’ by being able to move easily around; rather the house enables more
inclusive social and spatial encounters between all its occupants and visitors, and was a
catalyst for including a wider community during the processes of construction. Inclusivity,
then, is not simply a property that can be achieved by following guidelines and building
regulations, ensuring that a space is ‘step-free’ for example. Inclusivity is always spatial,
social and physical all at once, and the project of making inclusive spaces offers an
opportunity for multiple modes of inclusive practice that might involve the building of
270 Thea McMillan with Katie Lloyd Thomas

FIGURE 22.3 Chambers McMillan Architects (2011). Interior view, Ramp House, Portobello,
Edinburgh 2011
Source: Photography: David Barbour.

temporary collectives, or alternative forms of encounter with each other, as much as new
spatial visions.
For its visitors (and Katie includes herself here) the house embodies and communicates
a particular open-ended approach to the possibilities and potentials for a disabled person.
It makes use of the capacity of spaces and objects to ‘stand in for’ human actions and
encounters in ways that have been explored by Actor-Network theorists such as Bruno
The Ramp House 271

Latour. He gives the example of a speed bump on a university campus, as a permanent

physical ‘translation’ of a sign or a policeman standing by the side of the road asking
drivers to slow down (1999: 187); and similarly, in its spatial and material configuration,
the Ramp House ‘performs’ what would otherwise have to be constantly communicated
and explained by the family ‘on behalf of ’ Greta.
Using the example of a mechanical door closer fixed to the hinge that is ‘delegated’ the
job of shutting the door after you have gone through, Latour also suggests that there can
be an affective tone or manner to such performance. Just like a doorman holding the door
open, the door closer can do the job graciously, giving you plenty of time to go through,
or ‘rudely’ by closing it too quickly so that it almost catches you on the bottom (Latour
1999). The Ramp House delegates movement to the ramp, making it easy for everyone
to navigate their way through the house. But it does more than this – through the variety
and richness of spatial relationships, views and materials it communicates accessibility in
a certain manner – joyful, playful, witty. The house wears so very lightly, its serious and
radical challenge to conventional normative ideas about bodies and inhabitation. Even
when its occupants are weary and impatient with some of the assumptions and attitudes
they encounter, or during times when health is not so good, the house retains its open
optimistic breezy outlook, refusing, perhaps, to be worn down.

Katie: As we move round the ramp there is a collage of materials, pink, light and bright, spacious,
shiny… here the house looks back at itself, there at a peaceful pool, here at a worn stone wall
with gardens beyond, there at a desk just a minute ago abandoned, just here at a round chair still
rocking where Greta was playing, there is Bea’s school bag dropped off in a corner, and over there
at the sky and even beyond, up there, the sea.

The house is all about the ongoing process of occupation: each space becomes what it
is through use, but these varied and changing uses have been made possible by a design
which doesn’t limit or stereotype space (kitchen, living room, bedroom), but opens up
possibilities and potentials for every member of the family. It started with the plan to build
a house around a ramp, but it continues to act through its inhabitation and those who
encounter it. The house is experienced and performed by many people, in many different
ways – all because Greta is enabled to occupy the centre with her family and others.

Thea: We remember when Greta was a couple of weeks old, and we were in intensive care, a
nurse told us: ‘You will have to bring the world to Greta.’ Our life feels as if not only have we
done this, but also through the Ramp House we have changed the perception of the world.
23
RESISTANT SITTING

Sophie Handler (2008)

Reprinted from ‘Resistant Sitting: The Pensioner’s Alternative

Street Furniture Guide’ Project Report: RIBA/Ice McAslan
Bursary, pp 33–37, 39–41.

Public seating
There is a basic generosity in the idea of furnishing a street. A seat, for instance, that is
set outdoors as a freely available, public resource generously opens up that street to the
passer-by, turns it into a place for sitting in as much as a place for simply passing through.
This is the hospitable face of street furniture: furniture that openly invites the leisurely
occupation of public space, not only functional passage through it.
Early versions of street furniture (in Paris) are light and flexible: a set of fold-away
chairs are laid out in the city’s public parks, set out in the morning, tidied away at the
end of the day. Street furnishing now (here, in Newham) extend into the streetscape as
permanent fixtures of public space: robust, heavy benches and chairs on pavements, in
squares, that are rooted physically into the ground as an immoveable public resource,
resourced and maintained by the local authority. Borough-wide design guides formalise
the language of this provision, carefully codifying the placement, design and appearance
of public furnishings, generating a recognisably uniform (or limited?) vocabulary for
what are publicly designated spaces for sitting in. Formalised sitting.
There are limits though to this practice of formally codifying street furniture. To
generate, for instance, a uniform type of public seat is to, by implication, mark out all other
spaces that might be used for sitting in (objects, places, things not explicitly designed for
sitting in, but that are sat on all the same) as a mis-use of space, e.g. sitting on a set of steps,
on a ledge, on a wall. See Resistant Sitting below. Here,the necessarily limited dimension of
design coding narrows down and limits the potential for the creative, impromptu (mis)
use of urban space (the use of an alternative seat… a low-level wall, a streetside bollard).
Resistant sitting 273

Is this the point where the basic generosity behind the idea of furnishing a street
reveals itself as a subtle regime of social regulation and control? A bench, for instance,
is designed with a bare minimum of comfort to ensure not only adherence to the more
mundane municipal ambitions of robustness, durability, low maintenance (value for
money) but to also exert subtle degrees of social control (designed-in discomfort will
deter the ‘undesirable’ presence of rough sleepers, etc.). The barely comfortable seat
quietly limits and controls the length of the sitter’s stay – a precisely pitched ledge of a
bus stop seat tolerates a precarious, therefore, temporary perching posture only.
This is the inhospitable extremity of street furniture design: that there are specified
pitches and calculated comfort levels designed to determine and curtail the length of a
stay on a seat. ... Which is another way of saying that there is, in these local authority
design codes, a calculation for both public provision (generosity) but an equal calculation
for limiting that provision: for controlling it, taking it away. i.e. what is generously provided
with one hand is, with the other also, carefully guarded, monitored, occasionally (arbitrarily) taken
away.

Upton Lane (c. 2009)

A set of bus stop seats on Upton Lane are, without warning, removed sometime this
last year to discourage anti-social behaviour (‘drunken Poles’ have, allegedly, been
congregating on the seat, according to David (from the 50+year old dance class) within
what is the technically alcohol-free zone of Forest Gate). In its extreme literalism, local
authority logic reasons that it is the bus stop seat that supports the anti-social behaviour
– the seat is, therefore, removed leaving David to act out the tragic-comic scenario: of the
unwitting passer-by turning up at the bus stop ready to sit down on an accustomed seat,
only to encounter the empty space of a ghost of a bench.
Sitting as an ordinary, benign act turns into sitting as a uniformly suspect act; gracefully
degrading (through official misconstrual) as lingering, loitering ...
In its extreme (neurotic) form, the suspicion of sitting extends into an elaborate
typology of sitting deterrents that attempt to establish norms of public behaviour: training,
regulating and correcting all forms of bad sitting (in the wrong place). Like the operation
of a Pavlovian mechanism (in reverse), the typology of the urban streetscape is designed
to effect the psychological internalisation of its physical deterrents:

UÊ a set of stick-down strips of metallic spikes strategically positioned on sittable-height

ledging (engendering a bed-of-nails effect)
UÊ otherwise sittable steps washed down at regular intervals (deterrent masquerading as
regular ‘maintenance’)
UÊ commercial seating authorised ‘for customer use only’ (verbal deterrent of signage/
surveillance)
UÊ sittable-height boundary walls finished with hard-angled brickwork (deterrent
masquerading as ornament).
274 Sophie Handler

Resistant sitting (or how to sit differently)

DATE: 14.05.2009
Location: Cundy Road Recreation Ground
A group of schoolgirls are sitting the wrong way round on top of a park bench i.e. not
according to the designed use of the bench (their feet rest, ‘improperly’ on its seat). To
sit the wrong way round (to sit contrary to the designed shape of a public seat) is to resist
the behavioural norms that govern the intended use of objects of public space, challenging,
implicitly, the design coding that determines the correct posture for the use of street furniture.
In adolescence the territorial appropriation of objects in public space (a wrongly sat-
on bench) becomes a public marker of adolescent difference, a deliberate statement of
resistance to (paternal) authority (the correct way of sitting). This is the self-conscious
aesthetics of mis-use. Sitting the wrong way round as a visible, public statement of
emerging (adolescent) identity in space: a generational marker of difference.

DATE: last Monday

Location: Prince Regent Lane
Joan, on the way to the post office and back home, ‘plonks’ herself down on the
boundary wall (of no. 139 Prince Regents Lane). There are no other seats to sit on.
The territorial appropriation of a mis-used/sat-on boundary wall is the creative
response to changing physical need in older age: the ageing body as it feels and adapts
to the absence of enough seats to sit on when out and about, resisting self-consciously,
defiantly even, the limits, or rather these deficiencies, imposed by the urban environment.

Resistant sitting (tactics of resistance in older age)

Doreen Massey describes older age as ‘a closing in again’, an increasingly curtailed kind of
existence that is the inevitable by-product of diminished mobility in older age: a narrowing
down of movement, of experience (increasing confinement indoors) that implies, in turn,
diminishing levels of flexibility – both physical and psychological. There is, however, a
way in which diminished mobility forces, paradoxically, a greater kind of flexibility in older
age: adapting to an environment, adapting it in turn, developing a creative relationship to
a space as a way of both dealing with and resisting this limiting notion of an increasingly
curtailed kind of existence, of a ‘closing in’ again... working out ways of navigating a place
more comfortably, more easily, developing tactics, ways of using a space that bend the
environment to aid and accommodate personal desires and needs.
Derek and Joan talk (in a domestic setting) with intimate knowledge about ways of
navigating about their own homes, using the radiator (in the front hall) as a walking aid,
moving things about the house in order to minimise the need for unnecessary exertions
of movement. Joan brings the kettle in from the kitchen into her front living room to
limit the number of times she needs to get up out of her armchair to make herself a cup
of tea, Derek uses the radiator in the front hall as his improvised handrail, in the absence
of a walking stick. The intimate knowledge and sense of personal ownership of domestic
space allows for an easy, flexible appropriation of space.
Resistant sitting 275

To a degree, that easy appropriation of space extends, outwards into the public space
of the street, though more tentatively perhaps. Joan’s low wall, that, like the radiator
turned into a handrail, transformed into an impromptu, wished-for seat (the sat-on
wall). Eileen calls this: adapting, a resourcefulness that becomes increasingly necessary
in older age: having to adapt the urban environment to the needs of a changing-ageing
body, mapping out the urban ‘landmarks’ (the small features of public space) that affect
the body in older age (a dizzyingly sloping section of pavement, for instance), adapting
more generally to the sensation that diminished mobility expands space. The longer
it takes to get from a to b (with arthritic knees, failing hips, stiffening joints etc.) the
lengthier the feeling of that space between a and b, and the journey becomes more
tiresome...
PLEASE NOTE: Public provision for resting, in the form of a designated public seat/
bench, cannot always be found to be available at the precise moment when a rest stop is
required (the point of tiredness is a variable, subjective point somewhere between a and
b)... As public provision fails to meet up with personal need impromptu improvisation
follows: in the casual, ad hoc appropriation of found features of the street (non-seats)
as seats.

Ambiguous seating (or sitting somewhere between what is permitted

and what is not)
Joan sits on ‘her’ boundary wall, in legal limbo, on the borderlines of what is officially
designated as public/private space, perched in between public and private zones (her
feet set down on public territory, while the rest of her is sitting on the private realm of
a residential wall).
Derek sits on a bollard, on the borderlines of a pedestrian/vehicular zone, perched
somewhere in between the two (his feet set down on the public territory of the street,
while the rest of him sits on a bollard – an anonymous feature of the street – that is not,
technically speaking, actually intended for public use).
In a way it is the ambiguity of the streetscape object – the ambiguous rules of
ownership governing these borderline objects (a wall, a bollard), their anonymity in
terms of function (as technically non-useable objects, versus the more obviously useable
bench) that makes their appropriation possible. Here, a dividing marker of space (a
boundary wall, a borderline bollard) turns into an inhabited, thickened out line as a
dividing border, an interstitial space is expanded, temporarily, into an occupied place.
This double ambiguity/anonymity of the streetscape object tolerates more easily
a subversive attitude of appropriation in older age, mitigates the inhibiting effects of
self-consciousness (politeness/reticence), in favour of a more spontaneous and robust
confidence in the mis-use of space:

UÊ sitting in full public view (on a bollard) in the obviously wrong place knowing that
people might stare
UÊ asking (is this too much?) to sit on a seat, in a shoe stall, just for a rest, knowing that
the seat is ‘for customer use only’, for trying on shoes
276 Sophie Handler

UÊ overcoming a slight (but real) feeling of tentativeness in using a wall that belongs
to someone else
UÊ self-consciousness (to being moved on), to remain sitting on bus stop seat (just
resting) while everyone else has got up to get on the bus.

To borrow space in this way is, in a sense, like the adolescent, to step over a threshold
of impertinence, challenging the public etiquette and behavioural norms that govern the
‘proper’ use of public space. Like sitting on the backrest of the bench, your feet on the
seat, sitting the wrong way round...
There is a different tenor, though, to this kind of mis-use of space in older age that
does not quite fit the demonstrative pattern of adolescent mis-use of space (as a marker
of adolescent difference, as a territorial rite of passage). Here, in older age, mis-use of
space is not an explicit attempt to mark out elderly autonomy and difference but rather
a discrete, if still defiant, kind of adaptive action: to accommodate personal needs where
the designed environment fails. In an altogether more subtle vocalisation of identity, of
elderly difference, quietly testing out, pushing beyond the limits of public space.

FIGURE 23.1 Cushioned Bollard: technical drawing. Ageing Facilities: diagram from Resistant
Sitting: The Pensioner’s Alternative Street Furniture Guide www.ageingfacilities.net
Source: Photo: Verity-Jane Keefe.
Resistant sitting 277

FIGURE 23.2 Cushioned Bollard; completed project

Source: Photo: Verity-Jane Keefe.

24
NOTES ON AN INCLINED PLANE –
SLOPE : INTERCEPT

Sara Hendren (2016)

Not only do disabled people have experiences which are not available to the able-
bodied, they are in a better position to transcend cultural mythologies about the
body, because they cannot do things the able-bodied feel they must do in order to
be happy, “normal”, and sane… If disabled people were truly heard, an explosion of
knowledge about the human body and psyche would take place.
(Wendell 1996)

A ramp is a machine. It is the “inclined plane” – one of Galileo’s six “simple machines”. An
inclined plane is an elegance of physics that alters the behavior of force across a surface. It
transforms the possibilities of load-bearing by its degrees of slope, doing machinic work
with a simple geometry that belies its historical importance.
Slope : Intercept is a material and digital social design project organized around the ramp,
intended to de-familiarize this simple geometry from its modest, daily work and to show its
physics in new ways. Part architectural installation, part digital archive, and part collaborative
events, the project uses the ramp to cast both city architecture and city users in a new light.
The work creates ramped elevations that enact a literal physics for bodies seeking elevations
in the built environment. But its extended life as an archive and series of collaborative
events also creates a “political physics” in the form of cultural elevations and activism.
In this chapter and accompanying photographs, I lay out some history for the ramp,
suggesting that its machinic simplicity wrongly relegates it outside the usual connotations
of “technology” and “innovation” that so preoccupy contemporary cultures. I argue that
understanding the ramp as an overlooked technology has powerful implications for a
broadened definition of “technology” in general, and that looking for the influence of
hidden technological artifacts helps to recover things and politics that otherwise get
overlooked or suppressed. I also explore briefly the little-known late 1960s architectural
partnership between Paul Virilio and Claude Parent, called Architecture Principe, a
practice entirely organized around the inclined plane (Virilio 1996). Their utopian notion
Notes on an inclined plane – Slope : Intercept 279

of the “oblique function” of the ramp has been an inspiration for my own fascination with
inclined planes and their physics. Finally, I describe Slope : Intercept’s component parts – its
material design, archive, and events – and the work I have done so far with those various
elements.

The ramp as a historical technology

The ramp has been historically used for its machinic qualities long before its physics were
understood. Sites like Stonehenge in the UK are thought to have been built using the
mechanical advantage of the inclined plane formed in the earth as “on-ramps” to structural
building. The celebrated Roman causeways made use of the ramp’s physics as well, and
“siege ramps”, like the one that survives at a fortress site in Masada, Israel, created a defensive
advantage in battle by its elevations. The historical list goes on. But it took Galileo in the
sixteenth century to codify its predictable mathematics, after which he formally classified
it as one of six simple machines. Along with the lever, the pulley, the screw, the wedge, and
the wheel-and-axle, an inclined plane forms an elemental grammar of mechanics in the
built environment – a deceptively humble set of relationships that change the conditions
of physics reliably and mathematically, making it possible to multiply and augment those
mechanics in complex configurations for industrial work. Pressed into the service of
modern labor, those machinic combinations make up the modern modes of manufacturing
that have so powerfully structured contemporary global and industrialized cultures.
If a ramp is a machine, then, it may also be understood as a technology – though it
most often hides as a thing, as a mere surface, a commonplace geometry, a topographical
experience that’s often invisible. But it is a technology nonetheless. Seeing a ramp as a
technology changes it’s meaning in key ways.
The historian David Edgerton, in his book, The Shock of the Old (2007), has claimed that
the ways cultures talk about technology – in history, and in the present day – tend to run
along predictable and erroneous lines. Edgerton writes that cultural obsessions with the
technological standouts of the twentieth century – flight, nuclear power, the birth control
pill, the internet – are shaped by the myopic futurology of our own age: that is, our persistent
sense that innovation is just around the bend, proceeding at an ever-faster pace, and by
definition “ahead” of culture. And this is despite the fact that that “futurology” has been
a cultural mythology in industrialized cultures for more than a hundred years at least. As
scholars tell stories of technology in history, Edgerton writes, they link “technology” almost
exclusively with “invention” (the creation of a new idea) and “innovation” (the first use
of a new idea). Talk about technology centers on research and development, patents and
early stages of use – and so the story about historical change is too often hung upon these
same timelines. But Edgerton shows how a history of technology-in-use yields a far different
picture of technological importance. How would historians alternately measure the long arc
of impact around such technologies as the rickshaw, corrugated iron, the sewing machine,
the hydrogenation of coal, or the bicycle, if use is the key criterion? “In use-centered history,”
he writes, “technologies do not only appear, they also disappear and reappear, and mix and
match across centuries” (2007: xii). So we should look not only at an “absolute value” tied to a
moment of technological change, but also a highly situated and relative value of a technology,
280 Sara Hendren

evolving across time and culture. This view asks those interested in technologies to expand
the canopy of where they might look for impact, influence, or importance.
To try to get at a more refined and dispersed sense of technology in use, moreover,
Edgerton suggests that we alter our language, doing away with the false hierarchy between
“technologies”, on one hand, and mere “things” on the other. Edgerton writes that

[t]hinking about the use of things, rather than of technology, connects us directly
with the world we know, rather than the strange world in which “technology” lives.
We speak of “our” technology, meaning the technology of an age or whole society.
By contrast “things” fit into no such totality and do not evoke what is often taken as
an independent historical force.
(2007: xvii)

Slope : Intercept is a project about the inclined plane as an overlooked technology – a

technology that is also a thing, and a thing that is a technology – an object whose impact of
use extends far back into history.
How, then, might one see it again, take its measure of form, of engineering, of poetics?
What metrics would apply? In both material and digital designs, Slope : Intercept is an
attempt to waken this sleeping technology and its metaphors. The project is a networking
of ramps: an attempt at sensory estrangement, in the manner Svetlana Boym (2012) has
used the term – through cognitive ambivalence and play, to gain a provisional freedom to
see it again. In my case, the project is to estrange oneself from this ubiquitous and banal
form and instead to multiply its geometries, its designated and un-designated users.

