The Architecture of Disability
The Architecture of Disability
David Gissen on reconsidering what many take for granted in architecture
In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with author, designer and educator David Gissen about The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes beyond Access (University of Minnesota Press, 2023).
You can order The Architecture of Disability from University of Minnesota Press, Bookshop, or Amazon.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the article’s author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.
THE USONIAN: The Architecture of Disability is a treatise demanding architects and urban theorists to reconsider their field through the dimension of the experience of the impaired. What led you to this subject?
DAVID GISSEN: When I was 16 years old, I was diagnosed with bone cancer. I was already interested in architecture, but I became much more interested in it at this point in my life. As an art & architecture undergraduate student, the operation to salvage my leg kept failing. I decided to have an amputation, which in addition to being a cancer survivor at such a young age was a transformative experience. I eventually went to graduate school for architecture and also did a Ph.D. I went through my entire career as a student, graduate student, and of course as an academic and practitioner as a disabled person. It was always something that I’ve thought about, but it was never the center of my professional practice.
In 2007, I started writing about some of my experiences in graduate school at Yale being disabled. I was contending with Paul Rudolph’s A & A Building [now called Rudolph Hall] as a disabled person. At that time, I realized my perspective was a little bit different than how some other people talked about disability. I certainly thought about things such as accessibility, but it was my thinking and approach that was always through an historical lens—why certain kinds of buildings or spaces and the messages they send are so difficult from a disabled perspective, and my perspective in particular.
In 2013, I wrote an essay reflecting on my experiences visiting the Acropolis again, as somebody who obviously had disabilities. That was an important essay for me, because it enabled me to think about certain kinds of historical ideas and my own experiences as an amputee, and how these provided me with a very different perspective on the history of that site and its development.
In 2018, I wrote what would eventually become The Architecture of Disability, this 1500-word manifesto commissioned by The Architect’s Newspaper. That really talked about how education could be rethought from that perspective. And that became the kind of outline for this book. I realized that potentially I had a much bigger project here—a kind of “life project.” Five years later, the book was published.
I was in the architecture profession before the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed. There’s a punitive aspect to being disabled that older disabled people know very well—and young people [still] experience. When you decide to make work about this, you need bravery about facing that and figuring out a way to get through it.
TU: In your chapter on monuments, you discussed the classical Acropolis had a big ramp; the current Acropolis’ path to the Parthenon is a modern landscaped invention that most visitors probably don’t even notice, unless they are struggling to scale it. In your project The Archaeology of Disability, you tackle a similar subject as well. At the same time, the recent paving atop the Acropolis mount—which is objectively an improvement in terms of safety reasons—generated some controversy. How can we adapt monuments (even ancient monuments) for accessibility?
DG: I experienced a couple of different things when I went to the Acropolis. First, like any architecture student who has been educated in the United States, I was not only taught the history of that building, but that to visit the Acropolis is to have a transcendent experience of architecture.
After I was lucky enough to visit, looking back on the experience, I found it extraordinarily obnoxious. [The landscaping around the Acropolis] is one of the most celebrated late modern projects by Dimitris Pikionis realized in the early 1950s. [Architectural historian] Kenneth Frampton writes very affectionately about the experience of walking up this [route]. I found the experience completely obnoxious —not only because it’s arduous—it’s needlessly so. It’s as if to suggest that to experience monuments, one’s body has to be pressed to some kind of limit or extreme. After experiencing the site, I went to the Acropolis Museum, where they have a model of what the Acropolis looked like 2500 years ago. And in the model, there’s this enormous ramp that connected to the Agora—this lightly graded ramp from the Agora to the base level, the Acropolis, and the somewhat steeper ramp going from that upper-level base to the top of the Acropolis. It just made me think like, the way we experience it today comes from a different idea of authenticity. It’s not historically authentic—it’s an idea about what it’s like to have an authentic experience. All of this was disturbing.
At that time, in 2007 or 2008, there was a rickety construction elevator that could bring you to the top of the Acropolis that they had to build for the Paralympic Games, because they had events up there at the Parthenon. I looked at that and thought, there’s no way I’m going up in that. I ended up going to the top on the Pikionis path.
One of the issues of monuments, especially the Acropolis, is that they’re overwhelmed with visitors to the point that it’s destroying them. I don’t necessarily think increasing “accessibility” to monuments is a great thing. And those are some of the key critiques of those concrete paths that have been realized on the top of the Acropolis—they increase the capacity of people to go throughout the site in ways that interfere with the hydrology of the site and potentially ruin it.
