Disability Meets Architecture - Our newly funded project with Critical Design Lab!
We’re thrilled to share that, we’ll be working with Critical Design Lab on a translational repository of critical accessibility practice, bringing together examples of how ideas and practices from disability communities can inform architectural practice.
The project is made possible by recently awarded funding from The Graham Foundation. Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts fosters the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. The Graham realizes this vision through making project-based grants to individuals and organizations and producing exhibitions, events, and publications.
The project builds on from our recent Many More Parts than M! publication, as well as Critical Design Lab Critical Access Primer and involves a series of individuals and organisations, including:
Aimi Hamraie, Associate professor of medicine, health, and society and American studies at Vanderbilt University, where they direct the Critical Design Lab, a multidisciplinary and international collaborative of disabled artists, designers, and researchers.
Jos Boys, Co-Founder and Co-Director of The DisOrdinary Architecture Project, one of the co-founders of Matrix feminist design collective, and coauthor of their book Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment (Pluto, 1984/Verso, 2023).
Scarlett Barclay, Neuroqueer Project Manager for The DisOrdinary Architecture Project and architectural assistant, currently completing a master’s in architecture at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (UAL).
Tim Copsey, Independent filmmaker produceing motion-graphics, documentaries, and corporate videos - and many of DisOrdinary Architecture’s previous films!
Nadine Monem, Writer, editor, publisher, and lecturer, founder and publisher of small press, common-editions, and editor of over fifty books on art, architecture, and culture.
Find out more about The Graham Foundation here.
Find out more about Many More Parts than M! here.
Find out more about Critical Design Lab’s Access Primer here.
More about the partners:
Vanderbilt University, founded in 1873, is a center for scholarly research, informed and creative teaching, and service to the community and society at large. Vanderbilt upholds the highest standards and is a leader in the quest for new knowledge through scholarship, dissemination of knowledge through teaching and outreach, and creative experimentation of ideas and concepts. In pursuit of these goals, Vanderbilt values most highly intellectual freedom that supports open inquiry, equality, compassion, and excellence in all endeavors.
Critical Design Lab, founded in 2014, is a multidisciplinary arts and design collaborative centered in disability culture and crip technoscience. The work of Critical Design Lab pivots around the concept of access: access as ethic, creative content, and methodology. Critical Design Lab uses digital media and social practice to craft replicable protocols that treat accessibility as research-creation, an aesthetic world-building practice, and an invitation to assemble community. The Lab embodies crip interdependence in form, aesthetics, and content. It defines critical design as disability culture’s challenges to existing social and built environments. This work is approached with joy, relationality, and a commitment to embodied design processes. Critical Design Lab embraces interdependence as a political technology and design methodology. The Lab’s work is rooted in disability justice. Forms of accessibility rooted in anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and white supremacy are rejected by the Lab. Technologies of remote and collective participation to enable accessible world-building across time-zones, disciplinary boundaries, and access needs are used. Critical Design Lab centers sustainability and community as the basis of our work.
Image credit: Zoe Partington, “Nothing About Us Without Us,” 2023. Neon Glass tube lights and Perspex box, 23 1/2 × 73 × 3 in. Courtesy the artist.