Precedent work: the “function of the oblique” in Architecture Principe

Ramps can be found in much of architectural history, but the inclined plane took on a
distinctive prominence in Architecture Principe, a partnership between the cultural theorist
Paul Virilio and the architect Claude Parent, with the painter Michel Carrade and sculptor
Morice Lipsi (Virilio and Parent 1996). Theirs was a short-lived, experimental practice
in Paris begun in 1966 – a design partnership organized around the inclined plane and
what it made possible for the body. The inclined plane, they proposed, would animate
the topographical experience of the ground. A ramp provides resistance going up, and
acceleration going down – literal and phenomenological. This experience, they thought,
was a necessary corrective to the crisis of the “ordered city” – the relentless conformism
wrought by the early twentieth century’s legacy of verticals and horizontals. The resulting
drawings and models for architectural structures bear out this conviction, each featuring
the inclined plane at various scales: long and shallow, short and steep, for residences and for
public spaces, including the Parent family house in Neuilly (Figure 24.1).
Looking back on that time many years later, Virilio said of his partnership that: “At the time,
the tower was the most exalted type of architecture.” But as for “Architecture Principe,” he
writes: “Our opposition to towers was absolute.” He wrote: “The idea was to work with gravity
in a new way; to create a vision of instability while the perspective is stable...You could call it a
kind of ‘eroticization’ of the ground” (1996: 4). Their opposition was realized in the “function
Notes on an inclined plane – Slope : Intercept 281

FIGURE 24.1 Claude and Naad Parent with guests, in their Neuilly house, 1973
Photo Gilles Ehrmann. Reprinted by permission from Ehrmann Estate and with thanks to Chloe Parent.
Copyright: Photo Gilles Ehrmann.

of the oblique” – the sideways approach, the diagonal cut, the deforming of the horizontal
and vertical grid, and all the ways it rigidly organizes social relations (see also Koolhaas and
AMO 2014). I have sought that mystery of the oblique function both in the design of a set
of material ramps and in a form of networked architecture that extends the meaning and
the reach and the multiplicity of its uses. And, again, I am doing that by deploying a kind of
sensory estrangement in material and digital forms – exploring a new design for this simple
machine in material space, while letting it live and be in conversation with its many multiple
counterparts, wherever they may be found. I’ll explore more about such estrangement below.

First the material

In this material design, I am fracturing and dispersing the inclined plane, breaking it free
of its architectural scale and finding in it a multiple and multiplied set of uses (Figure 24.2).
It’s a low profile bit of geometry that’s designed to nest and stack, to attach side-by-side,
to maneuver about with wheels. So it’s a suite of objects for installation in public space.
Muted but present in its design are features that make affordances for specific users.
So it becomes less an extended architectural form at the urban scale, and instead more a
social technology, a nimble and portable tool for both scripted and unscripted uses. I have
labored to keep its iconic form but seek its multiplicity as a technology.
282 Sara Hendren

FIGURE 24.2 Sara Hendren; suite of objects for ramp design

Source: Photographs by Justin Knight.

Skateboarders have long sought elevations among the verticals and horizontals of
cities everywhere. And while skateboarding is still an under-theorized phenomenon as
a use of urban space, the architectural historian Iain Borden has posed some ideas about
the critical subjectivity of the skater in the otherwise rationalized, economically-ordered
city. He writes that skateboarding offers “both an apparently non-commercial realm of
compensation and a confrontation of the instructive mechanics of ‘signals’” – the ordinary
signals in architecture, he means, of what to do with a sidewalk or a curb. He writes
that “skateboarding counters signal architecture with a body-centric and multi-sensory
performative activity, and with an indifference to function, price, and regulation, creating
new patterns of space and time, and turning the signals of the city into ephemeral symbols
of everyday meaning and duration” (2001a, 2001b: 256). So here too, with this design, I’ve
been thinking about a structure that could extend and counter verticals and horizontals in
a number of different configurations, and with portability built in, since skaters are often
unwelcome in center-city plazas. They’re engineered to take a lot of force from a skater, to
stack securely, and they have this metal angle stock that allows a skater to grind across the
surface, especially when locked together.
Notes on an inclined plane – Slope : Intercept 283

FIGURE 24.3 Ramps configured for skateboarding

Source: Photograph by Justin Knight.

And while skateboarding – according to Borden – does have an inherent criticality

built into it, there’s also a legible virtuosity that is achieved by this athletic use of ramp
configurations. It’s not hard to see the elevations here. It’s harder to see other kinds of
virtuosity, which brings me to another set of users for this design (Figure 24.3).
These ramps are also made to address a grey area in the architectural code established
by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) (Figure 24.4). Single-step entrances at
small storefronts are quite common in cities like Boston and New York; you can see the
prevalence of these entrances on Cambridge Street here in Cambridge alone. Businesses
with single step entrances are not required by law to overhaul their structures unless
they’re already significantly re-modelling; so they’re added in with their steps as they
are. Instead the law exhorts these businesses to find “readily achievable” ways to remove
barriers to entry. But enacting these changes tends to be complaint-driven, and in many
cases ignored. So this material ramp has levelling feet that adjusts its height from a single
standard step to varying degrees of height beyond that – taking into account the historic
architecture of older cities and their idiosyncratic structures.
While you’re likely to see particular ramp forms used by skateboarders and wheelchairs
users, you’re unlikely to create a kind of Venn diagram of elevations – to see them seeking the
same thing; to see these as unlikely bedfellows with different kinds of marginalized status.
In this way, the ramp here is also designed to be the same kind of cultural technology as that
of a skateboard user – that is, it might well be used by a skateboarder and a wheelchair user
284 Sara Hendren

FIGURE 24.4 Ramp configured for single-step entrances

Source: Photograph by Justin Knight.

in a single afternoon, and several others as well, in as-yet-unimagined ways, depending on

its site of installation. Mixing uses and users is meant to upend notions of single-minded
virtuosity and function, and to instead make a multiplied poetics of a single form. By
finding the overlapping elevations sought by these users, I want this design to provide a
kind of sensory estrangement from the expected cultural ideas of the form: where and how
it appears, how its performers use it, what kinds of virtuosities might lie in its potentials.
When one uncouples a technology from its obvious assignments, both a technology and
its user can take up a newly unfixed narrative. All ramps are attached to their shared simple
machinic history as inclined planes, and the physics they afford; and there are referents
to its iconic status in architecture. But the work of this ramp un-tags itself from specific
users, from easy identity politics, and indeed from rigid notions of use altogether.

Second the digital

A project about ubiquitous spatial phenomena also begs for a digital life, in the co-extensive
site of the public commons online. I have also built this web site (Figure 24.5), wherein
a large collection of ramps live side-by-side with each iteration of my material designs –
ramps in grand architectural spaces alongside much more modest or surprising ones. It’s a
selective and enigmatic collection, organized to further strain the edges of likeness among
its individual ramps, to see what new connections might be found. From the home page,
you can either jump to a long form blog essay laying out the historical and cultural context
as in this chapter, or you can begin by navigating through a database, where ramps are
found in categories like TRANSVERSALS or ACCELERATIONS or VANTAGES. In
Notes on an inclined plane – Slope : Intercept 285

FIGURE 24.5 Homepage, www.slopeintercept.org

VANTAGES, for example, you’ll see, side-by-side, the ramp that forms the only access
to a hilltop fortress in Masada, Israel; a stunning, elegant beachfront walk in Norway; the
access ramp shared by users of a contested religious site; a park for penguins; and my own
design, providing a vantage of another kind. Testing my instincts against these categorical
abstractions is also how I can further test my model in physical space.
In the item view, you’ll find a simple set of descriptors, the other categories that characterize
that image, and links to the sources of those ramps. There’s no extended commentary except
in the alternate text, so that the associations among these forms and their contexts can be
constructed at will. If you want to know more, you can click through and find the source
and some context for where this ramp is, how it’s been written about. The spaces of web
architecture therefore allow the reach of a material practice to be amplified and to evolve. And
since this project is about the multiplicity one gets with the oblique function, only in tandem
with a digital environment can my material models find a commons, an imaginary, and
perhaps become some next iteration. Just as in the splintering of scale and use in the material
models, online I am piecing together these forms as idiosyncratic and unlikely bedfellows to
allow our perceptual forms, broadly conceived – again, both of the uses of the technology
and its users – to be redistributed. And above all, the entirety of the project is designed to ask:
What counts in the design of technologies, technologies that are things? Whose use matters?

Ramps and critical making

This project, finally, has both reflected and constituted my larger disposition as a maker
and thinker in general – that is, the uncoupling of technologies and prosthetics from
286 Sara Hendren

strictly scientific and medical research designations; a determination to design modes of

research in those domains alongside their professionalized expert cultures; an interest in
design for disability and marginalized bodies in public spaces.
In Slope : Intercept and my other projects, which are brought together on the Abler web
site I seek a practice that is somewhere between the “autonomous experimentation”
of art making and the “direct action” approach of the activist. I am influenced by the
“discursive design” strategies employed by designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
(2005, 2013), artist–engineer Natalie Jeremijenko (Jeremijenko and Thacker 2004), the
collective Wochenklausur (Jackson 2011), and others who use the language of design for
conceptual and practical ends, for those ends to be mixed and conflated in unexpected
ways – deploying estrangement and de-familiarity for productive, formative, propositional
ends. This follows Svetlana Boym (2012) who distinguishes an artistic estrangement
“from the world” – as in the avant-garde strategy of alienation, shock, and dislocation –
from an artistic estrangement that returns a viewer “to the world” – a redoubling back to
the conditions of political and civic life with new eyes. The language of design may be
particularly advantageous for such a return to the world, with its history of problem-
solving, practicality, and transparency. Slope : Intercept seeks the critical conceptuality of art
with the vernacular and consequence of design – an arrangement and re-arrangement of
physics for an altered built environment, an altered interpretation of ability and wheeled
physics, and an altered future polis.
REFERENCES

Introduction
Agrest, D., Conway, P. and Weisman, L. K. (eds) (1996) The Sex of Architecture, New York: Harry N.
Abrams.
Barton, C. E. (ed.) (2001) Sites of Memory: Perspectives on Architecture and Race, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Betsky, A. (1997) Building Sex: Men, Women, Architecture and the Construction of Sexuality, New York:
William Morrow & Co.
Borden, I., Penner, B. and Rendell, J. (eds) (1999) Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary
Introduction, London and New York: Routledge.
Boys, J. (2014) Doing Disability Differently: An Alternative Handbook on Dis/ability, Architecture and
Designing for Everyday Life, London and New York: Routledge.
Colomina, B. (ed.) (1992) Sexuality and Space, Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press.
Davidson, M. (2008) Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body, Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press.
Davis, L. J. (2002) Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism and Other Difficult Positions, New
York: NYU Press.
Garland-Thompson, R. (2011) ‘Misfits. A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept’, Hypatia Special
Issue: Ethics of Embodiment 26(3), 591–609.
Hughes, F. (ed.) (1998) The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice, Boston, MA: MIT Press.
Levin, M. (2010) ‘The Art of Disability: An Interview with Tobin Siebers’, Disability Studies Quarterly
3(10), available at http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1263/1272
Lokko, L. N. N. (ed.) (2000) White Papers, Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture, Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place, and Gender, Cambridge: Polity.
Matrix (eds) (1984) Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment, London: Pluto Press.
Mintz, S. (2007) Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities, Chapel Hill, NC: University
of North Carolina Press.
Sanders, J. (ed.) (1996) Stud: Architectures of Masculinity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Weisman, L. (1994) Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment, Illinois,
IL: University of Illinois Press.
Wilkins, C. L. (2007) The Aesthetics of Equity: Notes on Race, Space, Architecture and Music, Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
288 References

Part I Histories/narratives
Ben-Moshe, L., Chapman, C. and Carey, A. (eds) (2014) Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and
Disability in the United States and Canada, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Campbell, F. K. (2009) Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Abledness, Basingstoke and
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Davis, L. J. (1995) Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, London: Verso.
Davis, L. J. (1997) ‘Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel and the Invention of the
Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century’, in L. Davis (ed.) The Disability Studies Reader, New
York: Routledge, 9–28.
Ervelles, N. (1996) ‘Disability and the Dialectics of Difference’, Disability & Society 11(4): 519–537.
Ervelles, N. (2011) Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body
Politic, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Galis, V. (2011) ‘Enacting Disability: How Can Science and Technology Studies Inform Disability
Studies?’ Disability & Society 26(7): 825–838.
Garland-Thomson, R. (1996) Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York: NYU Press.
Imrie, R. (2012) ‘Auto-Disabilities: The Case of Shared Space Environments’, Environment and
Planning A 44(9): 2260–2277.
Imrie, R. (2013) ‘Shared Space and the Post-politics of Environmental Change’, Urban Studies 50(1):
3446–3462.
Kafer, A. (2013) Feminist, Queer, Crip, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Lambert, L. (2012) ‘Architectural Theories: A Subversive Approach to the Ideal Normalized Body’,
April 29, http://thefunambulist.net/2012/04/29/architectural-theories-a-subversive-approach-to-
the-ideal-normatized-body/
Lambert, L. and Pham, M.-H. T. (2015) ‘Spinoza in a T-shirt’, July 1st http://thenewinquiry.com/
essays/spinoza-in-a-t-shirt/
Michalko, R. (1998a) The Mystery of the Eye and the Shadow of Blindness, Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Michalko, R. (1998b) The Two in One Walking with Smokie, Walking with Blindness, Philadelphia, PA:
Temple University Press.
Michalko, R. (2002) The Difference that Disability Makes, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Sanchez, R. (2015) Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature,
New York and London: New York University Press.
Silberman, S. (2015) Neurotribes. The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who
Think Differently, Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Soldatic, K., Morgan, H. and Roulstone, A. (eds) (2014) Disability, Spaces and Places of Policy
Exclusion, London and New York: Routledge.
Stephens, E. (2011) Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1750 to the Present, Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press.
Stiker, H.-J. (2000) Translated by Sayers W. A History of Disability, Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press.
Wolff, J. (1985) ‘The Invisible Flaneuse. Women and the Literature of Modernity’, Theory, Culture &
Society 2(3): 37–46.
Wolff, J. (2008) ‘Gender and the Haunting of Cities (Or, The Retirement of the Flâneur)’ in
D’Souza, A. and McDonough, T. (eds) The Invisible Flaneuse? Gender, Public Space and Visual
Culture in Nineteenth Century Paris. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 18–29.

1. David Serlin, Disabling the ﬂâneur

Baudelaire, C. (1972 [1863]) ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in P.E. Charvet (ed.) Baudelaire: Selected
Writings on Art and Literature, pp. 395–422. New York: Viking.
References 289

Benjamin, W. (1978 [1936]) Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, London: New
Left Books.
Breckenridge, C. A. and Vogler, C. (2001) ‘The Critical Limits of Embodiment: Disability’s
Criticism’, Public Culture 13(3): 349–58.
Buck-Morss, S. (1985) ‘The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering’,
New German Critique 39: 99–140.
Buck-Morss, S. (1991) The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Burgin, V. (1996) In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture, Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Chadwick, W. and Ladimer, T. T. (eds) (2003) The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars,
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Charney, L. and Schwartz, V. (eds) (1996) Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Crary, J. (2001) Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Feld, S. (2005) ‘Places Sensed, Senses Placed: Toward a Sensuous Epistemology of Environments’,
in D. Howes (ed.) Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, pp. 179–91. New York: Berg.
Ferguson, P. P. (1994) ‘The Flâneur On and Off the Streets of Paris’, in K. Tester (ed.) The Flâneur,
pp. 22–42. London: Routledge.
Friedberg, A. (1994) Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Fuss, D. (2004) A Sense of the Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them, New York: Routledge.
Garland-Thomson, R. (2002) ‘The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular
Photography’, in S. L. Snyder, B. J. Brueggemann and R. Garland-Thomson (eds) Disability
Studies: Enabling the Humanities, pp. 56–75. New York: Modern Language Association of America.
Hammergren, L. (1994) ‘The Re-turn of the Flâneuse’, in S. L. Foster (ed.) Corporealities: Dancing,
Knowledge, Culture, and Power, pp. 53–69. New York: Routledge.
Keller, H. (1938) Helen Keller’s Journal, London: Michael Joseph.
Levin, D. M. (ed.) (1993) Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press.
Mirzoeff, N. (1995) Bodyscape: Art, Modernity, and the Ideal Figure, New York: Routledge.
Nesbit, M. (1992) ‘In the Absence Of the Parisienne . . .’, in B. Colomina (ed.) Sexuality and Space,
pp. 307–26. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
Nielsen, K. E. (2004) The Radical Lives of Helen Keller, New York: NYU Press.
Panchasi, R. (1995) ‘Reconstructions: Prosthetics and the Male Body in Post WWI France’, Differences
7(3): 109–40.
Parsons, D. (2000) Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity, New York: Oxford
University Press.
Pollock, G. (1988) Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and Histories of Art, New York: Routledge.
Prost, A. (1992) In the Wake of War: ‘Les Anciens Combattants’ and French Society, Providence, RI: Berg.
Roberts, M. L. (1994) Civilizing the Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927, Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.
Scales, R. P. (2006) ‘Creating a Listening Body: Radio, Disability, and the Politics of Citizenship in
Interwar France’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association,
Philadelphia, January. Used with permission of the author.
Schwartz, V. (1999) Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Serlin, D. and Lerner, J. (1997) ‘Weegee and the Jewish Question’, Wide Angle 19(4): 95–108.
Sherman, D.J. (1999) The Construction of Memory in Interwar France, Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
290 References

Stewart, M. L. (2001) For Health and Beauty: Physical Culture for Frenchwomen, 1880s–1930s, Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Tester, K. (ed.) (1994) The Flâneur, New York: Routledge.
Vidler, A. (1992) The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Walker, I. (2002) City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris,
New York: Manchester University Press.
White, E. (2001) The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris, New York: Bloomsbury.
Wilson, E. (2001) The Contradictions of Culture: Cities, Culture, Women, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Wolff, J. (1985) ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’, Theory, Culture &
Society 2(3): 37–46.