How do you make monuments more accessible, but remove the aesthetics of capacity? Pikionis’ path asks visitors to go through extremes to experience a site that can actually be approached more easily. It’s the aesthetics of archaeology, and the aesthetics of ruins to think that to experience the historic past, especially the ancient past, somebody has to go through these kinds of physical machinations. It’s not necessarily putting more elevators there. It’s completely rethinking the aesthetic way in which we apprehend the past.
TU: I was really struck by your chapter on National Parks and how the landscaping of them reflects Romantic ideas about having to struggle in nature to like, find yourself and stuff. I think most people recognize that Central Park in New York is an engineered, artificial landscape, but many may not realize that Yosemite and all National Parks are also that—artificial illusions of an “unspoiled land,” completely uninhabited when now we know that these places were inhabited and domesticated by indigenous peoples. How can we reconcile the (dated but enduring) Romantic basis that underpins the conservation / environmental movement with an architecture for accessibility?
DG: That chapter in the book ends with a question, which I don’t have the answer to, which is—how do you rectify a disability politics in the US that’s often been about having more access to spaces, with a more critical politics regarding national parks and restitution? On the one hand, you have people who want more access to national parks, and you have other people, both indigenous and allies [of indigenous perspectives], that want to see more restitution of spaces in those parks. This [latter position] potentially, but not inherently, works against concepts of access.
When I was working on my dissertation, I was in London, and one of the areas of scholarship that had a big impact on my thinking was called the London School of Geography. And one of their key explorations involves how society constructs nature. This includes parks but also water systems, trees on the street—any incidences of nature that surround us, in cities and exurban areas.
One of their arguments is that nature is filled with ideas about politics and economics. In the US, land development and settlement, and so forth. One of the things I wanted to think about is how society imbues nature with concepts of physiological capacity—in the way we plant trees and the way that the aesthetic of wilderness in national parks uphold physical strength and vigor.
I’m interested in an analogous effort to rethink the aesthetics of capacity around nature. Some of the examples that I give in that chapter are areas in which landscape architects tried to introduce a physiological sense of weakness and cultivate a weakness in nature.
There’s this landscape project realized by West 8 in Madrid, Spain. In this project, the landscape architect specified pine trees that are very twisted and generally speaking cannot hold themselves up. Usually, trees [in public spaces] have very nice straight trunks and strong roots that go deep at the front of the sidewalk that require minimum watering. But West 8 picked pretty pathetic looking trees. They designed bright red stanchions to hold them up.
I didn’t think I’d ever seen how I think about my own body reflected in a park. I didn’t even know that was possible. I related to the physical quality that West 8 was trying to bring to this constructed natural landscape. It offers a powerful contrast to the strength you see in a lot of physical landscapes. In [New York’s] Central Park, you go and walk down the boulevard, and there are these enormous elms that are constantly clipped and cut so that they have a very broad trunk that goes straight up with very powerful limbs. This creates a sensibility around the nature of the park.
The local, Madrid-based architects of this landscape who worked with West 8 read my book, and they were very upset. They said their trees had nothing to do with disability. For them, disability is a bad thing. They intended the trees to be naturalistic—[to their mind,] they had nothing to do with disability.
I wrote them back—I told them I wasn’t saying that they thought about disability when they made this. I’m saying, this is my interpretation of this landscape.
TU: In the third chapter, you write about how the grand avenues associated with Paris and Vienna are actually pretty inaccessible places that force societies to look inward. This was really compelling to me, because often from a US planning perspective we valorize these kinds of avenues because they seem more intimate (at least, relative to a freeway) or more thought out than the sprawling commercial districts we often find in the suburbs of American cities defined by drive-thrus, strip malls, and car dealerships. Could you talk a little about that?
DG: There’s been a lot of activism around making sidewalks and streets more accessible, like putting in things like curb cuts and so forth.
But one of the questions I had—the way the chapter started off—was where do curbs come from? Like, why do we even have curbs? And maybe that’s too simple of a question—understanding this assemblage of streets that is everywhere. [The model of] asphalt on the street and a raised curb and sidewalk is a fairly recent historical conglomeration, starting from 1830 in Paris—that’s really the first systemic use of these kinds of arrangements. It’s not inherent to a street.
Some of the most interesting critiques of modern street design were ones that came from the 19th century. Camillo Sitte was a very important urbanist in Vienna. He had this critique about elderly people living around grand boulevards then being realized in Vienna—a physiological critique that considered the physical experience of living through [the boulevards], their overexposure to the sun and the weather around them, as well as the broadness of the street and the difficulty of being a pedestrian moving through those areas. These kinds of critiques have been around since these modern streets have existed.
That chapter really tries to think about how it’s not just about creating something like curb cuts, but completely reimagining what the physical structure of a city is, and whether the quality of circulation that’s so much associated with modern contemporary cities can be lessened to some degree.
