About

“Everyone has access needs; it’s just that non-disabled people don’t recognise that ‘normal’ built surroundings already meet their needs.” 

— Jos Boys, 2024 

The DisOrdinary Architecture Project is a not-for-profit platform that starts from the experiences, expertise and creativity of disabled artists. Led by diverse disabled artists, designers and architects, DisOrdinary Architecture aims to shift paradigms about disability, access and inclusion across built environment and cultural sectors. 

We do this by centering the lived knowledges and experiences of disabled people as a creative generator for design, rather than a problem to be solved; and as a critical challenge to societal norms about whose bodies and minds are prioritised and whose are marginalised in the design of our built surroundings. We want to show how much can be learnt from paying attention to, and valuing, the richness of our bio- and neuro-diversity.  

Since our beginnings in 2007, we have developed and collaborated on projects both in the UK and internationally with wide-ranging outputs: across architectural installations, experiential workshops, consultancy, podcasts, talks and research. Our growing network and breadth of projects and publications shows how thinking about disability differently not only enables improved accessibility to spaces and events, but is also central to cross-movement ideas and actions that can challenge normative educational and professional practices, social inequality and the climate crisis. 

Throughout, our work is deeply informed by wider disability arts, activism and scholarship, and by international networks of creative disabled people pushing beyond conventional access and inclusion narratives and instead centring social, spatial and material justice. 

We start from difference, and aim to challenge underlying attitudes, assumptions and practices that frame disabled people in particular and limited ways, both in everyday life and through the education and practice of architectural and urban design.