2. Rob Imrie, The body, disability and Le Corbusier’s conception of the

radiant environment
Ann Hall, M. (1996) Feminism and Sporting Bodies: Essays on Theory and Practice, Champaign, IL:
Human Kinetics.
Banham, R. P. (1960) Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, London: Architectural Press.
Bordo, S. (1995) Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press.
Caygill, H. (1990) Architectural Postmodernism, London: AA.
Colomina, B. (1994) Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Crawford, M. (1991) ‘Can architects be socially responsible?’, in Ghirardo, D. (ed.) Out of Site: A
Social Criticism of Architecture, Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 27–45.
Crowe, N. (1995) Nature and the Idea of a Man Made World, London: MIT Press.
Curtis, W. (1986) Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms, London: Phaidon.
Davies, C. and Lifchez, R. (1987) ‘An open letter to architects’, in Lifchez, R. (ed.) Rethinking
Architecture, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 35–50.
Dickens, P. (1980) ‘Social science and design theory’, Environment and Planning B: Planning and
Design, 6:105–17.
Frampton, K. (1980) Modern Architecture: A Critical History, London: Thames and Hudson.
Frampton, K. (1991) ‘Reflections on the autonomy of architecture: a critique of contemporary
production’, in Ghirardo, D. (ed.) Out of Site: A Social Criticism of Architecture, Seattle, WA: Bay
Press.
Ghirardo, D. (ed.) (1991) Out of Site: A Social Criticism of Architecture, Seattle, WA: Bay Press.
Gray, E. (1929) ‘De l’eclectisme au doute, l’architecture vivante’, translated by Nevins, D., 1981,
‘From Eclecticism to Doubt’, Heresies, 11, 3:71–2.
Grosz, E. (1992) ‘Bodies-Cities’, in Colomina, B. (ed.) Sexuality and Space, New York, 241–54.
Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington, IN: Princeton
Architectural Press.
Grosz, E. (1995) Space, Time, and Perversion, London: Routledge.
Hayden, D. (1981) ‘What would a non-sexist city be like: speculations on housing, urban design,
and human work’, in Stimpson, C., Dixler, E., Nelson, M. and Yatrakis, K. (eds) Women and the
American City, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
House Builders Federation (1995) ‘The application of building regulations to help disabled people
in new dwellings in England and Wales’, unpublished paper.
Imrie, R. (1996) Disability and the City: International Perspectives, London and New York: Paul Chapman
Publishing and St Martin’s Press.
References 291

Jencks, C. (1987) Le Corbusier and the Tragic View of Architecture, London: Penguin.
King, R. (1996) Emancipating Space, New York: Guildford.
Knesl, J. (1984) ‘The powers of architecture’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1, 1:3–22.
Knox, P. (1987) ‘The social production of the built environment – architects, architecture, and the
post modern city’, Progress in Human Geography, 11, 3:354–78.
Laws, G. (1994a) ‘Oppression, knowledge, and the built environment’, Political Geography, 13, 1:7–32.
Laws, G. (1994b) ‘Aging, contested meanings, and the built environment’, Environment and Planning
A, 26, 11:1787–802.
Le Corbusier (1900) La Peinture Moderne, Paris: Cres.
Le Corbusier (1925a) The Decorative Art of Today, London: Architectural Press.
Le Corbusier (1925b) Urbanisme, Paris: Cres.
Le Corbusier (1927) Towards a New Architecture, Trowbridge: Butterworth Architecture.
Le Corbusier (1947) The Four Routes, London: Denis Dobson Ltd.
Le Corbusier (1948) The Home of Man, London: Architectural Press.
Le Corbusier (1967) The Radiant City, London: Faber and Faber Ltd.
Le Corbusier (1980) Modular I and II, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lefebvre, H. (1968) Dialectical Materialism, London: Jonathan Cape.
Lester, R. (1997) ‘The (dis) embodied self in anorexia nervosa’, Social Science and Medicine, 44, 4:479–
89.
McAnulty, R. (1992) ‘Body troubles’, in Whiteman, J., Kipnis, J. and Burdett, R. (eds) Strategies in
Architectural Thinking, London: MIT Press, 181–97.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) The Phenomenology of Perception, London: RKP.
Mumford, L. (1962) ‘The case against modern architecture’, Architectural Record, April 155–62.
Mumford, L. (1968) The Urban Prospect, London: Secker and Warburg.
Nevins, D. (1981) ‘From eclecticism to doubt’, Heresies, 11, 3:71–2.
Probyn, E. (1993) Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge.
Sennett, R. (1994) Flesh and Stone, London: Faber and Faber.
Shilling, C. (1995) The Body and Social Theory, London: Sage.
Sullivan, L. (1947) Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings, New York: Wittenborn Shultz.
Tschumi, B. (1996) Architecture and Disjunction, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Venturi, R. (1966) Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, New York: Museum of Modern Art.
Vitruvius (1960) The Ten Books of Architecture, Dover Publications, New York.
Ward, A. (1993) ‘Resistance or reaction? The cultural politics of design’, Architecture and Behaviour,
9, 1:39–68.
Weisman, L. (1992) Discrimination by Design, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Whiteman, J., Kipnis, J. and Burdett, R. (eds) (1992) Strategies in Architectural Thinking, London: MIT
Press.
Wigley, M. (1992) ‘The translation of architecture: the production of Babel’, in Whiteman, J., Kipnis,
J. and Burdett, R. (eds) Strategies in Architectural Thinking, London: MIT Press, 240–54.
Wolfe, T. (1981) From Bauhaus to Our House, New York: Farar, Straus, Giroux.

4. Liz Crow, Lying down anyhow: disability and the rebel body
Bullivant, S. (2011) ‘Sweeping the Homeless – and Charity – From Westminster’s Streets’, The
Guardian [Online]. Accessed 04.03.12. Available: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/
belief/2011/mar/04/homeless-victoria-london-westminster-bylaw (paragraph 4)
Frank, T. (6 July 2011) ‘Untitled, Nothing into Something; A Blog About Light’ [Online]. Accessed
26.05.12. Available: http://www.nothingintosomething.com/blog/james-turrell-celestial-vault
Herrera, H. (1983) Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, New York: Perennial Library/Harper & Row, 406
292 References

Lockton, D. (2008) ‘Anti-Homeless “Stools”: Design with Intent Blog’ [Online]. Accessed 26.05.12.
Available: http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/category/benches/
Municipal Code (2011) San Bruno, California. Title 5 Public peace, Morals and Welfare; Chapter
6.12 Trespassing and Loitering; 6.12.060 Sitting or lying down in designated zones prohibited, Quality
Code Publishing [Online]. Accessed 26.05.12. Available: http://qcode.us/codes/sanbruno/view.
php?topic=6-6_12-6_12_060&frames=on
Newell, C. (2002) in Goggin, G. (2008) ‘Bioethics, Disability and the Good Life: Remembering
Christopher Newell: 1964–2008’, Bioethical Inquiry, 5, 235–238, 237
Newell, C. (2006) ‘Moving Disability from Other to Us’, in O’Brien, P. & Sullivan, M. (Eds) Allies in
Emancipation: shifting from providing service to being of support, Melbourne: Thomson/Dunmore, ix–xi, ix.
Tophoff, M. (2006) ‘Mindfulness-Training: Exploring Personal Change through Sensory Awareness’,
Internet Journal for Cultural Studies (Internet-ZeitschriftfürKulturwissenschaften, in translation)
[Online]. Accessed 26.05.12. Available: http://www.inst.at/trans/16Nr/09_2/tophoff16.htm
(paragraph 5)
Vassi, M. (1984) Lying Down: The Horizontal Worldview, Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 14
Visbeek, B. (2009) A Sign of Enlightenment and Beauty (photograph) [Online]. Accessed 26.05.12.
Available: http://www.flickr.com/photos/visbeek/4002506546/
Wilkinson, A. (Ed) (2002) Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA:
University of California Press
Wright, F.S. (1947), ‘Henry Moore: Reclining Figure’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 6:2
95–105, 104

5. Rod Michalko, Blinding the power of sight

Jameson, F. 2003. “Future City” in New Left Review. 21(May–June): 65–79, 76.
King, T. 2003. The Truth about Stories. Massey Hall Lecture Series and Anansi Press Inc. Dead Dog
Café Productions Inc. and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Page 10.

Part II Theory and criticism

Butler, R., and Parr, H. (eds) (1999) Mind and Body Spaces: Geographies of Illness, Impairment and
Disability, London and New York: Routledge.
Chouinard, V., Hall, E., and Wilton, R. (eds) (2010) Towards Enabling Geographies: ‘disabled’ bodies and
minds in society and space, London and New York: Routledge.
Corker, M., and Shakespeare, T. (eds) (2002) Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory,
London and New York: Continuum.
Davis, L.J. (1995) Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, London: Verso.
Davis, L. (2002) Bending Over Backwards. Disability, Dismodernism and Other Difficult Positions, New
York: NYU Press.
Davis, L. (2014) The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era, Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press.
Garland-Thomson, R. (1996) Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York: NYU
Press.
Gleeson, B. (1998) Geographies of Disability, London and New York: Routledge.
Haller, B. (2010) Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media, Advocado Press Inc.
(epublisher).
Imrie, R. (1996) Disability and the City: International Perspectives, London: Sage.
Imrie, R., and Edwards, C. (2007) ‘The geographies of disability: reflecting on the development of a
sub-discipline’, Geography Compass, 1(3): 623–640.
References 293

Imrie, R. (2012) ‘Universalism, universal design and equitable access to the built environment’,
Disability and Rehabilitation, 34(10). Published online at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3
109/09638288.2011.624250?src=recsys
Imrie, R., and Kumar, M. (1998) ‘Focusing on Disability and Access in the Built Environment’,
Disability and Society, 13(3). Published online at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080
/09687599826687
Kafer, A. (2013) Feminist, Queer, Crip, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Michalko, R. (2002) The Difference that Disability Makes, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Siebers, T. (2008) Disability Theory, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Siebers, T. (2010) Disability Aesthetics, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Titchkosky (2008) ‘To pee or not to pee? Ordinary Talk about Extraordinary Exclusions in a
University Environment’ Canadian Journal of Sociology. 33(1): 37–60, available online at: http://
ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/CJS/article/view/1526/1058
Titchkosky, T. (2011) The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning, Toronto: University of Toronto
Press.

6. Tobin Siebers, Disability aesthetics

Allan Poe, E. (1978) ‘Ligeia,’ in Ollive Mabbott, T. (ed) The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 3 vols
2: 305–34. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Auerbach, E. (1953) Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bacon, F. (2007) ‘Of Beauty,’ in The Essays. New York: Cosimo Classics, pp. 111–112.
Baumgarten, A. (1954) Reflections on Poetry, trans. William Holther, Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Breton, A. (1960) Nadja, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Grove Press.
Crow, T. (1996) The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
Dornberg, J. (1987) ‘Art Vandals: Why do They Do It?’ Art News 86 (March):102–9.
Domberg, J. (1988) ‘Deliberate Malice,’ Art News 87 (October): 63–65.
Foucault, M. (1973) Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard
Howard, New York: Vintage.
Gamboni, D. (1997) The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism Since the French Revolution New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Mosse, G. L. (1991) ‘Beauty without Sensuality / The Exhibition Entartete Kunst, in “Degenerate
Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, ed. Stephanie Barron, New York: Los Angeles
County Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams, 25–31.
Quinn, M. (2004) The Complete Marbles New York: Mary Boone Gallery.
Siebers, T. (2000a) ‘The New Art,’ The Body Aesthetic: From Fine Art to Body Modification Ann Arbor,
MI: University of Michigan Press.
Seibers, T. (2000b) ‘Hitler and the Tyranny of the Aesthetic,’ Philosophy and Literature 24.1: 96–110.
Siebers T. (2002) ‘Broken Beauty: Disability and Art Vandalism,’ Michigan Quarterly Review 41.2:
223–45.
Siebers, T. (2003) ‘The Return to Ritual: Violence and Art in the Media Age,’ JCRT 5.1: 9–32.
Siebers, T. (2004) ‘Words Stare Like a Glass Eye: From Literary to Visual to Disability Studies and
Back Again,’ PMLA 119.5: 1315–24.
Wimsatt, W. K. and Beardsley, M. C. (1954) ‘The Intentional Fallacy,’ in W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal
Icon Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 3–18.
294 References

7. Tanya Titchkosky and Rod Michalko, The body as a problem of

individuality: a phenomenological disability studies approach
Abberley, P. (1998). ‘The Spectre at the Feast: Disabled People and Social Theory,’ Shakespeare, T.
(ed.) The Disability Reader: Social Science Perspectives. London: Cassell Academic, pp. 79–93.
Accessibility Services (AS). (2010). University of Toronto. Viewed July 29th, 2010, http://www.
accessibility.utoronto.ca/about/rightsandresp.htm.
Ahmed, S. (2004a). The Cultural Politics of Emotion, New York: Routledge.
Ahmed, S. (2004b). ‘Collective Feelings: Or, the Impressions Left by Others.’ Theory, Culture &
Society. Vol. 21(2): 25–42.
Bauman, Z. (2004). Identity, Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Butler, J. (2009). Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, New York: Verso Press.
Butler, J. (1999). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, New York: Routledge.
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time, New York: Harper & Row.
Hughes, B. (2007). ‘Being Disabled: Towards a Critical Social Ontology for Disability Studies.’
Disability & Society. Vol. 22(7): 673–684.
Hughes, B. and Paterson, K. (1997) ‘The Social Model of Disability and the Disappearing Body:
Towards a sociology of impairment.’ Disability and Society Vol 12(3). Available online at http://
www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09687599727209
Husserl, E. (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to
Phenomenological Philosophy, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1958 [1945]). Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Michalko, R. (2002). The Difference that Disability Makes, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Michalko, R. (1999). The Two in One: Walking with Smokie, Walking with Blindness, Philadelphia, PA:
Temple University Press.
Michalko, R. (1998). The Mystery of the Eye and the Shadow of Blindness, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Sacks, H. (1984). ‘On Doing “Being Ordinary”,’ Maxwell, J. and Heritage, J. (eds) Structures of Social
Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 413–30.
Schutz, A. (1973). Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, The Hague: Martinus Nijoff.
Stiker, H.-J. (1999). The History of Disability, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Titchkosky, T. (2011). The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Titchkosky, T. (2008). ‘“To Pee or Not to Pee?” Ordinary Talk about Extraordinary Exclusions in a
University Environment.’ Canadian Journal of Sociology. Vol. 33(1): 37–60. http://ejournals.library.
ualberta.ca/index.php/CJS/article/view/1526/1058.
Titchkosky, T. (2001). ‘Disability – A Rose by Any Other Name? People First Language in Canadian
Society.’ Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology. Vol. 38(2): 125–40.
Titchkosky, T. and Aubrecht, K. (2009). ‘The Power of Anguish: Re-mapping Mental Diversity with
an Anti-colonial Compass,’ Kempf, A. (ed.) Breaching the Colonial Contract: Anti-Colonialism in the
US and Canada. New York: Springer, pp. 179–99.
Titchkosky, T. and Michalko, R. (2009). Rethinking Normalcy: A Disability Studies Reader, Toronto:
Canadian Scholars/Women’s Press.
Weiss, G. (2008). Refiguring the Ordinary, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

8. Aimi Hamraie, Designing collective access: a feminist disability

theory of universal design
Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and
Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
References 295

Brown, L., ed. 2011. Feminist Practices: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Women in Architecture. Surrey:
Ashgate.
Center for Universal Design. 1997. “The Principles of Universal Design, Version 2.0.” North
Carolina State University. Available at: http://www.ncsu.edu/www/ncsu/design/sod5/cud/about_
ud/udprinciplestext.htm. Accessed on: March 20, 2013.
Chouinard, V., E. Hall, and R. Wilton, eds. 2010. Toward Enabling Geographies: ‘Disabled’ Bodies and
Minds in Society and Space. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Code, L. 2006. Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Corker, M. 2001. “Sensing Disability.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 16.4: 34–52.
D’Souza, N. 2004. “Is Universal Design a Critical Theory?” In Designing a More Inclusive World,
edited by S. Keates and J. Clarkson, 3–9. London: Springer.
Dyck, Is. 2010. “Geographies of Disability: Reflecting on New Body Knowledges.” In Toward
Enabling Geographies: ‘Disabled’ Bodies and Minds in Society and Space, edited by V. Chouinard, E.
Hall, and R. Wilton, 253–264. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Eiseland, N. 1994. The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability. Nashville, TN:
Abington Press.
Garland-Thomson, R. 1996. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Garland-Thomson, R. 2005. “Feminist Disability Studies: A Review Essay.” Signs: A Journal of Women
and Culture 2:1557–1587.
Garland-Thomson, R. [2002] 2011a. “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” In
Feminist Disability Studies, edited by Kim Q. Hall, 13–47. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press.
Garland-Thomson, R. 2011b. “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept.” Hypatia: A
Journal of Feminist Philosophy 26.3:591–609.
Glesson, B. 1999. Geographies of Disability. London and New York: Routledge.
Grasswick, H. 2011. (ed) Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge.
Rotterdam: Springer.
Hamraie, A. 2012. “Universal Design Research as a New Materialist Practice.” Disability Studies
Quarterly 32.4. Available at: http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3246/3185. Accessed on: March 20, 2013.
Hannson, L. 2007. “The Power of Design – Allies Fighting Design Exclusion.” In Little Monsters:
(De)Coupling Assemblages of Consumption, edited by H. Brembeck, K. Ekstrom, and M. Morck,
15–28. Berlin: Lit Verlag.
Hayden, D. 2000. “What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban
Design and Human Work.” In Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, edited by
I. Borden, B. Penner, and J. Rendell, 266–281. London: Routledge.
Imrie, R. 2002. “Architects’ Conceptions of the Human Body.” Environment and Planning D: Society
and Space 21.1:47–65.
Imrie, R. 2010. “Disability, Embodiment, and the Meaning of Home.” In Toward Enabling Geographies:
“Disabled” Bodies and Minds in Society and Space, edited by V. Chouinard, E. Hall, and R. Wilton,
23–44. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Imrie, R. 2012. “Universalism, Universal Design, and Equitable Access to the Built Environment.”
Disability and Rehabilitation 34.10:873–882.
Lifchez, R. 1987. Rethinking Architecture: Design Students and Physically Disabled People. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Mace, R. 1985. “Universal Design: Barrier-Free Environments for Everyone.” Designer’s West
33.1:147–152.
Matrix. 1984. Making Space: Women and the Man Made Environment. London: Pluto Press.
Mills, C. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
296 References

Mingus, M. 2010a. “Reflections from Detroit: Reflections on An Opening: Disability Justice and
Creating Collective Access in Detroit.” INCITE Blog. Available at: http://inciteblog.wordpress.
com/2010/08/23/reflections-from-detroit-reflections-on-an-opening-disability-justice-and-
creating-collective-access-in-detroit/. Accessed on: December 15, 2012.
Mingus, M. 2010b. “Changing the Framework: Disability Justice.” RESIST Newsletter November/
December. Available at: http://www.resistinc.org/sites/default/files/NovDec10NL_sm.pdf.
Accessed on: December 15, 2012.
Mueller, J. 1997. Case Studies on the Principles of Universal Design. Raleigh, NC: Center for Universal
Design, North Carolina State.
Mullick, A., S. Agarwal, A. Kumar, and P. Swarnkar. 2011. “Public Bathroom for Universal Access:
An Article.” The Trellis 2.7:117–126.
Nielson, K. E. 2012. A Disability History of the United States. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Ostroff, E., M. Limont, and D. Hunter. 2002. Building a World Fit for People: Designers with Disabilities
at Work. Boston, MA: Adaptive Environments.
Rose, G. 1993. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Blackwell
Publishers.
Sandhu, J. 2011. “The Rhinoceros Syndrome: A Contrarian View of Universal Design.” In Universal
Design Handbook: Second Edition, edited by W. Preiser and K. Smith, 44.3–44.11. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Sanford, J. 2012. Universal Design as a Rehabilitation Strategy. New York: Springer.
Sarkissian, W. 1987. “How the Students Saw It.” In Rethinking Architecture: Design Students and Physically
Disabled People, edited by R. Lifchez, 123–134. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Silvers, A. 1998. “Formal Justice.” In Disability, Difference, and Discrimination, edited by A. Silvers, D.
Wasserman, and M. Mahowald, 13–146. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Steinfeld, E. 1979. Access to the Built Environment: A Review of the Literature. Washington, DC: U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Policy and Development Research.
Steinfeld, E. and B. Tauke. 2002. “Universal Designing.” In Universal Design: 17 Ways of Thinking and
Teaching, edited by Jon Christophersen, 165–189. Husbanken: Council of Europe.
Steinfeld, E. and J. Maisel. 2012. Universal Design: Creating Inclusive Environments. Chichester: John
Wiley & Sons.
Steinfeld, E., V. Paquet, C. D’Souza, C. Joseph, and J. Maisel. 2010. “Final Report: Anthropometry
of Wheeled Mobility Project.” Report of the Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access for the
U.S. Access Board. Buffalo, NY: Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access.
Titchkosky, T. 2011. The Question of Access. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Tuana, N. and S. Sullivan, eds. 2007. Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany, NY: State University
of New York Press.
Weisman, L. K. [1981] 1999. “Women’s Environmental Rights: A Manifesto.” Heresies 11 (1981) Vol
3 No 3. Reprinted in Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, edited by Borden, I.,
Penner, B. and Rendell, J. (1999), 1–5. London and New York: Routledge.
Weisman, L. K. 1989. “A Feminist Experiment: Learning from WPSA, Then and Now.” In Architecture:
A Place for Women, edited by E. Berkley and M. McQuaid, 125–133. Washington DC: Smithsonian.
Weisman, L. K. 1992. Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment.
Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Weisman, L. K. 1999. “Redesigning Architectural Education.” In Design and Feminism: Re-visioning
Spaces, Places, and Everyday Things, edited by J. Rothschild, 159–174. Camden, NY: Rutgers
University Press.
Weisman, L. K. 2012. “The Environment is Political: Universal Design and Social Sustainability,”
Universal Design Newsletter April. Available at: http://www.universaldesign.com/interest/
sustainability/531-the-environmental-is-political-universal-design-and-social-sustainability-
with-leslie-kanes-weisman.html. Accessed on: January 1, 2013.
References 297

Welch, P. 1995. “What Is Universal Design?” In Strategies for Teaching Universal Design, edited by P.
Welch. Boston, MA: Adaptive Environments Center and MIG Communications. Available at:
http://www.udeducation.org/resources/62.html. Accessed on: March 18, 2013.
Welch, P. and S. Jones. 2002. “Universal Design: An Opportunity for Critical Discourse in Design
Education.” In Universal Design: 17 Ways of Thinking and Teaching, edited by J. Christophersen,
191–216. Husbanken: Council of Europe.
Wendell, S. 1996. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York: Routledge.

9. J. Kent Fitzsimons, More than access: overcoming limits in architectural

and disability discourse
Aymonin, D. (2008). “D-475 days, on the way towards the Library of the Rolex Learning Center of
the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland” (Abstract) conference presentation
21st Century Libraries: Changing Forms, Changing Challenges, Changing Objectives: 8th Frankfurt
Scientific Forum 3–4 November.
Breckenridge, C., and Vogler, C. (eds) (2001). The Critical Limits of Embodiment: Reflections on Disability
Criticism. (Special Issue of Public Culture.) Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Centre Suisse pour la construction adaptée aux handicapés (2005). “L’art d’une architecture
discriminatoire.” Info: Bulletin du Centre Suisse pour la construction adaptée aux handicapés, November
42, 2–4.
Eisenman, P. (2006). Feints, Milan: Skira.
Hockenberry, J. (1995). Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence, New
York: Hyperion.
Kristeva, J. (2003). Lettre ouverte au président de la République sur les citoyens en situation de handicap, à
l’usage de ceux qui le sont et ceux qui ne le sont pas, Paris: Fayard.
McNeill, W. (1995). Keeping Together in Time, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wölfflin, H. (1886). Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur, Munich: Kgl. Hof- & Universitäts-
Buchdruckerei, 1886; translated as Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture (1994). In R.
Vischer et al., H.F. Mallgrave and E. Ikonomou (Transl.) Empathy, Form and Space: Problems in
German Aesthetics, 1873–1893. Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the
Humanities.

10. Jay Dolmage, From steep steps to retroﬁt to universal design, from
collapse to austerity: neo-liberal spaces of disability
Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Blyth, M. (2013) Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dolmage, J. (2006) ‘Mapping Composition,’ in Brueggeman, B. and C. Lewiecki-Wilson (eds.) with
J. Dolmage Disability and the Teaching of Writing: A Critical Sourcebook, pp. 14–27. Boston, MA:
Bedford St. Martin’s.
Dolmage, J. (2015a) ‘We Need To Talk About Universal Design,’ Cripping the Computer, Unpublished
Edited Collection. http://ncte.connectedcommunity.org/wlu/ourlibrary/viewdocument?Docum
entKey=5caa9259-7e61-453b-b958-c409c8200d10
Dolmage, J. (2015b) ‘Disabling Studies, Disability Studied, and Disability Studies,’ Keynote,
Canadian Disability Association Conference, Ottawa, Ontario, 3 June.
Duggan, L. (2003) The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy,
Boston, MA: Beacon.
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1996 (1920))This Side of Paradise, New York: Modern Library.
Gleeson, B. (1999) Geographies of Disability, New York: Routledge.
298 References

Hamraie, A. (2013) Designing Collective Access: A Feminist Disability Theory of Universal Design, online
http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3871
Harvey, D. (1993) ‘From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the condition of
postmodernity,’ In Bird, J., Curtis, B., Putnam, T., Robertson, G., and Tickner, L. (eds) Mapping
the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, pp. 3–29. London: Routledge.
Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kerschbaum, S. L. (2014) ‘Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference,’ Urbana, IL: Conference on
College Composition and Communication/National Council of Teachers of English.
Mace, R. L. (1985) ‘Universal Design, Barrier Free Environments for Everyone,’ Designers West 33.1:
147–152.
Mackey, E. (1999) The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada, London:
Routledge.
Mayer, A. (2008) ‘Architecture in an Age of Austerity,’ New Geography. 29 Nov, online http://www.
newgeography.com/content/00444-architecture-age-austerity.
McRuer, R. (2015) Crip Times, Unpublished manuscript.
Mitchell, J. (2014) ‘Graves’ Discovery Affects Miss. Medical School’s Plans,’ The Jackson Mississippi
Clarion Ledger, 9 February. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/09/mississippi-
medical-school-graves-found/5320995/.
Mosby, I. (2013) ‘Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical
Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952,’ Histoire
sociale/Social history 46.1: 145–172. Project MUSE, Web. 1 Jun 2015. https://muse.jhu.edu/.
Price, M. (2011) Mad At School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press.
Price, M. (2012) ‘Access: A Happening,’ Featured session, in collaboration with J. Dolmage, Q.-L.
Driskill, C. Selfe, et al. Conference on College Composition and Communication. St. Louis,
MO. March 23, 2012.
Stuckler, D. and S. Basu. (2013) The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills, London: Allen Lane.
Titchkosky, T. (2011) The Question of Access, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Trent, J. W. (1994) Inventing the Feeble Mind, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Welsome, E. (1999) The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War, New York:
Dial Press.
Wilder, C. S. (2013) Ebony and Ivy, New York: Bloomsbury Press.
Zarfas, D. E. (1963) ‘The Formation and Function of the Children’s Psychiatric Research Institute,
London, Ontario.’ Canadian Medical Association Journal 88.4:192–195.

Part III Education

Afacan, Y. (2006) ‘Integrating Universal Design into the Main Stream of Architectural Design
Education’, Proceedings of the 1st International CIB Endorsed METU Postgraduate Conference, Built
Environment and Information Technologies, Ankara.
Basnak, M., Tauke, B. and Weidemann, S. (2015, April) ‘Universal Design in Architectural Education:
Who is Doing It? How is it being done?’ paper accepted to ARCC’s conference, Chicago.
Boys, J. (2014) Doing Disability Differently: An Alternative Handbook on Dis/ability, Architecture and
Designing for Everyday Life, London and New York: Routledge.
Boys, J. (2016) ‘Architecture, Place and the “Care-full” Design of Everyday Life’, in C. Bates, R.
Imrie and K. Kullman (eds) Care and Design: Bodies, Buildings, Cities, Chichester: John Wiley &
Sons Ltd, 153–179.
CEBE Special Interest Group (2002) Building and Sustaining a Learning Environment for Inclusive Design.
Edited by Ruth Morrow. Online. Available for free download at http://www.cebe.heacademy.
ac.uk/ learning/sig/inclusive/report.php.
References 299

Centre for Excellence in Universal Design (2010) Integrating Universal Design into the Third Level Curriculum,
National Disability Authority, Dublin, Ireland. http://universaldesign.ie/What-is-Universal-Design/
Education/Integrating-Universal-Design-Content-in-Third-Level-Curriculum/
De Cauwer, P., Clement, M., Buelens, H. and Heylighen, A. (2009) ‘Four Reasons Not to Teach
Inclusive Design’, paper presented at ‘Include’ conference, Helen Hamlyn Centre, Royal College
of Art, UK, 5–8 April.
Dolmage, J. (2005) ‘Disability Studies Pedagogy, Usability and Universal Design’, Disability Studies
Quarterly Fall 25: 4. Available at: http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/627/804
Dolmage, J. (2008) ‘Mapping Composition: Inviting Disability in the Front Door’, in C. Lewiecki-
Wilson, B. J. Brueggemann and J. Dolmage (eds) Disability and the Teaching of Writing: A Critical
Sourcebook, Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 14–27.
Dolmage, J. (2009) ‘Disability, Usability, Universal Design’, in S. K. Miller-Cochran and R. L.
Rodrigo (eds) Rhetorically Rethinking Usability: Theories, Practices, and Methodologies, New York:
Hampton Press. Available for download at: https://www.academia.edu/1569909/Disability_
Usability_Universal_Design
Dolmage, J. (2013) Disability Rhetoric, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Dolmage, J. (2015) ‘Disabling Studies, Disability Studied, and Disability Studies’, Keynote, Canadian
Disability Association Conference, Ottawa, Ontario, 3 June.
Goggin, G. (2010) ‘“Laughing with/at the Disabled”: The Cultural Politics of Disability in Australian
Universities’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 31: 4, 469–481.
Heylighen, A. and Bianchin, M. (2013) ‘How Does Inclusive Design Relate to Good Design?’ Design
Studies 34: 93–110.
Kennig, B. and Ryhl, C. (2002) ‘Teaching Universal Design: Global Examples of Projects and Models
for Teaching in Universal Design at Schools of Design and Architecture’, AAOutils Design for All
report. http://anlh.be/aaoutils/
Kerschbaum, S., Garland-Thomson, R., Oswal, S., Vidali, A., Ghiaciuc, S., Dolmage, J., Meyer,
C., Brueggemann, B. and Samuels, E. (2013) ‘Faculty Members, Accommodation and Access
in Higher Education’, Profession (online). Available at: https://profession.commons.mla.
org/2013/12/09/faculty-members-accommodation-and-access-in-higher-education/
Lifchez, R. (1986) Rethinking Architecture: Design Students and Physically Disabled People, Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Mintz, S. B. (2007) Unruly Bodies. Life Writing by Women with Disabilities, Chapel Hill, NC: The
University of North Carolina Press.
Morrow, R. (2001a) ‘The Draware Project.’ Online at Universal Design Education Online: http://www.
udeducation.org/teach/program_overview/program_infused/morrow.asp
Morrow, R. (2001b) ‘Universal Design as a Critical Tool in Design Education’, in W. Preiser and E.
Ostroff (eds.) The Universal Design Handbook, McGraw-Hill, 54.1–54.16.
Newall, C. (2008) ‘Flourishing Rhetorically: Disability, Diversity and Equal Disappointment
Opportunity’ Vance 117–127. Available for download at: http://scia.intersearch.com.au/sciajspui/
bitstream/1/332/1/Newell%202008.pdf
Price, M. (2009) ‘Access Imagined: The Construction of Disability in Conference Policy Documents’,
Disability Studies Quarterly 29:1 online http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/174/174
Price, M. (2011) Mad at School. Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press.
Tauke, B., Steinfeld, E. and Basnak, M. (2014) ‘Challenges and Opportunities for Inclusive Design
in Graduate Architecture’, in Caltenco, H.A., Hedvall, P.-O., Larsson, A., Rassmus-Gröhn, K.
and Rydeman, B. (eds) Proceedings of the International Conference on Universal Design, UD 2014,
Lund, Sweden, June 16–18 Amsterdam: IOS Press.
Titchkosky, T. (2003) Disability, Self and Society, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Titchkosky, T. (2007) Reading and Writing Disability Differently: The Textured Life of Embodiment, Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
300 References

Titchkosky, T. (2008) ‘“To pee or not to pee?” Ordinary Talk about Extraordinary Exclusions in a
University Environment’, Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 33:1, 37–60.
Yergeau, M., Brewer, E., Kerschbaum, S., Oswal, S. K., Price, S. M., Selfe, M. J. and Howes, F.
(2013) ‘Multimodality in Motion: Disability and Kairotic Spaces’ (online), Kairos: A Journal of
Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 18.1. August. View at: http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/18.1/
coverweb/yergeau-et-al/index.html

11. Stefan White, Including architecture: what difference can we make?

Deleuze, G. (1988). Spinoza, Practical Philosophy, San Francisco, CA, City Light Books.
Deleuze, G. (1992). Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, New York: Zone Books.
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition, London, Continuum.
Deleuze, G. (2003). ‘The three kinds of knowledge.’ Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 14: 1–20,
Warwick.
Eisenman, P. (1995). ‘Eisenman (and company) respond: The politics of formalism.’ Progressive
Architecture 76(2): 88–91
Evans, R. (1995). The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
Evans, R. (1997). Translations between Drawing and Building and Other Essays, London, Architectural
Association.
Ghirardo, D. (1994). ‘Eisenman’s bogus avant-garde.’ Progressive Architecture November, 70–73.
Naess, A. (1989). Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Nussbaum, C. M. (2011). Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach, London, Harvard
University Press.
OECD (2015). Ageing in Cities, Paris, OECD Publishing. DOI: http://dx.doi.
org/10.1787/9789264231160-en
Rawes, P. E. (2013). Relational Architectural Ecologies: Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity, New York,
Routledge.
Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Spinoza, B. (1677 [1996]) Ethics, London, Penguin Classics.
White, S., Phillipson, C. and Hammond, M. (2012). ‘Old Moat in an Age-Friendly Manchester
Research Report (AFOM).’ http://www.southwayhousing.co.uk/your-neighbourhood/age-
friendly-neighbourhoods.aspx (accessed 2016).
White, S. R. (2014). ‘Gilles Deleuze and the project of architecture: an expressionist design-research
methodology.’ PhD thesis. University College London.
World Health Organisation (2002). Active ageing: a policy framework. Geneva: WHO Press. Downloadable
from http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/67215/1/WHO_NMH_NPH_02.8.pdf
World Health Organization (2007). Global Age-friendly Cities: A guide, Geneva: WHO Press.