Circulation can refer to the way water, air, and sunlight move through a city. It’s a self-evident value. But cities can have other kinds of appreciable aspects as well. Tourists love going to medieval streetscapes or pre-modern cities, because that value of circulation was not there. It’s a very different kind of sensibility between how a building and its surroundings interact and how you move through urban space.
TU: In your chapter on bioclimatic implications of architecture, you write: “The two cities where I have lived while writing this book—Vienna and New York—have waged epic battles against overshaded streets and interiors that are symbolized by many of the cities’ most visible and monumental buildings. Rethinking these battles must extend from the planning of housing to the glass-walled, crystalline aesthetics of office towers and apartment buildings. As these cities’ governments are forced to revisit the automatic association between sunlight and health, they are effectively questioning basic presumptions about health, history, and the design of urban and interior spaces.” You go on to say in New York the city government is trying to minimize glass in tall buildings and in Vienna the planning department wants to bring back the “narrow and gloomy” quality of the medieval city so as to help prepare for a warming climate. Is there something cyclical in our approach to building toward sunlight and to the air?
DG: In 2018, I was offered a visiting position at both Yale and the University of Vienna, which had a year-long project “Hitze” (“Heat” in German) in which they were trying to think about how the architecture of Vienna might respond to changing climate. One of the things that’s very visible about the architecture of Vienna is that it was built to manage cold. In 1950, Vienna had about 10 “heat” days a year—days when the temperature had exceeded 90ºF, and now it has something like 30 of those a year. The point being, Vienna has three times the number of heat days that it used to. The summers in Vienna, and even part of the spring and early fall, can be unmanageable from a heat perspective.
Working with students in Vienna and Yale, I was looking at the way that architecture might respond. Cities tend to have a series of landscape-driven responses—plant more trees, create more places for residents that interact with water in the form of pools or misters, and transform paved areas to more porous and grassy surfaces. All of these things are important.
But so much of the modern language of design that I was taught as a student involved how sunlight was a self-evident good. I asked my students to rethink that practice in an era of heating. Now, the sun isn’t seen as an automatic good, but something that has to be negotiated. Part of these actions involve producing more shaded outdoor spaces.
But other decisions are less obvious. In Vienna, the municipal planning department is interested in thinking whether we can bring the kind of proportions of a modern street back to premodern proportions. As recently as the 1600s and 1700s in Vienna, the distance between the buildings and a street was much narrower than it is now. There was a lot less sunlight that reached the sidewalk areas. There’s an interest in returning to that dimension, which is difficult for architects to appreciate, because an architect might think the broader dimensions provide more air and more light.
Based upon their research, there’s some benefit to contracting street dimensions. How can we return to this premodern street dimension? And how can we imagine interiors with less sunlight? Smaller windows, thicker and insulated facades, things like that? I’m interested in continuing to explore these approaches, which involve rethinking the structural system of building and city planning, and aesthetic values of modernity and openness, and whether that can be maintained right now.
TU: Your book lays out the theory to help us conceive of an Architecture of Disability. What do we need to do to put that in action?
DG: The ideas in the book are actually very easy to realize—you just need to bring on somebody who provides this particular perspective. The first thing I always say is, if you’re the owner of a firm or the administer of a university, is to hire more disabled people and recruit more disabled students and faculty. It’s important that there’s more representation in the discipline of architecture around this topic.
Recently a museum hired me to do a project with them and think about how to improve the museum experience in some way beyond providing a disabled visitor wheelchairs. It’s not just whether disabled people can move throughout your space or interpret the artwork—it’s also thinking about everybody who works in the museum. Do the guards get to sit down? How heavy are the artworks in the museum, and who moves them around? What kinds of aesthetic values are being upheld in the artwork? The artwork is all about the expressive capacities of an artist flecking paint over his canvas, or do aesthetic values of weakness ever have a moment to appear in the works? Does the museum talk about the fact that this artist had a stroke, and the aesthetics of the work that comes out of that?
Thinking in this comprehensive way about what an institution is, its architecture, the values of disability, and how they can permeate every single aspect of the museum’s operation.
When it comes to working with a municipality—it’s not just about how we can make a neighborhood more accessible, but how many disabled employees do they have? When are these people able to survey these neighborhoods that are being open for planning? Do they notice things that other people may not notice? How do people that are in the neighborhood already manage their impairments in the neighborhood? What are they doing beyond issues of access? There could be any number of myriad spatial ways that disabled lives play out. How we think about those and document those things and how they can inform our practices are absolutely critical.
A disabled designer and historian of architecture, David Gissen is professor of architecture and urban history at Parsons School of Design at the New School.