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- Architecture - Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
- Architecture and Disablities
Architecture - Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Architecture and Disablities
Resources addressing the diversity, equity, and inclusion in the architecture community.
Building Codes & Standards
ADA Standards for Accessible Design, Link provides standards in both pdf and html formats from the Department of Justice website.
Journal Articles
- Towards inclusion: rethinking architectural education.
In 2009, concerned at the low profile of disabled architects, the Royal Institute of British Architects commissioned the University of the West of England, Bristol to undertake research into the experiences of disabled people both as students and as practitioners of architecture. The aim of the research was to assess the current situation and identify and distil best practice in encouraging and enabling disabled people to pursue an architectural career. The research method included online questionnaires and interviews with disabled people who were either studying or practising as architects. Support workers, with a variety of roles and remits in both education and practice, were interviewed to assess the level and quality of provision and to determine attitudes towards disabled people. Websites of schools of architecture and practices were analysed. Significant issues were revealed relating to the representation and participation of disabled people in architectural education and employment. In particular, the educational ethos, curriculum and delivery raised concerns, as education acts as a gatekeeper to the profession. It is concluded that architecture schools and practitioners need to be proactive in creating more inclusive cultures and approaches to design which in turn could benefit the design of the built environment. - The perspective of children and youth: How different stakeholders identify architectural barriers for inclusion in schools
Recent inclusive policies are promoting the involvement of individuals with disabilities in identifying barriers that limit their full participation and inclusion in public spaces. The present two studies explored the contributions provided by different stakeholder groups in the identification of architectural barriers in elementary and secondary schools. In each school, the principal, special education resource teacher and a student independently identified architectural barriers using an observational walkthrough method. The first study consisted of 29 schools where the student evaluator had a physical disability and the second study consisted of 22 schools where the student evaluator did not have a disability. The results of both studies showed that students identified the greatest number of barriers and principals the least. The type and location of identified barriers are explored and the conclusions are examined in relation to person-environment congruence. The results highlight the efficacy of youth involvement and provide support for collaborative assessments that equitably involve all stakeholders in inclusive environmental assessments. - Examining the physical environment of Ghanaian inclusive schools: how accessible, suitable and appropriate is such environment for inclusive education?The extent to which inclusive schools can physically and pedagogically include children with disability and special educational needs or otherwise is also identified to depend largely on the physical environment. This descriptive, mixed methods study reports empirically driven data on the nature, accessibility, suitability and appropriateness of the physical environment of inclusive schools, and how these impact inclusive education (IE). A purposively selected sample of 164 teachers, with wide-ranging teaching experience was surveyed through a questionnaire. Observation data were also collected to complement the survey data. Study findings revealed that the physical environment of most ‘inclusive schools’ was of a poor quality, less accessible for children with physical and other sensory motor disability, and less suitable for most physical activities, including sports, and physical education for all children. Teachers, therefore, called on Government and the Ghana Education Service to urgently improve ventilation systems, decorations and colour in inclusive schools. They also highlighted the need for good architectural designs to facilitate effective natural and artificial illumination in classrooms and buildings, modification of facilities, and redesigning the physical landscape of schools to promote accessibility and use for all children, regardless of disability. The findings have implications for universal design environments for IE.
- Housing equity, housing inclusion
Guest editors Kelly Greenop and Naomi Stead talked with architect Wendy Lovelace about the imperative for housing to accommodate the varying needs and abilities of the Australian population - this is an edited transcript of the interview. - Centralizing the cut: a feminist, queer, crip response to powerful playgrounds
Responding to Erik Rietveld’s inaugural lecture, this commentary asks which bodies and what sites of design and architecture are centralized when thinking about “The Affordances of Art for Making Technologies”? Departing from personal experience and Nicholas Mirzoeff’s counterhistory of visuality, I analyze what it means to imagine “the end of sitting.” Through an engagement with crip theory and disability activism, I aim to understand which architectural sites should be disrupted. RAAAF’s practice of cutting and splitting closely relates to the work of the ‘70s artist Gordon Matta-Clark. But the radical proposals of both RAAAF and Matta-Clark engage with power in almost oppositional ways. While Matta-Clark offers the cut as a final space, RAAAF aims to create new worlds. I question the need for new worlds, since they are built on current power structures, instead of dismantling them.
