Body Building: Architectural Narratives of Ability and Disability

Author: Wanda Liebermann

Dissertation School: The President and Fellows of Harvard College

Abstract:

Today in the United States 35 million households have one or more people with a disability, and aging baby boomers, injured soldiers returning from two protracted wars, and so forth, continue to build demand for the development of housing that maximizes independence for people with disabilities. On the 20th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), however, architects have only reluctantly accepted the code-mandated requirements for disabled access, perceiving them as both arcane and banal in ways that provoke anxiety and dampen creativity. This dissertation examines the architectural attitudes towards the human body that professional responses to mandated disabled access have revealed. In particular, it will focus on the role that architecture plays in constituting the category of disability.

The lack of any real acceptance of disabled access as a positive criterion for designers is a widespread yet under-theorized problem that leads to the continued production of designs that symbolically construct disability as a second-class form of citizenship. In order to develop a more productive analytical framework for analyzing disabled access than currently exists in architecture, my research introduces ideas from disability studies and science and technology studies that are based on an understanding of the built environment as a complex social and the material ensemble that embeds and reproduces a culture's forms of sociability, freedoms, and limitations. This shifts the focus from "disabled access" to a reexamination of how architecture itself creates the boundaries between able and disabled. Greater insight into the material and theoretical dimensions of disabled access can be used to build a more creative design vocabulary for application in the U.S. housing market and other construction, as well as contribute to building a more complex discourse about disability that engenders wider design engagement. This is critical to opening up the fields of architecture, planning, and development to a greater inclusion of accessible design concepts as an integral and positively valued aspect of buildings.

The dissertation's interpretive paradigm calls for mixed qualitative research methods, including close observation and documentation of specific spatial micro-practices that join bodies, technology, and architectural elements in the everyday routines; semi-structured interviews with users and architects; and a critical analysis of representational materials dealing with architecture and disabled access. These techniques will be used to build thick descriptions (Geertz, 1973) of three cases: Het Dorp, a planned community in the Netherlands; the new Ed Roberts Campus that houses the Center for Independent Living (CIL) in Berkeley, California; and a controversial as-yet unbuilt ramp in San Francisco City Hall. The dissimilarity among the building types illustrates different attitudes about how disabled people should live and complicates the analysis in productive ways.

The study triangulates between three different sources of data, beginning with the identification of specific physical elements at each site that enable people with disabilities to make independent choices about their actions. I will also study the means by which designers, clients, and users incorporate accessibility criteria in the design process. A third key method is to examine the rhetorical framings of the design in order to assess representations of disability and how intentions align with outcomes. The study will connect this empirical material with larger theoretical questions about how architecture reproduces social attitudes towards disability and thus shapes free will and citizenship for people with disabilities.

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