Doing disability differently: an alternative handbook on architecture, dis/ability and designing for everyday life

Jos Boys has written an excellent book that explores the interrelationships between architecture and people’s everyday occupation of space. Her focus is the significance of space, and processes of place-making and design, in shaping people’s well-being. For Boys, the design of different artefacts, including the built environment, is shaped by discourses that tend to disregard the complexity of the human body and the manifold ways in which bodies interact with everyday material objects. This is particularly so in relation to disabled people, who rarely register on the consciousness of architects and other design and building professionals. Rather, architects, and cognate professionals, are likely to perpetuate bodily norms that regard all bodies as more or less the same, and to disregard the multi-sensory nature of embodiment. The objective of Doing Disability Differently is to challenge and destabilise reductive and taken-for-granted assumptions about the body and design, and to develop a critique of architecture, and design practice, that can enable progressive practices to emerge that, in the words of Boys, conceive of ‘disability – and ability – as creative starting points’ (i). For Boys, the notions of disability and ability are not opposite categories and, instead, ought to be regarded as ‘ambiguous, complex, interrelated, and often contradictory’ (5).

This message is rarely recognised or acknowledged by design professionals, who typically reduce disability to medical and stereotypical notions that fail to capture the diversity and complexity of disabled people’s lives. This, for Boys, is the foremost challenge, to develop architects’ understanding of disability as potentially part of people’s everyday bodily experiences, and not necessarily a separate or special phenomenon consigned to any particular population. Her objective is to open up architects to different ways of thinking about the body, and to disrupt the common assumptions about disability that too often see it as an aberration or ‘not normal’. In this regard, Boys is particularly critical of compliance-centred approaches to design, such as regulatory standards like the building regulations. She notes that building regulations conceive of disability as something to be met by recourse to prescriptive, ‘ready made’, solutions that are disengaged from creative engagement with the messiness of the body. Part M of the British building regulations, which specifies that buildings need to meet minimum standards of accessibility for disabled people, is a case in point – in so far as it treats disability as a medical condition that revolves around the body as a ‘a fixity’; that is, a delimited, and limited, range of impairment groups or types.

Throughout Section 1 of the book, Boys is highly critical of the rationalist, regulatory, mentalities that treat disability as restricted to specific parts of the population, and not, as Zola (1989) persuasively argued, a constitutive part of being a person and intrinsic to human experiences. The separation of disability from categories such as ability, and its demarcation as something special or not normal, perpetuates the understanding that it can be treated as an ephemeral part of the design process, to be considered by designers as an afterthought. Boys questions all of these values and attitudes, and also directs her critique to questioning the language of design and disability embedded into regulations that, for her, primarily relate to technical and functional notions of accessibility and inclusion. For Boys, while not unimportant, this frames disability and architecture in specific and limiting ways by reducing the design process to the installations of things or fixtures and fittings to ensure that specific types of impairment are ‘accommodated’. Disability here is no more than a category, such as vision impairment, to be administered and provided with a ‘design fit’. This essentialises what are otherwise complex subjectivities underpinned by rich biographies and experiences, in which disabled people are not usually considered as anything other than passive, non-creative, users and consumers of the designed environment, or, otherwise, conceived as special, usually ‘one-off’, cases necessitating specific treatments or design solutions that set them aside from everyone else. The problem here is that the former fails to recognise the richness of corporeality in its manifest richness, while the latter reinforces a sense of disability as abnormality.

Section 2 of the book explores the different ways in which contemporary architectural discourse seeks to represent and engage with the body, and how far disability is part of architects’ conceptions of bodily matter. Boys does so by considering the works of two leading architectural figures, and in Chapter 4 the ideas and practices of the Dutch architect, Rem Koolhaas, are explored to illustrate limitations of design discourse in relation to mis-recognising, and mis-representing, the complexities of bodily interactions with design. This chapter is a good critique of Koolhaas and identifies the relative absence of people populating his architecture, with disability, in particular, rendered more or less invisible. This is followed, in Chapter 5, by an exploration of phenomenological approaches to architecture through the work of Peter Zumthor, a Swiss architect. This exploration suggests that his conceptions of bodies fail to capture the complexities of bodily interactions in space. In both instances, of Koolhaas and Zumthor, the underlying approaches to design are the translation of particular bodily characteristics into building form, rather than seeking to understand how people, through their diverse embodied presences, come to occupy and shape space. Chapter 6 explores how far issues of disability and design are broached in newly emerging themes around post-humanism relating to prosthetics, machines and bodies.

The final part of the book is a discussion of how architecture can be transformed to engage productively with the body in ways whereby disability is opened up as an integral aspect of what architects ought to think about. Chapter 7 provides excellent examples of how different people engage with the designed environment, and is suggestive of how architects may be able to learn from disabled people’s ‘creative interpretations of the world’ (131). Chapter 8 recognises that not all educational and architectural practices reproduce reductive understandings of disability, and outlines examples of good inclusive design. These are exceptional examples, however, and Boys asks the pertinent question of why so few architects follow the inclusive design approach, and refers to this as the ‘inclusion by exclusion’ approach. She concludes by advocating ‘slow space’ as an alternative architectural manifesto, in which ‘slowness’ is ‘simultaneously an attention to detail, sensory clarity and richness’ (172). This is an intriguing idea that seeks to work against corporatised design cultures, and the values of speed, efficiency, reduction and economy, in favour of working in ways that capture, and respond to, specific or fine-grain bodily interactions with designed environments. Chapter 9 concludes the book and explores the relevance of actor network theory as a methodological basis for studying disability and design, and highlights how it offers a potential way out of reductive theorising of the body and design by highlighting the mutually constitutive nature of people, things and objects.

Doing Disability Differently is rich and full of intriguing examples and insights, and it is one of the most important texts to tackle the important issues of design, disability and disablism. Its very presence highlights the paucity of writings in this field and the indifference of the academic research cultures, in architecture, design and cognate disciplines, to thinking, researching and writing about design and disability. The chapters are well crafted and organised and beautifully illustrated with many examples from art, architecture and disability cultures and practices. If the book was to be revised and brought out as a second edition, then I would like to see more acknowledgement of the social relations of design and construction, and, in particular, the ways in which architects are constrained by broader structural forces and relations often beyond their ability to shape. The book says little about the politics and economics of design, and the feeling conveyed is that if only we change the values and practices of architects, then a more progressive, sensitive, architecture would ensue. The question is how is this to be done given that the design process extends well beyond the architect and the design studio environment. In many instances, architects have little role in the design process, and so a broader socio-cultural transformation is required that is simultaneously a critique of corporatised design cultures, and the underlying disablist attitudes that frame societal engagements with the body.

Rob Imrie
Goldsmiths University of London, UK
[email protected]
© 2015, Rob Imrie
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2014.995512