12. Jos Boys, Diagramming for a dis/ordinary architecture

arq (2012) Diagramming Architecture, Architectural Research Quarterly, 16, 3–4
Artemel, A. J. (2013) ‘Peter Versus Peter: Eisenman and Zumthor’s Theoretical Throwdown,’ 1st
August, http://architizer.com/blog/peter-versus-peter/
Borden, I., Kerr, J., Pivaro, A., and Rendell, J. (1996) Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture in the
City, London: Routledge
Boys, J. (1996) ‘Neutral Gazes and Knowable Objects. Challenging the Masculinist Structures of
Architectural Knowledge,’ in Wigglesworth, S., Ruedi, K., and McCorquodale, D. (eds) Desiring
Practices: Architecture Gender and the Interdisciplinary, London: Black Dog Publishing
Boys, J. (1998) ‘Beyond Maps and Metaphors. Re-thinking the Relationships between Architecture and
Gender,’ in Ainley, R. (ed.) New Frontiers of Space, Bodies and Gender, London and New York: Routledge
References 301

Boys, J. (2014) Doing Disability Differently: An Alternative Handbook on Architecture, Dis/ability and
Designing for Everyday Life, London and New York: Routledge
Boys, J. (2016) ‘Architecture, place and the “care-full” design of everyday life,’ in Bates, C., Imrie,
R., Kullman, K. (eds) Care and Design: Bodies, Buildings, Cities, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell
Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1980 [2013]) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
London: Bloomsbury Academic
Eisenman, P. (1987) Houses of Cards, New York: Oxford University
Eisenman, P. (1999) Diagram Diaries, New York: Universe Architecture Series
Eisenman, P. (2007) Diagram. ‘An Original Scene of Writing’, in Writing into the Void: Selected Writings
1990 – 2004, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press
Evans, R. (2000) The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries, Boston, MA: MIT Press
Fedorchenko, M. (2008) ‘Beautiful Apparatus: Diagrammatic Balance of Forms and Flows,’
Architectural Theory Review, 13:3, 288–305
Frank, S. (1994) Peter Eisenman’s House VI: The Client’s Response, New York: Watson-Guptil
Publications
Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall
Garland-Thompson, R. (2011) ‘Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept,’ Hypatia Special
Issue: Ethics of Embodiment, 26:3, 591–609, Summer
Ghirardo, D. (1994) ‘Eisenman’s bogus avant-garde,’ Progressive Architecture, November. 70–73.
Gins, M. and Arakawa (2002) The Architectural Body, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press
Goldberger, P. (1989) ‘The Museum That Theory Built’ The New York Times November 5th.
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/11/05/arts/architecture-view-the-museum-that-theory-built.
html?src=pm&pagewanted=1
Henry Dreyfuss Associates (1974) Body Measurements, Boston, MA: MIT Press
Kafer, A. (2013) Feminist, Queer, Crip, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press
Lambert, L. (2012) ‘Architectural Theories: A Subversive Approach to the Ideal Normalized Body,’
April 29, http://thefunambulist.net/2012/04/29/architectural-theories-a-subversive-approach-to-
the-ideal-normatized-body/
Lambert, L. and Pham, M-H. T. (2015) ‘Spinoza in a T-shirt’, July 1st, http://thenewinquiry.com/
essays/spinoza-in-a-t-shirt/
Le Corbusier (2004) [First published in two volumes in 1954 and 1958.] The Modulor: A Harmonious
Measure to the Human Scale, Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics. Basel & Boston: Birkhäuser.
Michalko, R. (2002) The Difference that Disability Makes, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press
Neufert, E. and Neufert, P. (2012) Architects’ Data 4th Edition, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell
Price, M. (2015) ‘The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain,’ Hypatia Special Issue:
Conversations in Feminist Disability Studies, 30:1, 268–284, Winter
Reiser, J. and Umemoto, N. (2006) Atlas of Novel Tectonics Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Rowe, C. (1947) ‘The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa: Palladio and Le Corbusier Compared,’
Architectural Review, March 101: 101–104
Somol, R. E. (1999) ‘Dummy Text, or the Diagrammatic Basis of Contemporary Architecture,’
Introduction to Diagram Diaries, by Peter Eisenman, New York: Universe Publishing, 7–25.
Titchkosky, T. (2002) ‘Cultural maps; which way to disability?’, in Corker, M. and Shakespeare, T.
(eds) Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying disability theory, London: Continuum
Titchkosky, T. (2008) ‘To Pee or Not to pee?’ Ordinary Talk about Extraordinary Exclusions in a
University Environment, Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, 33(1): 37–60
Titchkosky, T. (2011) The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning, Toronto: University of Toronto
Press
Vidler, A. (2000) ‘Diagrams of Diagrams: Architectural Abstraction and Modern Representation,’
Representations, 72, 1–20, Autumn
Virilio, P. and Parent, C. (1966 and 1996) Architecture Principe, Les Editions de Imprimeur
302 References

Wittkower, R. (1949) Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, London: The Warburg Institute
Zumthor, P. (2006) Atmospheres, 5th Edition, Basel: Birkhauser Architecture
Zumthor, P. (2010) Thinking Architecture, 3rd Edition, Basel: Birkhauser Architecture

13. Margaret Price, Un/shared space: the dilemma of inclusive

architecture
Abramson, K. (2014). ‘Turning up the lights on gaslighting,’ Philosophical Perspectives 28.1: 1–30.
Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Alaimo, S. (2008). ‘Trans-corporeal feminisms and the ethical space of nature,’ Material feminisms. Ed.
Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.. 237–264.
Barad, K. (2003). ‘Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to
matter,’ Signs 28.3: 801–831.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning,
Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press.
Blankmeyer Burke, T. and B. Nicodemus. (2013). ‘Coming out of the hard of hearing closet:
Reflections on a shared journey in academia,’ Disability Studies Quarterly 33.2. http://dsq-sds.org/
article/view/3706/3239
Boys, J. (2014). Doing disability differently: An alternative handbook on architecture, dis/ability and designing
for everyday life, London & New York: Routledge.
Charlton, J. I. (1998). Nothing about us without us: Disability oppression and empowerment, Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Crowley, S. (2006). Toward a civil discourse: Rhetoric and fundamentalism, Pittsburgh, PA: University of
Pittsburgh Press.
Dadas, C. (2017) ‘Interview Practices as Accessibility: The Academic Job Market’ Computers and
Composition. Ed. Melanie Yergeau and Elizabeth Brewer. Digital Press.
Dolmage, J. (2008). ‘Mapping composition: Inviting disability in the front door,’ Disability and the
teaching of writing: A critical sourcebook. Ed. C. Lewiecki-Wilson and B. J. Brueggemann, with J.
Dolmage. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s. 14–27.
Dolmage, J. (2013). Disability rhetoric, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Dolmage, J. (2015). ‘Universal design: Places to start,’ Disability Studies Quarterly 35.2. http://dsq-sds.
org/article/view/4632
Dunne, A. and F. Raby. (2013). Speculative everything: Design, fiction, and social dreaming, Cambridge,
MA & London: MIT.
Eligon, J. (2016, February 3). ‘Diversity is one thing, inclusion another: After racist episodes, blunt
discussions on campus,’ New York Times. ‘Education Life.’
Fox, C. (2002). ‘The race to truth: Disarticulating critical thinking from whiteliness,’ Pedagogy 2.2:
197–212.
Hamraie, A. (2013). ‘Designing collective access: A feminist disability theory of universal design,’
Disability Studies Quarterly 33.4. http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3871/3411
Hawhee, D. (2002). ‘Kairotic encounters,’ Perspectives on rhetorical invention. Ed. J. M. Atwill and J. M.
Lauer. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press 16–35.
Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist, Queer, Crip, Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press.
Kafer, A. (2016). ‘Un/safe disclosures: Scenes of disability and trauma,’ Journal of Literary & Cultural
Disability Studies 10.1: 1–20.
Keller, J. S. (2016). ‘The politics of stairs,’ Design Equilibrium. American Institute of Architects,
Atlanta, GA: 42–45.
Kerschbaum, S. (2014). Toward a new rhetoric of difference, Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers
of English.
References 303

Konrad, A. (2016). ‘Access as a lens for peer tutoring,’ Another Word. Feb 22. http://writing.wisc.edu/
blog/?p=6454
Lefebvre, H. (1974 (trans. 1991)). The production of space, Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Massey, D. (1994). Space, place and gender, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
McLaren, P. (1988). ‘Schooling the postmodern body: Critical pedagogy and the politics of
enfleshment,’ The Journal of Education 170:3, 53–83.
Mingus, M. (2011). ‘Access intimacy: The missing link,’ Leaving Evidence. May 5. https://
leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/
Newell, C. (2007). ‘Flourishing rhetorically: Disability, diversity, and equal disappointment
opportunity,’ Disabled faculty and staff in a disabling society: Multiple identities in higher education. Ed.
Mary Lee Vance. Huntersville, NC: AHEAD. 117–127.
Pratt, M. B. (1984). ‘Identity: Skin blood heart,’ Yours in struggle: Three feminist perspectives on anti-
Semitism and racism. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1984. 11–63.
Price, M. (2009). ‘Access imagined: The construction of disability in conference policy documents,’
Disability Studies Quarterly 29.1. http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/174/174
Price, M. (2011). Mad at school: Rhetorics of mental disability and academic life, Ann Arbor, MI: University
of Michigan Press.
Price, M. (2016). ‘Access statement for presentations’. https://margaretprice.wordpress.com/access-
statement-for-presentations/
Price, M. and Kerschbaum, S. L. (2016). ‘Stories of Methodology: Interviewing Sideways, Crooked
and Crip,’ Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 5.3: 18–56.
Reynolds, N. (2004). Geographies of writing: Inhabiting places and encountering difference, Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press.
Rickert, T. (2007). ‘Invention in the wild: On locating kairos in space-time,’ The locations of composition.
Ed. C. J. Keller and C. R. Weisser. Albany, NY: SUNY P. 71–89.
Rickert, T. (2013). Ambient rhetoric: The attunements of rhetorical being, Pittsburgh, PA: University of
Pittsburgh Press.
Ruíz, E. F. (2014). ‘Musing: Spectral phenomenologies: Dwelling poetically in professional
philosophy,’ Hypatia 29.1: 196–204.
Schalk, S. (2013). ‘Coming to claim crip: Disidentification with/in disability studies,’ Disability
Studies Quarterly 33.2. http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3705
Smith, W. A. (2004). ‘Black faculty coping with racial battle fatigue: The campus racial climate in a
post-civil rights era.’ Ed. D. Cleveland. A long way to go: Conversations about race by African American
faculty and graduate students, New York: Peter Lang. 171–190.
Titchkosky, T. (2007). Reading and writing disability differently: The textured life of embodiment, Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Titchkosky, T. (2011). The question of access: Disability, space, meaning, Toronto: U of Toronto P.
Ventola, E., C. Shalom, C, and S. Thompson (eds) (2002). The Language of Conferencing, Frankfurt
am Main: Peter Lang
Wilson, S. (2012). ‘They forgot Mammy had a brain’, Presumed incompetent: The intersections of race and
class for women in academia, Ed. G. Gutiérrez y Muhs, Y. Flores Niemann, C. G. González and A.
P. Harris. Boulder, CO: Utah State University Press. 65–77.
Wood, T., J. Dolmage, M. Price and C. Lewiecki-Wilson. (2014). ‘Moving beyond disability 2.0 in
composition studies,’ Composition Studies 42.2: 147–150.
Yergeau, M., E. Brewer, S. Kerschbaum, S. Oswal, M. Price, M. Salvo, C. Selfe and F. Howes. (2013).
‘Multimodality in motion: disability and kairotic spaces,’ Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology
and Pedagogy 18.1. http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/18.1/coverweb/yergeau-et-al/index.html
304 References

14. Aaron Williamson, The collapsing lecture

Barber, S. (2003) Blows and Bombs. Antonin Artaud: The Biography, London: Creation Books
Butt, G. (2005) Introduction to After Criticism – New Responses to Art and Performance, Oxford:
Blackwell.
Dillon, B. (2007) ‘Slapstick Theory’ Frieze, Issue 110, October.
Thody, P. and Read, H. (1998) Introducing Sartre, London: Icon Books.
Williamson, A. (2008) Performance / Video / Collaboration, The Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley 44–45.

Part IV Technologies/materialities
Davis, L.J. (1995) Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, London: Verso.
Sobchack, V. (2006) ‘A leg to stand on: prosthetics, metaphor, and materiality’, in M. Smith and J.
Morra (eds) The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Wigley, M. (1991) ‘Prosthetic theory: The disciplining of architecture’, Assemblage 15, 7–29.

15. Peter Anderberg, Where does the person end and the technology
begin?
Akrich, M. & Latour, B. (1992) ‘A Summary of a Convenient Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human
and Nonhuman Assemblies’. In: W. E. Bijker & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society:
Studies in Socio-Technical Change, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 259–264.
Bateson, G. (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind: A Revolutionary Approach to Man’s Understanding of
Himself, New York: Ballantine.
Callon, M. (1986) ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and
of the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay’. In: J. Law (Ed.), Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of
Knowledge?, London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 196–229.
Haraway, D. (1991) ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century’. In: D. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New
York: Routledge.
Hernwall, P. (2001) Barns digitala rum. Berättelser om e-post, chatt & Internet, Stockholm, Sweden:
Pedagogiska institutionen, Stockholms universitet.
International Standardization Organization (2002) ‘ISO 9999:2002.’ Technical Aids for Persons with
Disabilities – Classification and Terminology, Central Secretariat, Geneva Switzerland, http://www.
iso.ch/iso/en/ISOOnline.frontpage
Jain, S. (1999) ‘The Prosthetic Imagination: Enabling and Disabling the Prosthesis Trope.’ Science,
Technology, & Human Values, 24(1), 31–54.
Landow, G. P. (1992) Hypertext. The convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology, Baltimore,
MD & London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Law, J. (1987) ‘Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: the Case of the Portuguese Expansion.’
In: W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes & T. Pinch (Eds.), The Social Construction of Technical Systems: New
Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 111–134.
Law, J. (1992) Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network: Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity, Lancaster:
Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University.
Moser, I. & Law, J. (1999) ‘Good Passages, Bad Passages.’ In: J. Law & J. Hassard (Eds.), Actor Network
Theory and After, Oxford: The Sociological Review and Blackwell, 196–219.
References 305

Radabaugh, M. P. (1988) Study on the Financing of Assistive Technology Devices and Services for Individuals
with Disabilities: A Report to the President and the Congress of the United States, March 4, 1993, 1.
Washington, D.C.: National Council on Disability.
Seelman, K. D. (2001) ‘Science and Technology Policy: Is Disability a Missing Factor?’ In: G. L.
Albrecht, K. D. Seelman & M. Bury (Eds.), Handbook of Disability Studies, Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage, 663–692.
Sobchack, V. (1995) ‘Beating the Meat/Surviving the Text, or How to Get Out of the Century Alive.’
In: M. Featherstone & R. Burrows (Eds.), Cyberspace/cyberbodies/cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological
Embodiment, London: Sage, 205–214.
Stone, R. A. (1995) The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Winance, M. (2006) ‘Trying Out the Wheelchair.’ Science, Technology & Human Values, 31(1), 52–72.

16. S. Lochlain Jain, The prosthetic imagination: enabling and disabling

the prosthesis trope
Bateson, G. (1971). ‘The cybernetics of ‘self ’: A theory of alcoholism.’ Psychiatry 34:1–18.
Brahm, G. and M. Driscoll, eds. (1995). Prosthetic territories: Politics and hypertechnologies. Boulder, CO:
Westview.
Freud, S. ([1930] 1962). Civilization and its discontents, translated by James Strachey. New York: W.
W. Norton.
Gray, C. H., ed. (1995). The cyborg handbook. New York, London: Routledge.
Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Scarry, E. (1994). ‘The merging of bodies and artifacts in the social contract.’ In Culture on the brink: Ideologies
of technology, edited by Gretchen Bender and Timothy Druckery, 85–98. Seattle, WA: Bay Press.
Seltzer, M. (1992). Bodies and machines. New York, London: Routledge.
Sobchack, V. (1995). ‘Beating the meat/surviving the text, or how to get out of this century alive.’
Body & Society 1:205–214.
Stone, R. A. (1995). The war of desire and technology at the close of the mechanical age. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Virilio, P. (1995). The art of the motor, translated by Julie Rose. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Wiener, N. (1985). Cybernetics, science, and society: Ethics, aesthetics, and literary criticism, edited by P.
Masani. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wigley, M. (1991). ‘Prosthetic theory: The disciplining of architecture.’ Assemblage 15:7–29.
Wills, D. (1995). Prosthesis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

17. Bess Williamson, Electric moms and quad drivers: people with
disabilities buying, making and using technology in postwar America
Brandt, E. N. and MacPherson Pope, A. (eds) (1997) Enabling America: Assessing the Role of Rehabilitation
Science and Engineering. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Breslin, M. L. (2000) “Cofounder and Director of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund,
Movement Strategist,” in Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement Oral History
Project, an oral history conducted in 1996–1998 by Susan O’Hara. Regional Oral History Office.
Brinkman, I. (1958) “The Home and I,” Toomeyville Jr Gazette, Winter 1958, 13.
Bruck, L. (1978) Access: The Guide to a Better Life for Disabled Americans, 1st ed. New York: Obst Books.
Clark, C. E. (1986) The American Family Home, 1800–1960. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press.
306 References

Colson-Cleveland Co.(nd) Colson Ball-Bearing Rubber-Tired Steel Wheels, Cleveland.