Books
Inclusive Design by Call Number: 720.87 I34i - ARCH LibraryISBN: 9780419256205Publication Date: 2001-09-21The reality of the built environment for disabled people is one of social, physical and attitudinal barriers which prevent their ease of mobility, movement and access. In the United Kingdom, most homes cannot be accessed by wheelchair, while accessible transport is the exception rather than the rule. Pavements are littered with street furniture, while most public and commercial buildings provide few design features to permit disabled people ease of access. Inclusive Design is a documentation of the attitudes, values and practices of property professionals, including developers, surveyors and architects, in responding to the building needs of disabled people. It looks at the way in which pressure for accessible building design is influencing the policies and practices of property companies and professionals, with a primary focus on commercial developments in the UK. The book also provides comments on, and references to, other countries, particularly Sweden, New Zealand, and the USA.
Inclusion of Disabled Children in Primary School Playgrounds by ISBN: 9781904787662Publication Date: 2006-06-07This concise, useful book identifies organisational, social and physical barriers to disabled children's inclusion in primary school playgrounds, and suggests ways to overcome these barriers in the future, as well as examining examples of good practice. This is essential reading for teachers, special educational needs coordinators, personal support assistants, lunchtime supervisors, playworkers, and architects and landscape professionals involved in play.
Accessible America by ISBN: 9781479894093Publication Date: 2019-01-15A history of design that is often overlooked--until we need it Have you ever hit the big blue button to activate automatic doors? Have you ever used an ergonomic kitchen tool? Have you ever used curb cuts to roll a stroller across an intersection? If you have, then you've benefited from accessible design--design for people with physical, sensory, and cognitive disabilities. These ubiquitous touchstones of modern life were once anything but. Disability advocates fought tirelessly to ensure that the needs of people with disabilities became a standard part of public design thinking. That fight took many forms worldwide, but in the United States it became a civil rights issue; activists used design to make an argument about the place of people with disabilities in public life. In the aftermath of World War II, with injured veterans returning home and the polio epidemic reaching the Oval Office, the needs of people with disabilities came forcibly into the public eye as they never had before. The US became the first country to enact federal accessibility laws, beginning with the Architectural Barriers Act in 1968 and continuing through the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, bringing about a wholesale rethinking of our built environment. This progression wasn't straightforward or easy. Early legislation and design efforts were often haphazard or poorly implemented, with decidedly mixed results. Political resistance to accommodating the needs of people with disabilities was strong; so, too, was resistance among architectural and industrial designers, for whom accessible design wasn't "real" design. Bess Williamson provides an extraordinary look at everyday design, marrying accessibility with aesthetic, to provide an insight into a world in which we are all active participants, but often passive onlookers. Richly detailed, with stories of politics and innovation, Williamson's Accessible America takes us through this important history, showing how American ideas of individualism and rights came to shape the material world, often with unexpected consequences.
Strategies for Teaching Universal Design by Call Number: Stacks 720.42S898 Architecture LibraryISBN: 0944661238Publication Date: 1995-11-01
Doing Disability Differently by Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781315777559Publication Date: 2014-05-23This ground-breaking book aims to take a new and innovative view on how disability and architecture might be connected. Rather than putting disability at the end of the design process, centred mainly on compliance, it sees disability - and ability - as creative starting points for the whole design process. It asks the intriguing question: can working from dis/ability actually generate an alternative kind of architectural avant-garde? To do this, Doing Disability Differently: explores how thinking about dis/ability opens up to critical and creative investigation our everyday social attitudes and practices about people, objects and space argues that design can help resist and transform underlying and unnoticed inequalities introduces architects to the emerging and important field of disability studies and considers what different kinds of design thinking and doing this can enable asks how designing for everyday life - in all its diversity - can be better embedded within contemporary architecture as a discipline offers examples of what doing disability differently can mean for architectural theory, education and professional practice aims to embed into architectural practice, attitudes and approaches that creatively and constructively refuse to perpetuate body 'norms' or the resulting inequalities in access to, and support from, built space. Ultimately, this book suggests that re-addressing architecture and disability involves nothing less than re-thinking how to design for the everyday occupation of space more generally.
