Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader
Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader (2017) explores the interconnections between disability, architecture and cities. The contributions come from architecture, geography, anthropology, health studies, English language and literature, rhetoric and composition, art history, disability studies and disability arts and cover personal, theoretical and innovative ideas and work.
Richer approaches to disability – beyond regulation and design guidance – remain fragmented and difficult to find for architectural and built environment students, educators and professionals. By bringing together in one place some seminal texts and projects, as well as newly commissioned writings, readers can engage with disability in unexpected and exciting ways that can vibrantly inform their understandings of architecture and urban design.
Most crucially, Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader opens up not just disability but also ability – dis/ability – as a means of refusing the normalisation of only particular kinds of bodies in the design of built space. It reveals how our everyday social attitudes and practices about people, objects and spaces can be better understood through the lens of disability, and it suggests how thinking differently about dis/ability can enable innovative and new kinds of critical and creative architectural and urban design education and practice.
Purchase this book from the publisher’s website here.
What people like about Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader:
“This diverse collection of essays proposes creative and critical ways of engaging in disability studies within the field of architecture. From rethinking technologies and design practices to reframing dis/ability across the theoretical and historical discourses of architecture, it challenges dominant assumptions about the embodied occupation of designed environments. Instead of simply framing disability as a problem to be solved by way of regulations and universal spatial solutions, embodied dis/abilities are explored as opportunities rather than impediments to design thinking and socio-spatial awareness.”
— Dr Hélène Frichot, KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), Sweden
“Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader is a critical and thought provoking collection of essays broadening the potential of dis/ability studies for designers, educators and academics. Seeking to radically relocate disability front and center within architectural discourse, the Reader positions disability as a transformative place to design and educate from. For the built environment to become more responsive and inclusive, we must not only acknowledge but also conceptualize differently the relationship between heterogeneous bodies and space as far more complex and intersectional, providing a trove of under examined spatial potential”
— Lori A. Brown, Professor, School of Architecture, Syracuse University, USA
“This brilliant gathering of texts, both synthetic and surprising, should be taught in every architecture and design program, and it may well become the new standard text for interdisciplinary disability studies courses generally”
— Susan Schweik, Professor of English and Disability Studies, UC Berkeley, USA