Crawford, M. (1995) “Scarcity and Promise: Materials and American Domestic Culture During
World War II,” in World War II and the American Dream, Albrecht, D. and Crawford, M. (eds)
Washington, DC: National Building Museum, 42–89.
Eglash, R. (2004) “Appropriating Technology: An Introduction,” in Appropriating Technology: Vernacular
Science and Social Power. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Flink, J. J. (1988) The Automobile Age. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Goldstein, C. (1998) Do It Yourself: Home Improvement in 20th-Century America. New York and
Washington, DC: Princeton Architectural Press and The National Building Museum.
Grimley Mason, M. (2000) Life Prints: A Memoir of Healing and Discovery. New York: Feminist Press
at the City University of New York.
Hounshell, D. A. (1984) From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development
of Manufacturing Technology in the United States. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Jordan, J. (1951) “Hand Controlled,” Paraplegia News, January, 7.
Kline, R. and Pinch, T. (1996) “Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of
the Automobile in the Rural United States,” Technology and Culture 37, no. 4 (October 1): 763–795
La Michle, V. (1959) “The Home and I,” Toomey J Gazette, Fall–Winter 1959, 17.
Longmore, P. L. (2003) Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability. Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press.
Lowman, E. W. and Rusk, H. A. (1962) Self-Help Devices, Part 1. New York: Institute of Physical
Medicine and Rehabilitation, New York University Medical Center.
Mee, C. L. (1999) A Nearly Normal Life: A Memoir. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co.
Meikle, J. L. (1995) American Plastic: A Cultural History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Oshinsky, D. M. (2005) Polio: An American Story. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ott, K. (2002) “The Sum of Its Parts: An Introduction to Modern Histories of Prosthetics,” in
Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics, ed. Ott, K., Serlin, D. and Mihm, S.
New York: New York University Press.
Percy, S. L. (1989) Disability, Civil Rights, and Public Policy: The Politics of Implementation. Tuscaloosa,
AL: University of Alabama Press.
Roberts, Z. (2000) “Counselor for UC Berkeley’s Physically Disabled Students’ Program, Mother
of Ed Roberts,” Oral History conducted in 1994–1995 by Susan O’Hara. Berkeley, CA: Regional
Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, 63–65.
Rusk, H. A. and Taylor, E. J. (1953) Living with a Disability. Garden City, NY: Blakiston Co.
Stiker, H-J. (1999) A History of Disability. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Toomey J. Gazette (1960) “Mouthsticks,” Spring, 8–9.
Toomey J. Gazette (1961) “Travel by Respos,” Spring, 18–19.
Toomey J. Gazette (1968) “Wheelchairs: Accessories, New Models, Oddments and Endments,” 60
Wajda, S. T. and Shuemaker, H. (eds.) (2008) Material Culture in America: Understanding Everyday Life.
Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
White, R. B. (2000) Home on the Road: The Motor Home in America. Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press.
Wilson, D. J. (2005) Living with Polio: The Epidemic and Its Survivors. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.

18. David Serlin, Pissing without pity: disability, gender and the public
toilet
Bérubé, A. (1984) ‘The History of Gay Bathhouses’, reprinted in Dangerous Bedfellows, eds, Policing
Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism, Boston, MA: South End Press, 187–220.
References 307

Bettison, S. (1982) Toilet Training to Independence for the Handicapped: A Manual for Trainers, Springfield,
IL: Charles C. Thomas.
Breckenridge, C. A. and C. Vogler (2001) ‘The Critical Limits of Embodiment: Disability’s
Criticism,’ Public Culture Special Edition 13.3 Durham, NC, Duke University Press.
Carter, J. B. (2007) The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940, Durham:
Duke University Press.
Charlton, J. I. (2000) Nothing about Us without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment, Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.
Chess, S. A. Kafer, J. Quizar, and M. U. Richardson (2004) ‘Calling All Restroom Revolutionaries!’
in Matt Bernstein Sycamore, That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, Brooklyn,
NY: Soft Skull Press, 189–206.
Ervin, M. (2002) ‘Johnny Crescendo, British Balladeer for Disability Rights,’ Disability World 14
June–August.
Goffman, E. (September 1977) ‘The Arrangement Between the Sexes,’ Theory and Society 4:3, 316.
Goldsmith, S. (2001 [1997]) Designing for the Disabled: The New Paradigm, Oxford, UK: Architectural Press.
Igo, S. E. (2008) The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public, Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Johnson, R. A. (1983) ‘Mobilizing the Disabled’, in J. Freeman and V. Johnson, eds, Waves of Protest:
Social Movements since the Sixties, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999, 25–45.
Joyce, P. (2004) The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City, New York: Verso.
Kittay, E. F. (1999) Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency, New York: Routledge.
Levi, J. and B. Klein (2006) ‘Pursuing Protection for Transgender People through Disability Laws,’
in P. Currah, R. M. Juang, and S. P. Minter, eds, Transgender Rights, Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press.
Lifchez, R. and B. Winslow (1980) Design for Independent Living: The Environment and Physically
Disabled People, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Longmore, P. (1997) ‘Conspicuous Contribution and American Cultural Dilemmas: Telethon
Rituals of Cleansing and Renewal,’ in D. T. Mitchell and S. L. Snyder, eds, The Body and Physical
Difference: Discourses of Disability, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 134–158.
Mairs, N. (1996) Waist-High in the World: A Life among the Nondisabled, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Ogle, M. (2000) All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing, 1840–1890, Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Schweik, S. (2009) The Ugly Laws, New York: New York University Press.
Serlin, D. (2004) ‘Bathhouses,’ in Marc Stein, ed., The Encyclopedia of American Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
and Transgender History in America, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 122–125.
Serlin, D. (2004) Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America, Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Serlin, D. (Winter 2006) ‘Making History Public: An Interview with Katherine Ott,’ Radical History
Review 94, 197–211.
Serlin, D. (2006) ‘Disability, Masculinity, and the Prosthetics of War, 1945 to 2005,’ in M. Smith and
J. Morra, eds, The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, Cambridge:
MIT Press, 155–183.
Shapiro, J. P. (1993) No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement, New York:
Three Rivers Press.
Stiker, H-J. (2000) A History of Disability, trans. William Sayers, Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 128.
Terry, J. (1999) An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society, Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.
Wilson, D. J. (2004) ‘Fighting Polio Like a Man: Intersections of Masculinity, Disability, and Aging,’
in B. G. Smith and B. Hutchison, eds, Gendering Disability, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
308 References

White, P. (2003) ‘Sex Education, or How the Blind Became Heterosexual,’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian
and Gay Studies 9:1–2, 133–148.
Zames Fleischer, D. and F. Zames (2001) The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation,
Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Part V Projects and practices

Anthony, K. (2001) Designing for Diversity: Gender, Race, and Ethnicity in the Architectural Profession,
Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Bauman, H-D. L. and Murray, Joseph J. (2013) ‘Deaf Studies in the 21st Century: “Deaf-Gain”
and the Future of Human Diversity’, in Lennard J Davis (ed.) Disability Studies Reader, 4th ed.
London: Routledge, 246–260.
Bauman, H-Dirksen. L. and Murray, Joseph J. (2014) Deaf Gain: Raising the Stakes for Human Diversity,
University of Minnesota Press.
Davis, L. J. (1995) Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, London: Verso.
Goldsmith, S. (2001) Universal Design, Oxford: Reed Educational and Professional Publishing.
Goldsmith, S. (2012) Designing for the Disabled: A New Paradigm, London: Routledge.
Mace, R. (1985) ‘Universal Design: Barrier-Free Environments for Everyone’, Designer’s West 33.1,
147–152.
O’Connell, K. (2012) ‘Designing a City for the Deaf ’, May 27 CityLab (online), http://www.citylab.
com/design/2012/03/designing-city-deaf/1600/
Pullin, G. (2011) Design Meets Disability, Boston, MA: MIT Press.
Silberman, S. (2015) Neurotribes. The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter about People Who Think
Differently, Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Tauke, B., Smith, K. and Davis, C. (2015) Diversity and Design: Understanding Hidden Consequences,
London and New York: Routledge.

21. Amanda Cachia, Along disabled lines: claiming spatial agency

through installation art
Arnheim, R. (1982) The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts, Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Awan, N., Schneider, T., and Till, J. (2011) Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture, Abingdon,
Oxon, England & New York: Routledge.
Badger, G. and Jacob, W. (2011) ‘In the Presence of another Being: A Conversation with Wendy
Jacob,’ Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy, Issue 01: 4–5.
Davidson, M. (2015) ‘Keywords in Disability Studies: Aesthetics,’ Keywords in Disability Studies,
Edited by Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss and David Serlin, New York: New York University
Press.
De Bruyn, E. (2006) ‘Topological Pathways of Post-Minimalism,’ Grey Room, 25, Fall 33.
Demos, T. J. (2001) ‘Duchamp’s Labyrinth: First Papers of Surrealism 1942,’ October, Vol. 97
(Summer), 91–119.
Gleeson, B. J. (1996) ‘A Geography for Disabled People?’, Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers, New Series, Vol. 21, No. 2, 387–396.
Grosz, E. (2001) Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, Cambridge, MA and
London, England: The MIT Press.
Hamraie, A. (2013) ‘Designing Collective Access: A Feminist Disability Theory of Universal
Design,’ Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 4. Special Issue: Improving Feminist Philosophy
and Theory by Taking Account of Disability. http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3871/3411. Accessed
October 28, 2013.
References 309

Kachur, L. (2001) Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, and Surrealist Exhibition
Installations, Cambridge, MA and London, England: The MIT Press.
Kruse II, R. J. (2010) ‘Placing Little People: Dwarfism and the Geographies of Everyday Life,’ Towards
Enabling Geographies: ‘Disabled’ Bodies and Minds in Society and Space. Edited by V. Chouinard, E.
Hall, and R. Wilton, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
Lefebvre, H. (1974) The Production of Space, Hoboken UK: John Wiley & Sons.
Seamon, D. (2010) ‘Merleau-Ponty, Perception, and Environmental Embodiment: Implications for
Architectural and Environmental Studies,’ available at: https://www.academia.edu/948750/Merleau-
Ponty_Perception_and_Environmental_Embodiment_Implications_for_Architectural_and_
Environmental_Studies_forthcoming_
Siebers, T. (2006) ‘Disability Aesthetics,’ Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (JCRT) 7.2 Spring/
Summer, 63–72.
Wolfflin, H. (1994) ‘Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture,’ in Empathy, Form, and Space:
Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, Introduction and Translation by Harry Francis Mallgrave
and Eleftherios Ikonomou, Los Angeles, CA: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the
Humanities.

22. Thea McMillan with Katie Lloyd Thomas, The Ramp House:
building inclusivity
British Standards Institution (2005) BS7000–6: 2005 Guide to Managing Inclusive Design, London: BSI
Publications.
Star, L. (ed)(1995) Ecologies of Knowledge – Work and Politics in Science and Technology, Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 257–280.
Latour, B. (1999) Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the reality of science studies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.

24. Sara Hendren, Notes on an inclined plane – Slope : Intercept

Borden I. (2001a) ‘Performing the City’ reprinted in Gelder, K. (ed.) (2005) The Subcultures Reader.
London and New York: Routledge.
Borden, I. (2001b) Skateboarding, Space, and the City. Oxford and New York: Berg.
Boym, S. (2012) Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Dunne, T. and Raby, F. (2005) Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience and Critical Design.
Boston, MA: MIT Press.
Dunne, T. and Raby, F. (2013) Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming. Boston, MA:
MIT Press.
Edgerton, D. (2007) The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Jackson, S. (2011) Social Works, Performing Art, Supporting Publics. New York: Routledge.
Jeremijenko, N. and Thacker, E. (2004) Creative Biotechnology: A User’s Manual. Newcastle-Upon-
Tyne: Locus+.
Koolhaas, R. and AMO (2014) Elements: Ramp. Venezia, Italy: Marsilio Editions.
Virilio, P. (1996) ‘Architecture principe.’ In: The function of the oblique: the architecture of Claude Parent and
Paul Virilio, 1963–1969. London: AA Publications.
Virilio, P. and Parent, C. (1966) Architecture Principe. Joue les Tours: Les Editions de Imprimeur 27.
Wendell, S. (1996) The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York:
Routledge.
INDEX

Page references in italic indicate figures. Age Friendly Cities and Communities (AFCC,
WHO) 124, 126
Abberly, P. 67 agency 69, 84, 228, 233–4; and ambience 163;
ableism 10, 108, 150, 166, 185, 248, 253; of an architectural project 129; and centred
bodily conceptions underpinning control 231; disability, geography and spatial
architectural discourses/practices 22–3; and agency 248–9; embodied 187; installation art
retrofitting 106 and spatial agency 247–60; and intra-activity
access/accessibility: and ableist bodily 163, 166–7; and technology 187, 190, 192,
conceptions 22–3; to academic conferences 229–30
161; access fatigue 167–9; Accessibility Ahmed, S. 156, 157, 160
Services, St George campus, Toronto 73–5; ambience 163, 166, 167, 170, 172; ambient
accessible entrance sign on a university knowledge 172
campus 155, 157–60, 158; access intimacy Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) 105,
172; approach to overcome architectural/ 160, 171, 214, 216, 218, 223, 224–5, 283
disability discourse limits 88–101; barrier- Annual Labor Day Telethon for the Muscular
free design 78–9; broad accessibility 85, Dystrophy Association 226
86, 87; designing collective access 78–87; Architectural Barriers Act, 1968 (US) 215
destigmatising disability access 86; drivers Architectural Research Quarterly 139–40
and access on the road (postwar America) architecture: and capitalism see capitalism; co-
208–11; and the Memorial to the Murdered design 171; and a community’s embodied
Jews of Europe, Berlin 88–95, 90, 94; knowledge 130–4; democratisation of
to public toilets 214–26, 216, 219, 222, practices 32; design and misfit 82–4,
224; ramps see ramps; regulations 93, 96, 85; designing collective access 78–87;
97, 101; and the Rolex Learning Center, diagramming see diagramming, for
Lausanne 89, 95–101, 96, 99; and stairs see architecture; disability’s position within
stairs; universal design see universal design architecture and urban design 1–3, 9;
(UD) discriminatory design 22; disembodied/
activism, disability see disability activism decontextualised 23–5; and epistemic
Actor-Network Theory (ANT) 191–2 conceptions of the body 23–4; higher
added value 86 education buildings and neo-liberal spaces
Adorno, Theodor 20 of disability 102, 103–10; inclusivity in
aesthetics: definition 57; disability aesthetics see inclusivity; justificatory narratives 54,
57–66; and disinterestedness 57; machine 135–6, 139, 140–1, 146; learning from
aesthetic 24; non-materialist 57; and disability 2–3; and Le Corbusier see Le
opticality 57; popularisation of the aesthetic Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret);
over the use of buildings 24; and reason 25 neutral design and the normate template
Index 311

81–2, 84–5, 108; parametric design (blob blind/visually impaired people 13–15, 14, 217;
architecture) 144–7, 146; popularisation and architectural regulations 93; and the
of the aesthetic over use of buildings 24; blindness of sight 49–50; and exposure/
pre-requisites for non-ableist architecture vulnerability 165–7; ‘going blind’ and ‘being
31–2; and projection 127–9, 128; ramps blind’ 49–50; and the stick 189; and the
see ramps; redefining the project 129–30, unimaginable 49–50
130; regulations 88, 90, 93, 96, 97, blob architecture (parametric design) 144–7,
101; relationship between architectural 146
discipline and society 129–30, 130; Blyth, M. 113
representation problem 127–9, 128; Borden, I. 282–3
retrofit 102, 105–9, 237; and social Boym, S. 286
inequalities 22–3; stairs see stairs; tensions Breckenridge, C. A. and Vogler, C. 214
between polarities 28; universal design Breker, Arno: Readiness 59
see universal design (UD); value-explicit Breslin, M. L. 212
design 81–4, 87, 110, 112 Breton, A. 58
Architecture Principe 280–1 Brinkman, I. 198–9, 211
Arhem Station 146, 147, 150 Bruck, L. 202
Arnheim, R. 251, 259 Brunel University staircases 103, 106–8, 107,
Arnold, Robert 245 109
art 57–66; aesthetics see aesthetics; Corban Buddha, Reclining 44
rule 249–53; damaged/vandalised 59–60; built environment: access see access/
disability arts practice 2; and genius 62, accessibility; architecture see architecture;
66; installation art and spatial agency disruptive to the disabled 31; popularisation
247–60; as materialist 60; minimalist 249, of the aesthetic over the use of buildings 24;
258–9; Nazi 59; post-minimalist 258–9 and social inequalities 22–3, 31
Artaud, Antonin 175 built space see space
asylums 104, 105; asylum schools 104–5 Burden, Chris 57
Atos 111–12 Burgin, V. 19
Auerbach, E. 58 Butt, Gavin 176, 178, 179
austerity 112–13 Byam Shaw School of Art, ‘Collapsing lecture
autonomy 10, 18, 19, 21, 43, 104, 111, 128, 1’ 175–6
218, 223, 225–6, 231, 232, 234 see also
independence; and architecture 131, 139, capitalism 85, 108–9, 112, 197; and collapse
140, 144; and art 62, 66; of the human 112; fast 108, 109, 111; industrial 103–4, 106,
body 137, 148, 149 111; late 108, 111
Awan, N. et al. 248–9 Carpentier, Thomas: The Measure(s) of Man 144,
152–3; reinterpretation of Le Corbusier’s
Bacon, Francis 58 Modulor 154
Bahan, Benjamin 242, 243 Carrade, Michel 280
Baldwin, James 38 Caygill, H. 25
Barad, K. 80, 166 Center for Independent Living, Inc., Berkeley
barrier-free design 78–9; UD see universal 225
design Chambers McMillan Architects 267
Bateson, G. 189 Chelsea Flower Show, London 221–2, 222
Baudelaire, Charles 17 Children’s Psychiatric Research Institute,
Bauman, Dirksen 242, 243 London, Ontario 105
Bauman, Hansel 237, 242, 243 Churchill, Winston 245
Bauman, Z. 76 civil rights movement 78
Baumgarten, A. 57 Class Fool (McCarthy) 62
Bedding Out 10, 47 co-design 171
belongingness 70–1 collapse 112
Benjamin, W. 17, 19 Collapsing Lecture 173–80; ‘ lecture 1’, Byam
Bergson, Henri 93 Shaw School of Art 175–6; ‘lecture 2’,
Berlant, L. 108 Goldsmiths College 176–8; ‘lecture 3’,
Bienvenu, M. J. 241 Whitechapel Gallery 178–80
312 Index

