DISABILITY AND ARCHITECTURE

This course explores the manifold relationships between architecture and disability. We will discuss how architecture mediates different bodily experiences and relationships and negotiates social norms and forms of assembly that intervene in shaping shifting understandings and performances of impairment, assistance, access, rehabilitation, and oppression that have historically framed disability.  We will explore disability as a culture, an episteme, and a politics, often negotiated by architecture.

We will assess the disabling effects of the built environment as well as architectural projects and designs defined to normalize, segregate, or eradicate disability. We will also study environments, artifacts, and infrastructures that have allowed disabled individuals and communities to thrive, often against expectations of integration in normative life frameworks. We will additionally explore how disability contributes to framing architecture differently and opens up space for new aesthetic experiences, different cultures of making, and diverse politics of the built environment. We will discuss how it challenges normalizing understandings of space and form, functionalist paradigms in architecture, and modern and contemporary interpretations of nature, the city, and society.  We will discuss the ideologies enacted by different projects shaping the life of disabled individuals, including their own designs and interventions in the built environment.

These explorations are organized thematically, with sessions engaging design and disability scholarship and providing students with a robust introduction to disability studies. In dialogue with this field, students will explore how design and architecture have operated in relation to medical, social, environmental, cultural, and political paradigms of disability. They will discuss the role that built environments play in the agendas of the disability rights and disability justice movements. Sessions engage both historical and theoretical questions.

Three assignments will allow students to explore the intersections of the built environment and disability in a diversity of formats. Advanced students will have the opportunity to write a research paper.