All Access: Better Fits for Architecture

Abstract

In 1975, disability activist Victor Finkelstein modestly but pointedly proposed an “imaginary example which turns the world upside down,” where wheelchair users lived together in a village no longer obliged to accommodate the able-bodied, who found themselves comparatively disabled by their ill fit into their surroundings. That same year, Peter Eisenman’s pointedly disorienting House VI was completed, intentionally confounding inhabitation by even the most robust physical specimens. Nearly two decades earlier, in 1956, Selwyn Goldsmith contracted polio in the same year he earned his degree from the Bartlett School of Architecture. With his drawing hand paralyzed, his life and career had to adjust themselves accordingly. His life’s work would engage his insights into both realms –architecture and disability – and in his seminal work, Designing for the Disabled, he upended established views on ‘medical disability,’exposing instead the idea that architecture was responsible for the creation of disabling environments, and, further, that “the architect can prevent people from being disabled when they use buildings.”