TY - JOUR
AU1 - Wanda, Liebermann,
AB - ‘Who counts as everyone and how can we know?’ is the ambitious question that author Aimi Hamraie explores in their original and penetrating book Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability, which traces the evolution of Universal Design, a late-twentieth-century design philosophy developed by a group of designers and rehabilitation specialists led by disabled architect Ronald Mace, as a more flexible alternative to the disabled access code (p. 5). The book opens with a micro-travel log from four sites that employ various interpretations of Universal Design: the Blusson Spinal Cord Centre in Vancouver, with a ceremonial ramp winding around an oblong atrium; the Institute for Human Centered Design in Boston, replete with broadly accessible architecture and consumer items; Morgan’s Wonderland, a theme park in Austin, where children with disabilities were integral to the design of rides and spaces; and an annual Society of Disability Studies conference lecture, featuring American Sign Language and simultaneous transcription. As the author observes, ‘each space embodies a very different way of understanding the concept of disability, whether a medical category in need of correction, a category of identity and shared experience, a consumer designation, or an invaluable aspect of human community, which society should anticipate and value’ (xiii). How understandings of ‘universal’ reproduce the subject of design is the analytical thread of this book. The author argues that the term is slippery, problematic, and historically produced—entangled with some of the same ideologies that shape(d) oppressive ways of regulating the disabled. Few architects or architectural historians know the history behind access codes or can distinguish accessibility from Universal Design. Chronicling the making of Universal Design fills a scholarly void and, in the process, introduces key sites of knowledge-making about the body: anthropometrics, eugenics, ergonomics, scientific management, rehabilitation, environmental design research and human factors. Hamraie deftly braids together critical disability, race and feminist theory to provide novel interpretations of archival material, including drawings and personal papers produced by leading mid-century design knowledge creators, like Henry Dreyfuss, of Architectural Graphic Standards anthropometric figures, as well as less-known records of Mace and his colleagues’ work on barrier-free and Universal Design. The subjects are not famous architectural auteurs but people who produced the epistemological ground upon which designers unremarkably construct their thinking. Inflected by science and technology studies, the author examines the inscriptions, techniques and artifacts that shaped the production, legibility and mobility of ideas about the body.1 For example, the author shows that the ‘andrometer’, an instrument used to measure Civil War soldiers’ bodies, assumed an upright military posture (p. 47) and how the meaning of ‘all’ differed when based on proportionate sampling versus ‘oversampling’ of marginal, underrepresented bodies (p. 158). The book is organized into seven chapters chronicling the evolution of what the author calls ‘access-knowledge’, an epistemological project aimed at ‘designing a more inclusive world for everyone’ (p. 5). The first two chapters, ‘The Normate Template’ and ‘Flexible Users’, give an account of the dominant subject of architecture, from the idealized white male of the Vitruvian Man to the modern flexible subject absorbed into architecture through building standards, produced by nineteenth- and twentieth-century demographics and anthropometry (p. 23). The flexible user, Hamraie notes, becomes the object of rehabilitation regimes, medical and administrative systems designed to compensate for the body’s deficiencies—and also the origin of access-knowledge. The evolution of access-knowledge provides a critical history of the user in design, contributing the important dimension of disability to this interdisciplinary area, which architectural historian Kenny Cupers calls an ‘alternative history of architecture’.2 Hamraie asks: through what forms of knowledge making do atypical users become legible to researchers and designers? The failure to consider human complexity spurred, in the post-war years, internal critiques of architectural high modernism. The remedy was architecture’s alliance with empirical human research in the social sciences.3 Until Building Access, disability had been missing from this scholarship. Hamraie shows that barrier-free (precursor to Universal Design), in turn, offered a critique of user research, demonstrating that disabled access standards ‘led to a wholescale diversification in the Graphic Standards of the figures of the architectural inhabitant, an expansion of gender representation, as well as disability inclusion’ (p. 38). That is to say, considering disability opened architecture to many more bodies. Chapter three, ‘All