Colomina, B. 27, 29–30 normalising disability 9, 10, 71–2, 108, 186,

Commerson, Ryan 245 228, 233; phenomenological approach 67–77;
Computer Aided Design (CAD) 262 and position within architecture and urban
Corban rule 249–53 design 1–3, 9; and shareable frames 70–1; as
Crawford, M. 28 space for personhood and individuality 75–7
crip spacetime 162–3, 164–72; and exposure/ disability photography: realist, of window-
vulnerability 165–7; and fatigue 167–9; and shopping 13–16, 14, 16, 17, 20–1; war
gaslighting 169–70 veterans 16–17, 16
Crow, T. 66 disability rights 16; movement 212, 217
Crowley, S. 160 disability studies 2, 53–5, 143–4; ability–
curb cuts 86, 106, 108 disability pairing 53; co-design 171;
Curtis, W. 26 interrelationships between concepts of
cyborgs 185, 190–1 ideal/normal and disabled body 9, 67–77;
intersectionality 55, 85; phenomenological
Davidson, M. 252–3 approach to body as a problem of
Davies, C. and Lifchez, R. 31 individuality 67–77; retrofit metaphor 102,
Davis, L. J. 185 105–9; steep steps metaphor 102, 103–5;
Deaf Culture 11, 237, 241, 242, 243 universal design see universal design (UD)
Deaf Gain 237 disabled people: access see access/
deaf space 241–6, 246 accessibility; activism by see disability
Death Ship (McCarthy) 60 activism; ‘challenges’ in relation to society
De Bruyn, E. 258–9 values 34–41; dependency matters see
Deleuze, G. 121, 122–5, 129, 144 autonomy; dependence; independence;
Deleuzian philosophy 2, 121, 122–5, 144 interdependence; and difference,
Demonstrating the World (Williamson) 181 abnormality and the ‘other’ 36–7;
dependence 218, 220, 221 see also independence; discrimination of see discrimination; and
interdependence; stigma of 215 the disembodied self 23; and diversity
design drawing see diagramming, for see diversity; drivers (postwar America)
architecture 208–11; and eugenics 104–5; experience of
determinism 24 disability and prejudice in society 33–41;
diagramming, for architecture 135–51; identifying with 171–2; and inequalities
Carpentier’s reinterpretation of Le with the built environment 22–3, 31;
Corbusier’s Modulor 154; Carpentier’s The institutionalisation of 19; lying down in
Measure(s) of Man 144, 152–3; cripping the public spaces 42–7, 47; marginalisation 3,
grid: inserting disability into architecture as 9, 23, 32, 82; misfitting 82–4, 85, 144; and
form 139–44, 142, 143; development process ‘misfortune’ 34–5; mobility 22–3; noticing
examples and effects on design 138; and the appearance of disability 73; and the
flows 144–5, 147–50; justifying the formalist onus of accommodation 218; photography
diagram 137–9; mapping differential of see disability photography; from polio see
perceptions/experiences of space 148–50, polio and its survivors; and public toilets
150; as a method of translation 136–7; and 214–26, 216, 219, 222, 224; and ramps see
social/material practices 148, 149; UN ramps; rehabilitation see rehabilitation; and
Studio and the unimpeded line 146–7, 146 ‘sickness’/‘suffering’ 39–40; and the space
digital technologies 185 for a sense of individuality 75–7; special
Dillon, B. 178 needs see special needs; and stairs see stairs;
disability activism 2, 78, 171, 213–14, 225, 237; and technology see prosthetics; technology;
and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of and ‘uselessness’ 35–6; visually impaired
Europe, Berlin 90–1 people see blind/visually impaired people;
disability aesthetics 57–66, 247–8, 251–3 war veterans 16–17, 16, 19–20, 217; Work
disability arts practice 2 Capability Assessments 112
Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) 105 Disabled Student Allowance 109
disability frameworks: destigmatising disability discrimination: discriminatory architectural
access 86; disability-as-a-problem framework design 22; exclusion of people with
67–77; and education 76; framing and disabilities from composition of the
marginalisation of non-normal bodies 9, 82; public 217; experience of disability and
Index 313

prejudice in society 33–41; and oppression feminism: feminist disability theory of

37–9; universal design camouflaging universal design 78–87; and flânerie 18; and
administrative discrimination 109 spaces as processes 161
disembodiment: in art 53, 60; disembodied/ Ferguson, P. P. 17
decontextualised architecture 23–5; Fernald School 104
disembodied environments 82; the Fitzgerald, F. S. 103
disembodied self 23; and education 76 flânerie 17–21, 148; window-shopping 13–15,
disinterestedness 57 14, 18–19, 20–1
diversity 61, 144, 156, 237; gender 85; and ‘Flannel’ 174
misfitting 82, 85; and neo-liberalism 111; flows 144–5, 147–50
and retrofitting 106; sampling 172n; and Freud, S. 194, 196
universal design 109, 111
Doors Open Day, Scotland 265–6 Galileo Galilei 279
Doussan, Jenny 176 Galis, V. 11
drivers with disabilities (postwar America) Gallaudet University 237, 241, 243–4
208–11 Garland-Thompson, R. 15, 80, 82, 83, 144
Duchamp, Marcel 256, 258 gaslighting 169–70
Duggan, L. 113 genius 62, 66
Dunne, A. and Raby, F. 171–2, 286 Ghirardo, D. 140
Dyck, I. 79 Gleeson, B. 102, 103, 248
Glenney, B. 155
Edgerton, D. 279–80 Goffman, E. 223–4
Ed Roberts campus, Berkeley 110, 110 Golden Section 252
education: accessible entrance sign on a Goldsmiths College, ‘Collapsing lecture 2’
university campus 155, 157–60, 158; 176–8
Collapsing Lecture see Collapsing Lecture; Graham, Dan 258–9
dilemma of inclusive architecture Grasswick, H. 83
155–72; and disability frameworks 76; Gray, E. 24
and disembodiment 76; higher education Greed, Clara 218
buildings and neo-liberal spaces of Grimley Mason, M. 202
disability 102, 103–10; kairotic space in Grosz, E. 23, 25, 28, 83, 248
academia 161–2; topoi 160–1 Guattari, F. 144
Edwards, Chloe 176–7, 180
Eisenman, P. 136, 137–41, 144, 147; House VI Hall, M. Ann 24
138, 138, 141; Memorial to the Murdered Halseth, Thomas 244
Jews of Europe 88–95, 90, 94, 101 Hamraie, A. 110
embodiment 2, 25, 28–31, 53, 68, 76–7, Haraway, D. 191
122–3, 149 see also disembodiment; in Hart, Anna 175
art 60; and diagramming 148; embodied Hart, Louis 18
agency 187; embodied experiences 83, 84, Harvey, D. 103, 113
101; embodied knowledge 130–4; minority Hawking, Stephen 190
embodiments 83, 86; and phenomenology Hayden, D. 85
69, 77; privilege of majority embodiments Hendren, S. 155
82; and projection 127–8; subjectivity, Hernwall, P. 190–1
technology and 227–34; and technology Heumann, Judy 213
185, 227–34 Hitler, Adolf 59
equality discourse 214–15 Hockenberry, J. 100, 101
essentialism 23–4, 27, 28 Holdsworth, Alan (Johnny Crescendo) 226
eugenics 104–5 Hollywood Halloween (McCarthy) 60, 61
Evans, R. 127–9, 128, 136, 137 House Builders Federation 22
excludable types 156–60 Hughes, B. 67, 72
exposure 165–7 humanism 15
Husserl, E. 69, 77
fatigue 164; access fatigue 167–9
Fedorchenko, M. 145–6 ignorance 83, 84, 86, 105
314 Index

imagination 48–50 Kristeva, J. 95

Imrie, R. 82, 85
inclusivity: and ambience 163, 166, 167, 170, Lambert, L. and Pham, M.-H. T. 151
172; and crip spacetime 164–72; designing La Michle, V. 208
and inhabiting an inclusive home 262–5, 263, Landow, G. P. 191
264; dilemma of inclusive architecture 155– Latour, B. 270–1
72; equalising space 265–6; and excludable Laurie, Gini 200
types 156–60; expanding definitions 269–71; Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret)
and exposure/vulnerability 165–7; inclusive 19, 24–32; Modulor 252, 253, 253; Modulor
design philosophies 121–34, 131; kairotic reinterpreted by Carpentier 154; The Radiant
space 161–3; of local community 265–8; and City 28–9; and the radiant environment
ramps see ramps 28–9; Unite d’Habitation, Marseille 29;
independence 34, 66, 160, 203, 204 see also workers’ houses, Pessac 30, 30
autonomy; and automobility 208; making Leonardo da Vinci: Vitruvian Man 252, 252, 253
active and independent agents 228–30; and Lester, R. 23
public toilets 218, 220, 222 Levittowns 204
individuality: phenomenological approach to Lewin, Philip 202
body as a problem of 67–77; space for a sense Lewis, Jerry 226
of 75–7 liberalism: classical 215, 225–6; neo- see neo-
industrial capitalism 103–4, 106, 111 liberalism
injustice 37–9 Lifchez, R. 78–9, 83; and Winslow, B. 225
installation art, and spatial agency 245–60 Lipsi, Morice 280–1
institutionalisation of people with disabilities 19 Liv 192
interdependence 54, 87, 218–20; body- Lloyd Thomas, Katie 261
environment 84–6 London Paralympics 111–12, 113
Interesting Invalid, An 44 Lowman, E. W. 203, 212
intuition 125, 126 lying down in public spaces 42–7, 47

Jacob, Wendy 247, 249, 253–9, 257; Explorers Mace, R. L. 80–1, 109–10
Club 254, 259; Line, Cambridge 254, 256; MacGregor, John 66
Between Spaces 254, 255, 259 machine aesthetic 24
Jain, S. 190 Mackey, E. 113
Jameson, F. 48 Magritte, René: Les Menottes de cuivre 59
Jencks, C. 25, 26, 31 Mairs, N. 222
Jeremimenko, N. 286 maluma 242–3
Johnson, Richard 178–9 Malzkuhn, Matthew 244, 245
Jordan, I. King 242 Manchester School of Architecture (MSA)
Jordan, J. 209 130–4, 131, 132, 133
Joyce, P. 226 marginalisation: of the disabled 3, 9, 23, 32, 82;
justificatory narratives 54, 135–6, 139, 140–1, of non-normal bodies 9, 23, 82
146 Marx, Karl 60
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 104
Kafer, A. 139 Massey, D. 161, 171, 274
Kahlo, Frida 45 materialism 2
kairotic space 161–3 Mayer, A. 112
Keller, Helen 13–15, 14, 17, 18–19, 20–1 McAnulty, R. 22, 23–4
Kendall Green 243 McCarthy, Paul 60–2, 61, 63
Kerschbaum, S. L. 111, 164 McMillan, Bea 261, 263
King, T. 48 McMillan, Greta 261, 263, 263, 264–5, 266,
Kittay, E. F. 218–20 267, 268–9, 271
knowledge models/types 123–5, 126, 127–9; McMillan, Ian 261
ambient knowledge 172; architecture and a McMillan, Thea 261, 262, 263, 264–5, 266,
community’s embodied knowledge 130–4 267–8
Knox, P. 24 McRuer, R. 111
Konrad, A. 167 Mee, C. L. 203–4
Index 315

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Plaster Your Head and One Arm into a Wall
Berlin 88–95, 90, 94, 101 (McCarthy) 62, 63
Merleau-Ponty, M. 25, 69 Poe, Edgar Allan 58
Micali, Stefano 254, 256, 257, 259 polio and its survivors 33, 191, 198, 200, 204,
Mills, C. 83 205–6, 208, 209, 211–12
Mingus, M. 85, 172 Polio Chronicle 209
minimalism 249, 258–9 Pope.L, William 175
Mirzoeff, N. 15 post-humanism 2
misfitting 82–4, 85, 144 post-minimalism 258–9
modernity/modernism: architecturual prejudice 37–9
problems from abstract premises of 25; Price, M. 112
disability framing 76; modernist values 23; projection/projective knowledge 127–9, 128
technological modernity 20, 23–5 Prost, A. 20
Monster’s University 103 prosthetics 185, 187–8, 189–91; prosthesis
Moore, Henry, reclining figures 44–5 as metaphor 191, 195–6; the prosthesis
Mosby, I. 104 trope and prosthetic imagination 194–7; as
Moser, I. and Law, J. 192 rhetorical encoding of disability 194–7
Mother Pig (McCarthy) 60–2 public lying down 42–7, 47
mouthsticks 199, 206–7, 207 public seating see sitting/seating
Mumford, L. 26 public toilets see toilets, disabled
purism 26
National Council on Disability, US 192
National Health Service, Scottish 268 quad driving 209–11
Nazi art 59
neo-liberalism 103, 111, 113; neo-liberal spaces radio technology 20
of disability 102–13 Ramp House 261–71, 263, 264, 270
Newell, C. 45 ramps 86, 91, 96, 97, 98–100, 278–86; and
Nielsen, K. E. 14–15 Architecture Principe 280–1; and critical
Norway, technology and an order of the normal making 285–6; in Deaf Culture 243;
for disabled people 227–34 historical technology of 279–80; inclusivity
and the Ramp House 261–71, 263, 264, 270;
Old Moat: age-friendly action plan, Manchester and the retrofit 105–6, 108, 109; for single-
133, 134 step entrances 284; for skateboarding 282–3,
oppression 37–9 283; Slope: Intercept see Slope: Intercept project;
opticality 57 and universal design 110, 110
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Ratzka, Adof 191
Development (OECD) 132 Rawls, John 218–20
Ray, Cecil 210
Paik, Nam June 57 Ray, Susan 210
Para-car 209–10, 210 realist disability photography 13–16, 14, 16, 17
Paralympics, London 111–12, 113 Reclining Buddha 44
parametric design 144–7, 146 rehabilitation 15, 68, 71, 72, 81, 200, 201–3,
Paraplegia News 200, 203, 209 204, 206; medicine 225; movement in
Parent, Claude 278–9, 281 America 199; Rehabilitation Act of 1973
Parent, Naad 281 (US) 213, 223; self-help approach 203,
Paris 13–21, 14, 16, 175, 272, 280 204–8, 206, 207
participatory design 171 Reiser, J. and Umemoto, N. 144
performance theory 173–5 representational model of knowledge 124, 126
Pessac, workers’ houses 30, 30 retrofitting 102, 105–9, 237
phenomenology 2; approach to disability-as- Rickert, T. 163, 170
a-problem framework 67–77; and flânerie Roberts, Ed 205
17–18 robotics 185
photography, disability see disability Rolex Learning Center, Lausanne 89, 95–101,
photography 96, 99
picture theory (Evans) 127 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 209
316 Index

Royal Institute of British Architects 32 space 9; perception/experience and the

Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland 111 significance of an architectural space 92–5,
Ruíz, E. F. 170 101; and processes 161; redesigned 85;
Rusk, H. A. 203, 212 retrofit metaphor 102, 105–9; for a sense of
individuality 75–7; shaping social relations
St Mel’s Cathedral 111 24; spacial segregation 78; spatial identifying-
Saliger, Ivo: Diana’s Rest 59 with 172; spatial inclusion 121–34, 131;
Sanchez, R. 11 spatial perfectibility 26; steep steps metaphor
Sander, August 20 102, 103–5; theoretical explorations in
Scales, R. P. 20 geography of disability and built space 53;
Scarry, E. 195 unconventional 98–100; and universal design
Schalk, S. 172 see universal design (UD); users of built
Schiaparelli, Elsa 14 space 2–3, 31, 82–3, 89, 96–7, 98–100
Schiff, John D. 258 special needs 75; access see access/accessibility
Schneemann, Carolee 57 Spinoza, B. 122, 129
Schutz, A. 70–1 stairs 78, 98, 103, 106–8, 107, 109 see also steep
Schweik, S. 217 steps metaphor
Scott, Judith 62–6, 64, 65 steep steps metaphor 102, 103–5
Sejima and Nishizawa Architects and Associates stigma 84, 104, 217; of dependence 215;
(SANAA): Rolex Learning Center, Lausanne destigmatising disability access 86
89, 95–101, 96, 99, 137 Stiker, H.-J. 72, 201, 215
Shapiro, J. P. 214 Stone, R. A. 190
Siebers, T. 2 Stonehenge 279
Sim, Nicola 178–9 street furniture 272–3; cushioned bollard 276,
sitting/seating 272–6; ambiguous seating 275–6; 277
bus stop seats, Upton Lane 273; cushioned Stuckler, D. and Basu, S. 113
bollard 276, 277; resistant 272–6; street subjectivity 15, 21, 37, 192, 214, 228, 230–4;
furniture 272–3 and gaslighting 170; masculine 81; urban
skateboarding ramps 282–3, 283 subjectivities of the disabled 20
Slope: Intercept project 278–86; material design Sullivan, L. 23
281–4, 282, 283, 284; website and digital Swiss Center for Disability-adapted
aspects 284–5, 285, 286 Construction 89, 90, 97
Smith, Marquard 180
Sobchack, V. 185, 187 Taberlet, Fred 209, 210
social inequalities, and the built environment takete 242
22–3 technology: and Actor-Network Theory
social/shared reason approaches to knowledge 191–2; building positions of centred control
and disability 124–5, 126 230–2; as ‘compensation’ 187; the competent
social sustainability 86–7 normal subject of 232–4; Computer Aided
Soir, Le 13, 15 Design (CAD) 262; and constructing a life
Somol, R. E. 138–9 at home 203–8; defining assistive technology
Sorenson Language and Communications 192–3; digital 185; and disabled people in
Center (SLCC) 241, 242 postwar America 198–212; disabled toilets
space: bodies in 2, 9, 25–32, 100, 164, 254–8; 214–26, 216, 219, 222, 224; ‘do-it-yourself ’/
circulation space 91, 97–8; deaf space Self-Help Aids approach 198–200, 203,
241–6, 246; between design drawing and 204–8, 206, 207, 211; for drivers with
building 136–7, 151; design of built space disabilities (postwar America) 208–11;
2, 10–11; disability, geography and spatial from hospital to home 201–3; influence of
agency 248–9; disability and the use of 103; artefacts and technology on disabled people
equalising 265–6; hostile to the disabled 22; 191–2; information and communication
inclusive architecture dilemma of shared/ 227; making active and independent agents
unshared space 155–72; installation art 228–30; and an order of the normal for
and spatial agency 247–60; kairotic 161–3; disabled people in Norway 227–34; overview
meaningful 91–2, 98; neo-liberal spaces of disabled people and 185–8; and the
of disability 102–13; ‘normality’ and built person 189–93; productivity for the subject
Index 317

228; promises for disabled people 227–34; veterans, disabled 16–17, 16, 19–20, 217
prosthetic see prosthetics; radio 20; ramp Vidler, A. 19, 137, 144–5
technology 278–86 see also ramps; and rights Virilio, Paul 280–1
in the twentieth century 211–12; subjectivity, vulnerability 165–7
embodiment and 227–34; technological
modernity 20, 23–5 Walker, Corban 247, 249, 259; Corban rule
Thomson, Polly 13, 14, 15, 17, 18–19, 20–1 249–53; Trapezoid 249–51, 250
Titchkosky, T. 53–4, 75, 82, 135, 147, 157, 160, Ward, A. 24
172 Warhol, Andy 57
toilets, disabled 214–26, 216, 219, 222, 224 war veterans 16–17, 16, 19–20, 217
Toomey J Gazette 198, 199–201, 203, 204–8, Weegee 20
209–10, 211, 212 Weisman, L. K. 31, 32, 81
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 17 WELL building standards 171
Trent, J. W. 104 Welsome, E. 104
Tschumi, B. 24, 30, 31 Wendell, S. 79
White, P. 223
Union of Physically Impaired Against White, R. B. 211
Segregation (UPIAS) 9 Whitechapel Gallery, ‘Collapsing lecture 3’
universal design (UD) 79–87, 102, 103; and 178–80
added value 86; applied to transnational Wigley, M. 195–7
contexts 87; and body-environment Wilder, C. S. 104
interdependence 84–6; camouflaging Wilkinson, A. 45
administrative discrimination 109; definition Williams, Sue 212
81; and diffractive reading 80; Education Wilson, D. J. 208, 221
Project 83; and neo-liberalism 103, 109–11; Winance, M. 192
Seven Principles 81; and social sustainability window-shopping 13–15, 14, 18–19, 20–1
86–7; theorizing value-explicit design 81–4, Wochenklausur 286
87 Wölfflin, H. 92–3, 252
UN Studio 136, 146–7, 146 Work Capability Assessments 112
Upton Lane, London, bus stop seats 273 Wrentham School for the Feeble-Minded 104

value-explicit design 81–4, 87, 110, 112 Zumthor, Peter 139, 148
Venus de Milo 58–9

Building Access PDF
No ratings yet
Building Access PDF
350 pages
The Architecture of Disability Buildings Cities and Landscapes Beyond Access 1517912490 9781517912499 - Compress
No ratings yet
The Architecture of Disability Buildings Cities and Landscapes Beyond Access 1517912490 9781517912499 - Compress
215 pages
Inclusive Design
100% (2)
Inclusive Design
69 pages
Diagram
90% (10)
Diagram
139 pages
Inclusive Designing Joining Usability Accessibility and Inclusion-P M Langdon
No ratings yet
Inclusive Designing Joining Usability Accessibility and Inclusion-P M Langdon
275 pages
Architects After Architecture - Harriet Harriss
100% (2)
Architects After Architecture - Harriet Harriss
321 pages
Soild Void
100% (2)
Soild Void
5 pages
Bow Wow Examines The E28098behaviors of Buildings1
No ratings yet
Bow Wow Examines The E28098behaviors of Buildings1
4 pages
Dr. Scott Drake - The Elements of Architecture - Principles of Environmental Performance in Buildings-Taylor and Francis Routledge (2014)
100% (1)
Dr. Scott Drake - The Elements of Architecture - Principles of Environmental Performance in Buildings-Taylor and Francis Routledge (2014)
191 pages
Architectural Criticism: New York Public Library
100% (1)
Architectural Criticism: New York Public Library
18 pages
ARCHITECTURAL DEFINITION AND ABBREVATION Book 1
No ratings yet
ARCHITECTURAL DEFINITION AND ABBREVATION Book 1
54 pages
Katharine A. Martindale - Research For Architectural Practice-Routledge (2021)
No ratings yet
Katharine A. Martindale - Research For Architectural Practice-Routledge (2021)
279 pages
Steven Holl Urbanisms Working With Doubt 2009 PDF
100% (3)
Steven Holl Urbanisms Working With Doubt 2009 PDF
288 pages
Towards The Tectonic: A Critique of The Idea of Space in Architectural Education
100% (1)
Towards The Tectonic: A Critique of The Idea of Space in Architectural Education
5 pages
Moholy Nagy Vision in Motion 1947
100% (2)
Moholy Nagy Vision in Motion 1947
383 pages
Invitation To Architecture - Discovering Delight (Max Jacobson, Shelley Brock)
No ratings yet
Invitation To Architecture - Discovering Delight (Max Jacobson, Shelley Brock)
276 pages
Diagramming Big Idea
100% (1)
Diagramming Big Idea
257 pages
House Plan by Aires Mateus in Leiria
No ratings yet
House Plan by Aires Mateus in Leiria
14 pages
N.Zagora D.Samic Urban Rooms of Sarajevo Transforming Urban Public Spaces Using Interior Design Tools
100% (1)
N.Zagora D.Samic Urban Rooms of Sarajevo Transforming Urban Public Spaces Using Interior Design Tools
306 pages
Design and Living Basics by Jan Krebs
No ratings yet
Design and Living Basics by Jan Krebs
76 pages
Price - The Fun Palace Cedric Price
No ratings yet
Price - The Fun Palace Cedric Price
20 pages
Fluid Space in Architecture
No ratings yet
Fluid Space in Architecture
10 pages
Article Praxis8
100% (2)
Article Praxis8
11 pages
Architecture Vs Neuroscience: The Interpretation of Research Results in Neuroscience To Support Phenomenological Issues in Architecture
No ratings yet
Architecture Vs Neuroscience: The Interpretation of Research Results in Neuroscience To Support Phenomenological Issues in Architecture
6 pages
Architectural Thought The Design Process
100% (1)
Architectural Thought The Design Process
191 pages
Designing Inclusive Futures
No ratings yet
Designing Inclusive Futures
276 pages
Architectural Prototypes
No ratings yet
Architectural Prototypes
0 pages
The Modern Elements of Architecture PDF
100% (2)
The Modern Elements of Architecture PDF
125 pages
Architecture As Space
67% (6)
Architecture As Space
31 pages
Kurokawa Kisho Metabolism in Architecture 1977 PDF
No ratings yet
Kurokawa Kisho Metabolism in Architecture 1977 PDF
203 pages
Understanding Parasitic Architecture
No ratings yet
Understanding Parasitic Architecture
11 pages
Bergevoet, T. and Van Tuijl, M. (2023), The Flexible City. Solutions For A Circular and Climate Adaptive Europe
100% (1)
Bergevoet, T. and Van Tuijl, M. (2023), The Flexible City. Solutions For A Circular and Climate Adaptive Europe
115 pages
Architecture of Diagram PDF
100% (1)
Architecture of Diagram PDF
83 pages
Grossform Urbanism: Ungers' Vision
100% (1)
Grossform Urbanism: Ungers' Vision
18 pages
Future Architecture: Human-Centric Design
No ratings yet
Future Architecture: Human-Centric Design
18 pages
Archigram: Innovations in Architecture
No ratings yet
Archigram: Innovations in Architecture
21 pages
Robert Schmidt - James Pinder - Adaptable Architecture - Theory and Practice-Routledge (2016)
100% (1)
Robert Schmidt - James Pinder - Adaptable Architecture - Theory and Practice-Routledge (2016)
319 pages
Space Final PDF
100% (2)
Space Final PDF
76 pages
Yelavich Adams Design As Futuremaking
No ratings yet
Yelavich Adams Design As Futuremaking
257 pages
Peter Eisenman - From Object To Relationship II - Perspecta 13-14 1971 PDF
100% (2)
Peter Eisenman - From Object To Relationship II - Perspecta 13-14 1971 PDF
30 pages
Adaptive Reuse Extending The Lives of Buildings (Liliane Wong) (Z-Library)
100% (4)
Adaptive Reuse Extending The Lives of Buildings (Liliane Wong) (Z-Library)
257 pages
Holl Phenomena of Relations Steven Holl PDF
No ratings yet
Holl Phenomena of Relations Steven Holl PDF
34 pages
Objekt Series - School PDF
No ratings yet
Objekt Series - School PDF
210 pages
Bernardo Zacka - Political Theory and Architecture-Bloomsbury Academic (2020)
No ratings yet
Bernardo Zacka - Political Theory and Architecture-Bloomsbury Academic (2020)
329 pages
Mies Van Der Rohe's Paradoxical Symmetries
No ratings yet
Mies Van Der Rohe's Paradoxical Symmetries
26 pages
H Hertzberger - Space and The Archi PDF
100% (1)
H Hertzberger - Space and The Archi PDF
294 pages
Professional Practice - Paul Segal
No ratings yet
Professional Practice - Paul Segal
217 pages
Diagram Strategies in Architecture
100% (4)
Diagram Strategies in Architecture
194 pages
N Clusi: Signature Redacted
No ratings yet
N Clusi: Signature Redacted
74 pages
White Edges
No ratings yet
White Edges
15 pages
JosBoys DisOrdHandyGuide Funambulist19
No ratings yet
JosBoys DisOrdHandyGuide Funambulist19
4 pages
Building Access Universal Design and Politicals of Accessibility
No ratings yet
Building Access Universal Design and Politicals of Accessibility
3 pages
Did Someone Say Participate
100% (1)
Did Someone Say Participate
2 pages
Percepción en Arquitectura
No ratings yet
Percepción en Arquitectura
30 pages
Divergent Spaces in Public Design
No ratings yet
Divergent Spaces in Public Design
17 pages
Hamraie - Designing Collective Access
No ratings yet
Hamraie - Designing Collective Access
33 pages
Elusive Users
No ratings yet
Elusive Users
15 pages
Gissen Aod Urbanization of Disability
No ratings yet
Gissen Aod Urbanization of Disability
39 pages
Accessible - America - A - History - of - Disability Book Review
No ratings yet
Accessible - America - A - History - of - Disability Book Review
3 pages
Modern Architecture
100% (1)
Modern Architecture
56 pages
Ethnicity, Culture and Human Development of Bangladesh's Tea Workers
No ratings yet
Ethnicity, Culture and Human Development of Bangladesh's Tea Workers
18 pages
A Respectable Woman
No ratings yet
A Respectable Woman
30 pages
Social Class in British Society in Jane Austens P
No ratings yet
Social Class in British Society in Jane Austens P
16 pages
Great Expectations Part1 Notes Detailed
No ratings yet
Great Expectations Part1 Notes Detailed
4 pages
Inuit Shamanism and Christianity Transitions and Transformations in The Twentieth Century No-Wait Download
100% (17)
Inuit Shamanism and Christianity Transitions and Transformations in The Twentieth Century No-Wait Download
16 pages
5th Paper
No ratings yet
5th Paper
2 pages
The Teacher and The Community: Teacher's Ethical and Professional Behavior
No ratings yet
The Teacher and The Community: Teacher's Ethical and Professional Behavior
6 pages
Winning of The West Vol. 1
100% (1)
Winning of The West Vol. 1
152 pages
Ethical Decision-Making Quiz Results
No ratings yet
Ethical Decision-Making Quiz Results
13 pages
Code of Ethics
No ratings yet
Code of Ethics
15 pages
Notes On Equality
No ratings yet
Notes On Equality
30 pages
RK Merton Notes 1696511825518
No ratings yet
RK Merton Notes 1696511825518
7 pages
Etika
No ratings yet
Etika
10 pages
Presentation 9
No ratings yet
Presentation 9
13 pages
Rebellion Against Cultural Oppression
No ratings yet
Rebellion Against Cultural Oppression
6 pages
Owsley and Me My LSD Family Full Text
100% (20)
Owsley and Me My LSD Family Full Text
15 pages
Akku
No ratings yet
Akku
2 pages
Sociology: Understanding Social Change
100% (1)
Sociology: Understanding Social Change
26 pages
Cricket's Role in Indian Society
0% (1)
Cricket's Role in Indian Society
12 pages
European Politics A Comparative Introduction 4th Edition Tim Bale Ebook Technical Edition
100% (1)
European Politics A Comparative Introduction 4th Edition Tim Bale Ebook Technical Edition
43 pages
Notes - Approaches To The Study of Globalization
No ratings yet
Notes - Approaches To The Study of Globalization
7 pages
Nigeria Stability and Reconciliation Programme Volume 1
No ratings yet
Nigeria Stability and Reconciliation Programme Volume 1
99 pages
Thousand Tibetan Proverbs and Wise Sayings of Obscure Phrases (Gergan J.) (Z-Library)
No ratings yet
Thousand Tibetan Proverbs and Wise Sayings of Obscure Phrases (Gergan J.) (Z-Library)
62 pages
Power Distance Index (PDI)
No ratings yet
Power Distance Index (PDI)
3 pages
Club Affiliations in India List
No ratings yet
Club Affiliations in India List
6 pages
BSW Syllabus I To VI Sem - 2023-24 - Dept. of Social Work, Jamia Millia Islamia-1
No ratings yet
BSW Syllabus I To VI Sem - 2023-24 - Dept. of Social Work, Jamia Millia Islamia-1
65 pages
Article 36 Cases Consolidated
No ratings yet
Article 36 Cases Consolidated
24 pages
IMMI45TAREKUL11
No ratings yet
IMMI45TAREKUL11
3 pages
Lesson-Exemplar-Ppg Week 2 - Humss
No ratings yet
Lesson-Exemplar-Ppg Week 2 - Humss
5 pages
Volunteer Opportunities in Nepal
No ratings yet
Volunteer Opportunities in Nepal
1 page

Disability, Space, Architecture - A Reader

Uploaded by

Disability, Space, Architecture - A Reader

Uploaded by

DISABILITY, SPACE, ARCHITECTURE

Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader takes a groundbreaking approach to exploring the

‘Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader is a critical and thought provoking collection

Edited by Jos Boys

1 Disabling the flâneur 13

2 The body, disability and Le Corbusier’s conception of the radiant

4 Lying down anyhow: disability and the rebel body 42

5 Blinding the power of sight 48

7 The body as a problem of individuality: a phenomenological disability

8 Designing collective access: a feminist disability theory of universal

9 More than access: overcoming limits in architectural and disability

10 From steep steps to retrofit to universal design, from collapse to

11 Including architecture: what difference can we make? 121

12 Diagramming for a dis/ordinary architecture 135

13 Un/shared space: the dilemma of inclusive architecture 155

14 The collapsing lecture 173

17 Electric moms and quad drivers: people with disabilities buying,

19 Disability and the promises of technology: technology, subjectivity

20 Deaf Space 241

22 The Ramp House: building inclusivity 261

23 Resistant Sitting 272

24 Notes on an inclined plane – Slope : Intercept 278

11.3 Diagram of relationship between architectural discipline and society 130

proposals. He was previously a contributor to the university’s newspaper, and involved in

Amanda Cachia is an independent curator from Sydney, Australia, and is currently

Jay Dolmage is an associate professor of English at the University of Waterloo in Ontario,

J. Kent Fitzsimons is an architect, associate professor at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure

Aimi Hamraie is assistant professor of medicine, health and society at Vanderbilt

Sophie Handler is a research–practitioner, currently based in Manchester, UK. She

Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher and professor based in Cambridge,

Rob Imrie is visiting professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths,

S. Lochlann Jain is an associate professor in the Anthropology Department at Stanford

Katie Lloyd Thomas is a senior lecturer in architecture at Newcastle University, UK,

Thea McMillan is design director at Chambers McMillan Architects based in Edinburgh,

Margaret Price is an associate professor of rhetoric/composition and disability studies at The

Tanya Titchkosky is a professor at the University of Toronto, in the Department of Social

Stefan White is a Senior Enterprise Fellow at the Manchester School of Architecture

Aaron Williamson is an artist whose interdisciplinary engagement with performance, objects,

What can architecture learn from disability?

About this anthology

Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader is divided into five parts – histories/narratives,

1 Histories/narratives aims to open up new spaces in architectural history, theory

Recommended further reading

Recommended further reading

David Serlin (2006)

As any connoisseur of modernist literature will confirm, engagement with the

Rob Imrie (1999)

Excerpt reprinted from R. Butler and H. Parr (eds) (1999)

Modernity, technology and decontextualised/disembodied architecture

avant-garde is intoxicated by the machine aesthetic… But the machine aesthetic is

Spatial perfectibility, Le Corbusier and the radiant environment

Le Corbusier was, as Jencks (1987:112) notes, ‘propelled by a single vision of technology

the establishment of a standard involved evoking every practical and reasonable

Corbusier and an unnamed individual, Le Corbusier’s views, on the potentially complex

However, in dismissive terms, Le Corbusier (1925a:72) noted: ‘let us recognize the

Reclaiming context and developing self-conscious embodied architecture:

contingencies are the environment: places, peoples, cultures, topographies,

These comments were particularly directed at workers’ houses designed by Le Corbusier

contradictory feelings about Pessac, Jencks (1987:74–5, quoted in Imrie 1996:86)

Paul Hunt (1966)

Reprinted from P. Hunt (ed.) Stigma: The Experience of

Disability and the rebel body

Liz Crow (2013)

Chapter 12, reprinted from J. Swain, S. French, C.

I vowed to write lightly because I am writing of something so simple: of stretching

Rod Michalko (2015)

Theory and criticism

retrofit is to add a component or accessory to something that has been already

Recommended further reading

Tobin Siebers (2006)

Reprinted from Journal for Cultural and Religious

Beholders discover in vandalized works an image of disability that asks to be contemplated

© Paul McCarthy. Courtesy Paul McCarthy and Hauser & Wirth.

Copyright: Creative Growth Art Center. Photograph by Leon A. Borensztein

A phenomenological disability studies

Tanya Titchkosky and Rod Michalko (2012)