Americans’, investigates the compelling theme of how disability and African-American rights intersect. Hamraie anchors this analysis in the fluctuating meaning of the words ‘all’ and ‘everyone’ in the affordance of accessible space. White privilege, they argue, permeated early access discourse in the focus on middle-class disabled citizens in the development of ANSI A117.1, the first access standard. Proponents of ANSI A117.1 suggested that its implementation opened up space to all Americans ‘regardless of race, creed, color or physical handicap’, even though the USA was largely segregated at this time (p. 87). Hamraie argues that, ‘in the civil rights era, the growing political legibility of particular non-normate users was contingent upon their scientific legibility as productive white spatial citizens’ (p. 66). A decade later, the disability rights movement appropriated the success of black civil rights. Although ‘it was within a post-racial framework that it became possible to use racial segregation as a parallel case or metaphor for disability exclusion’, the author notes that the appropriation rarely acknowledged the ongoing prejudice that created uneven spatial arrangements based on race (p. 87). Chapters four and five, ‘Sloped Technoscience’ and ‘Epistemic Activism’, recount the beginnings of disability rights activism and ‘crip technoscience’, a term coined by the author for the experimental, iterative expertise developed by people with disabilities. This prefigures the eventual opposition between rehabilitation-based approaches, such as code compliance-thinking (p. 153) and the freer Universal Design. Even as Hamraie sets up this dualism, however, their account of the overlapping modes through which Ron Mace and others worked to develop both building codes and Universal Design complicates this opposition. The last two chapters, ‘Barrier Work’ and ‘Engangled Principles’, analyse Universal Design’s evolution and how it was understood within and outside epistemic activist communities after the 1990 passage of the ADA. Compared with disabled access standards, Universal Design lacks specific rules and means for assessing outcomes. The 1990s saw Universal Design take shape through the proliferation in institutional settings, like architectural education, leading to its codification into seven ‘Principles’. Hamraie’s close reading of their development between 1995 and 1997 reveals the logics inherent in the adoption and omission of specific language, offering ‘a key for deciphering the historical map of access-knowledge’ (p. 248). ‘Entangled Principles’ reiterates one of Building Access’s motifs: the continual struggle to keep forms of access-knowledge from being captured by non-progressive regimes of productive citizenship or, with Universal Design, neoliberal ideologies. Hamraie argues that efforts to differentiate Universal Design from barrier-free approaches depoliticized Universal Design Particularly, Mace’s strategy for its dissemination into mainstream design culture as a marketing strategy as a way to overcome architects’ resistance to accessibility compliance, transformed Universal Design into a feature that added convenience for normate bodies instead of an essential accommodation for non-normate users. This flattening of difference erroneously presumed that, in the post-ADA era, accessibility had been achieved, taking focus off the disabled subject. This last section reveals the book’s main shortcoming, namely that its discursive and political emphasis omits a study of architectural practice and form. Although the profession’s reluctance to take disability seriously animates Hamraie’s project, the book does not really address architects, who could most benefit from its lessons. How architects implement Universal Design as a method and its material outcomes—particularly vis-à-vis code compliance—is not discussed. We hardly encounter buildings after the introductory guided tour. Nonetheless, Hamraie’s skill in detailing the struggle, triumphs and ironies of this history makes this book a valuable addition to any critical architecture reading list. Footnotes 1 B. Latour. ‘Drawing Things Together’, in Representations in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael and Steve Woolgar Lynch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 19–68. 2 K. Cupers, ed. Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture. London & New York: Routledge, 2013. 3 J. Knoblauch, “Going Soft: Architecture and the Human Sciences in Search of New Institutional Forms (1963–1974)” (unpublished diss., Princeton University, 2012). © The Author(s) [2018]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Design History Society. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability
JF - Journal of Design History
DO - 10.1093/jdh/epy023
DA - 2018-09-22
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/building-access-universal-design-and-the-politics-of-disability-rxFZLKiaFx
SP - 296
VL - 31
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -