 Hello everyone and welcome to this event, GSAP, this very special event on the preservation of disability. My name is Jorge Otero-Pylos, I'm the Director of the Historic Preservation Program and it is a great pleasure to introduce David Gissen who has organized this event in celebration of the special issue of Future Anterior that he has guest edited and this is the issue right here. An amazing, troubling issue really on this question of disability and preservation and how historic sites are intervened in and how we think more deeply about the role of disability and helping us push the boundaries of preservation. This boundary pushing work has defined David's career and he has really worked at the intersection of a number of disciplines in particular, of course, architecture, history, experimental design and preservation. He is Professor of Architecture and Urban History at Parsons School of Design and the New School University and he was Arrow Sarin and Visiting Professor of Architecture at Yale University between 2019 and 2020. Also University Professor at the Institute for Art and Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in Austria and former Professor at the California College of Arts where he was based for 12 years. David's books include the materialist study of architecture and the modern urban environment titled Subnature, Architectures, Other Environments which was published in 2009 and the magnificent history of New York City told through the design of the city's air titled Manhattan Atmospheres which I recommend, both books I recommend to all of you. He's also an artist and has done some historic reconstruction projects and preservation works that have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2016, in 2020, the Canadian Center for Architecture, Yale University Architecture Galleries and the Museum of the City of New York. He had been working on this special issue for a long time and I think it really brings together an amazing array of points of view which he is going to introduce in a second. Many of the speakers here today are participants in the issue and some have other relationships to Colombia and to Future Anterior and if I may have a shout out to Rob Garland-Thompson who was the first editor of Future Anterior and so it's wonderful to have Rob back. It's an honor to have David do this event and a sincere honor and pleasure to have all the speakers here so welcome to this virtual event and thank you for being here. Thank you so much Jorge. I really appreciate that introduction. As Jorge mentioned today's symposium marks the publication of the Future Anterior issue, Preservation and Disability and I want to thank Jorge so much not only for sponsoring this project but really shepherding it along with his graduate students Whitney Bears, Scott Goodwin and Mora Cari Wang who all helped make the publication possible. I of course also want to thank all of the authors who worked with us over the past two years to make this publication possible and I'm really grateful to Dean Andreos for including today's event in the fall lecture series and Lila Catelier for organizing and bringing the whole affair together. So my own interest in the topic of disability and preservation stems from my own physical struggles when visiting historic architectural sites but it also stems from larger conceptual struggles with how we imagine the architectural past relating to human impairment. In the past 30 years we've seen increasing efforts by preservationists, conservators and architects to make historic sites more accessible for their impaired visitors. So this kind of work includes things that are probably familiar to many of you, the increased use of ramps, elevators, braille panels and even touch tours among many other strategies and all of this work is very important because at some very basic level we can think of the entire city as a historic artifact and it's transformed through maintenance and preservation practices that are ongoing. So in these introductory remarks it's important to note that when developing access strategies preservationists often describe a desire, a strong desire to balance a monument or a site's historical authenticity with the desire or even the demands for increased disability accessibility and many other symposia on the topic of disability and preservation have explored and focus on this problem of balance between the authentic and the desire or demands for access. So but as we will see today several of our speakers adopt a completely different approach and really attempt to move beyond this particular binary so while it may be surprising to some many historic sites and monuments actually owe their architectural form to their engagements with impaired people and this has a very long history. It includes well-known ancient and medieval religious sites as well as key sites in the history of preservation as a professional practice and so in these cases disability is authenticity. Similarly the subject of impairment often shadows many sites that eventually become historic monuments and this can be due to a site's historic transformation through war and civil conflict or it can be due to practices of preservation itself that may disrupt the use or the ability to easily access an area of the city. Now the final point is that there's often an assumption in many contemporary discussions of disability access and architectural preservation that disabled people are simply the visitors to be accommodated within various sites and as our last speaker Georgina Klee will demonstrate conservators can bring an attribute such as their own blindness into a preservation practice. So collectively I think we can see today's speakers enabling us to move away from the idea of balance and towards what is for me and I think all of us a more fantastic possibility which we can call the preservation of disability itself and I believe this provocative coinage which is inspired by one of our speakers Rosemary Garland Thompson it suggests a way this provocative coinage suggests a way that that the practice of preservation might maintain difficult and sometimes discomforting subjects subjectivities and experiences into the mysterious aesthetics of what we consider history. So our first speaker today who's will explore many of these ideas is Vanda Kaja Lieberman. Vanda is an architectural and urban historian and professor of architecture at Florida Atlantic University. Her numerous publications and research focuses on theories and practices of architecture and urbanism in relationship to disability politics. I think of Vanda's writing as among a small group and some of the first that brought critical ideas from disability studies into dialogue with contemporary forms of architectural historiography and theory and she is currently working on a book manuscript titled architectures problem with disability that's due up from Rutledge. So our second speaker is Sun Young Park a scholar of 19th century France who studies the intersection of architectural urban and medical history. Sun Young is associate professor in the department of history and art history at George Mason University. She wrote the book ideals of the body architecture urbanism and hygiene in post-revolutionary Paris and is finishing up her second book the architecture of disability in modern France and this project investigates how architectural and urban engagements with blind death and physically disabled subjects between the late 18th and early 20th centuries and Sun Young's article in future interior is actually drawn from some of this research. So our third presentation is by a duo Rosemary Garland Thompson and Rob Thompson. So Rosemary Garland Thompson is a bioethicist, I mean a humanity scholar and professor based at Emory University. Many of you with us today may know Rosemary's work through the articles she has written on disability for the New York Times and that are now being transformed into the book about us essays from the New York Times about disability by people with disabilities. Rosemary is a foundational figure in the field of disability studies via her many books and articles including staring how we look and her current project embracing our humanity, a bioethics of disability and health. So Rob Thompson as Jorge mentioned is a graduate of the preservation program at Columbia. Rob is the federal preservation officer for the Presidio Trust, a U.S. federal agency responsible for managing the Presidio of San Francisco. It's one of the most visited national parks in the United States. Rob has worked for the trust for a long time for almost 15 years and he manages the agency's historic preservation program. Prior to the Presidio, Rob worked for the Getty Conservation Institute where he developed a variety of global training programs for preservation practitioners and he is the co-author of a very important study called architectural conservation in Asia national experiences and practice which is really the first comprehensive survey of preservation policy and practice across all Asian countries. So our final speaker today is Georgina Klieg. Georgina is professor of English at the University of California Berkeley. Her collection of personal essays site unseen is a classic in the field of disability studies. Like Rosemary, Georgina is a foundational figure in the field of disability studies. Georgina's latest book in which I encourage all of you to read is called more than meets the eye what blindness brings to art and it's concerned with blindness and visual art. How blindness is represented in art, how blindness affects the lives of visual artists and how museums can make visual art accessible to people who are blind and visually impaired. She has lectured and served as consultant to art institutions around the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Tate Modern Museum in London. So before I'm handing it off to Vanda who will give our first presentation I just want you to note that I'm sure many of you will in the audience will have questions for our panel. Please use the Q&A field on the bottom to ask your question and then I will read from these later during the Q&A portion of today's program. Okay thank you very much again to Jorge. Thank you so much and Vanda we are looking forward to your presentation. Hello everybody. I want to first thank David Aguisson and Jorge Otero Pylos for their work on this issue and then their work on Future Interior in general and for all the editors who worked on this and to Laila Catelier for all of the hard organizing work. It's an honor to be on a panel with these scholars in disability studies and architecture. So my presentation in some ways focuses on what David referred to which is this kind of balance or maybe even binary between architecture and heritage. Next slide please. Yes thank you. So I think that while balance is often the word that's used I think a lot of times it's sort of perceived also as a trade-off. So if you are giving access you are often destroying quote-unquote authentic fabric or the true heritage of a site and in order to sort of look at this I examined two prolonged battles over kind of beloved architectural historical architectural sites. One in California, San Francisco City Hall and one in Boston's Beacon Hill. And these sites I were difficult in part because they were everyday sites that were in use. They were not just historical sites that people visited for pleasure and recreation but because they have a kind of daily function still. Next slide please. In looking at these two sites they offered insights into how public narratives about authentic heritage are used to support or undercut making spaces more democratic by including people with disabilities. In this case both really focused on wheelchair access which often sort of becomes the kind of emblem of accessibility in architectural debates. But they also show how ideas of authenticity are really malleable and end up having an impact on also questions of what is public space and what disabled access amounts to. So I'm going to start by briefly summarizing the two cases. One of them is San Francisco City Hall and on the left is an image of this beautiful Beaux Arts building from the front. It is the kind of crown jewel of San Francisco's civic center and on the right is an image of the grand interior with the stairway under the rotunda. These are spaces that have been featured in films and people's weddings and so forth and so they are quite well known. Next. These this building was renovated. It was severely damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and so in the 10 years that followed 300 million dollars I believe was spent in renovating and modernizing all kinds of deferred maintenance and updates including on the left you can see the the scaffolding around the dome which is was severely damaged in the earthquake and on the upper right you can see the the actual gold gilding of the detailing on the exterior of the dome and the very expensive steel and rubber base isolation system on the lower right slide. These were all meant to make the building you know last for a very long time and it was a Willie Brown got Mayor Willie Brown project and it was also in somewhat associated with his especially the gilding with his sort of a decadent decadence of his administration. Next slide please. One space however in all of these very expensive renovations was omitted which was in the Board of Supervisors Chamber which is effectively San Francisco's legislature. The Board of Supervisors Chamber is highlighted on the plan slide on the right in the upper top corner and then this is an interior view of it prior post renovation but prior to the work that I'm about to discuss. So due to very complicated issues of extinct materials tight space and so forth a lot of loopholes in the kind of intersection of the secretary of interior standards and the ADA building code were used to basically punt making the presidential base which is the space that you see at the very end of the left slide making that wheel chair accessible. Next please. It wasn't until the newly elected that Mayor Gavin Newsom who was elected in 2004 took office and he appointed his friend and ally on the Board of Supervisors McKella Alioto Peer who you can see here on the upper left who uses a wheelchair. When he appointed her to the Board the issue of this inaccessible presidential base became problem and in the first year of her term on the Board Matt Gonzalez who was then Board President refused to change any of his practices and it made it very difficult for her to have equal access. There's a lot of negotiating and haggling and talking to each other and basically all those kinds of practices were inaccessible to her. She when in 2005 when the new Board President Aaron Peskin took the presidency he ceremoniously gave up the upper disk and you can see on the right side image you can see a kind of velvet rope was strung across that space and a ramp a kind of short ramp was built to the clerk's desk which then became turned into the presidential seat and then the clerk sort of sat below on the ground in a kind of more portable desk. However, Alioto Peer did not find this to be a sufficient solution. I'm going to call this the ad hoc or as is solution because she and she argued successfully with the support ultimately of the mayor's office on disability that this was not making the space sufficiently democratic to everyone. Next please. Her threatened ADA lawsuits under the ADA brought in a kind of very complex process spearheaded by the mayor's office on disability Susan Misner was in charge of that and brought in Page and Turnbull very you know renowned architectural preservation firm in San Francisco and beyond to make many many different proposals and after four years of all kinds of politicking and negotiating the image on the right is the solution was basically to lower the upper desk to 12 inches below uh to 12 inches above the existing floor to move the clerk's desk to be flush with the existing floor and to add this kind of curved ramp and you can see on the left that this is a disassembly detail so it required a very careful removal and storage of many of the existing elements because this is a Manchurian oak material which is one of the points of contention which is since the construction of this space has been made extinct so there was no way to really replace it exactly the same way. The this this development of this solution ended up pitting sort of two camps against each other and this and it became highly politicized with an article in the Chronicle that called this the million dollar ramp and this ultimately became viewed as the kind of elitist solution because it spent so much money on a chamber that was viewed as being part of an elite space as opposed to being kind of the most public political space in the city which it actually is because the deliberations are always open to the public and in fact because Alioto Pierre herself is a scion of a very wealthy and influential family it became associated with her personally and it ended up kind of taking this space and debate around the space out of the public realm and kind of privatized it and made it seem like a niche elitist issue and this was also pitted against the ad hoc solution which many people were for partly because it was inexpensive but also because it was viewed as leaving the authentic the word that David used earlier fabric the existing original fabric intact and kind of showing the kind of layers of time and change but as I said the mayor's office on disability sort of buttressed by Alioto Pierre's claims did not see that as a sufficiently democratic solution next please and here you can see the presidential days before on the left you can see that the desk is a bit higher there is no ramp there's just flanking stairs on both sides that lead both to the clerk's desk and to the higher central presidential desk and on the right you can see I mean it I think one of the things that is evident is that the the solution the final solution that was constructed and opened in 2012 which you see on the right is we would consider this a quite a seamless sort of integration of access which is definitely one of the primary reasons that it was favored by the kind of official access proponents position next please so on the other side of the continent I compared the San Francisco case with the still ongoing case of the Beacon Hill neighborhood in Boston those of you who have been here or have heard of it you know that it is one of the most exclusive and expensive neighborhoods in San Francisco it is a kind of a major point of tourist interest and these pictures kind of show what its character is they are very narrow streets and sidewalks beautiful brick buildings steep often steep streets and crowded with the sidewalks are crowded with all kinds of street furniture next please and this is the condition of the existing so-called curb ramps where they exist at all they tend to be very uneven there have been years and hundreds of lawsuits and complaints and there has been a lot of stalling by the Beacon Hill Civic Association also known as the BHCA to that have basically prevented any installation of new construction next in 2005 I believe the incoming mayor Marty Walsh basically finally took control of the situation and under the banner of safety he sort of started a construction without receiving a kind of certificate of appropriateness or basically without receiving approval from the neighborhood commission itself he you know to be clear he never used any kind of preservation discourse unlike the access proponents in San Francisco nor did he talk about civil rights in any way it was always under safety which is actually a kind of a lamentable thing because a lot of access proponents find that in architecture disability access is almost always sort of a legal technical issue rather than being understood in sort of more creative architectural terms the solution actually as you can see here is a concrete you know apron with wings and it has instead of the more standard yellow tactile pad they did have a compromise after feedback with a number of the neighborhood groups and made it it sort of a dark red brick colored tactile pad however the BHCA still wanted it to be made out of brick and they wanted to have a color a powder coated cast iron tactile pad which was both very costly but it would also create a kind of inconsistency of accessible there's really a sort of not a universality across the city of access features so this became a very tense public dispute with the BHCA suing the city and getting an injunction next please and and using all kinds of discussions about how historically Boston is the brick city and that neighbors in there is a kind of history of the neighbors who live in Beacon Hill of having you know taken to various kind of civil unrest or or different kinds of protest mechanisms to prevent earlier efforts by the city to remove brick from the sidewalk so the this is from 1947 and it's kind of a famous image that is used to circulate around Boston and particularly the Beacon Hill Society to sort of reference their kind of guardianship of the patrimony of Boston which they see as being a big sacrifice on their part that they contribute to the city's kind of value and history next please the debate as I mentioned you know took place over many years many public meetings but also this is a sort of a selection of the comments and to an article in the Boston Globe and as you can see it says Beacon people in Beacon Hill are not liberal far from it liberals have empathy they think of others before themselves another reader writes yikes the horror yellow oh my god now anyone can use our sidewalk what's next handicap parking and a third in this little clip that I took says quick we better start another association this one isn't working it appears they're going to allow anyone who wants to use our sidewalks so this as you can see it took on a pretty strong class warfare dimension you know with disabled access curbs here taking on a populist kind of common man or almost the exact opposite of what happened in San Francisco because of the recent Boston bombing some journalists as well as John Winsky who's the executive director of the disability policy consortium in Boston kind of raised the you know created an association between the many many people who had been permanently disabled by the bombing which happened a year before and the kind of exclusion that this represented that sort of unwillingness to build sidewalks that would be accessible um next please other people raise questions that had to do with like what is really authentic because in this one of them those people was again the same John Winsky I mentioned um you know they's a Beacon Hills uh civic association has special lampposts that they get designed they they do require the city to spend extra money on sort of every day furnishings urban street furnishings but they don't seem to object to other things um here I'm showing for example a traffic signal that's electrified and you can also see something as mundane as asphalt paving these streets used to be all cobblestone and in the winter and actually I think I mean sorry in the summer and you can see this in the distance here as well on the image on the left which is sort of just the intersection of Charles street and another street that leads uphill you can see also an air conditioner slotted into a window which obviously is also anachronistic with the historical period of Beacon Hill and John Winsky pointed out why are cars allowed and what is it that is so offensive or so corrosive to authentic heritage that Beacon Hill Association had literally for you know if the ADAs starts in 1991 implementation you know had for 20-something years been stalling on the installation of them next please I think one of the things that these both of these projects raise is the kind of question about what people find acceptable and and how those even disrupt or contradict official policy or best practices of architectural preservationists for example this is in San Francisco this little hairline border is the only remaining evidence that this current design was not original to the space this is actually a panel that was fabricated the lower piece is a panel that kind of covers up the area where the stairs were and meets the original Manchurian oak paneling above and in a question sort of you know why is this kind of historical simulacrum the favored solution in both Beacon Hill where the BHCA as I said is still promoting this brick and cast iron design and a same here where you know other solutions were rejected because they would look like they were quote unquote retrofitted or afterthoughts as Amy Hamray puts it in an article for the Smithsonian but I kind of argue something a little bit different which is you know this suggests that disabled access was always built into the landscape and I think a lot of people in the access you know politically motivated access community which I'm also a member of sort of see this as being a positive thing to make it look like it always been there but from an architectural standpoint it's also historical fiction and it's predicated on the idea that access elements are unsightly and of course sometimes they certainly are but that the kind of you know the in the the kind of historical false image of always having been there is more important than the historical truth and sort of to conclude then you know borrowing from public history and urban geography thinking about how one builds access into especially maybe every day environments that are still working environments that don't follow either maybe the Beacon Hill or San Francisco cases it's possible to think of the idea of office authenticity maybe more in the way that Paul growth and Dolores Hayden talked about which is that they are kind of public histories that the urban landscape is a public history that records social transformations and to that end I would say that disabled access needs to be reframed as a form of cultural practice a social art of remembering a year to four you know left out population and that that sort of records how over time society has changed although that was the very argument that was rejected in San Francisco but heritage knowledge should be opened up beyond traditional professional forms of architectural and archaeological expertise to include what Jeremy Wells and Barry Stiefel call civil experts this would not only encourage community participation which I think is always something that these projects should strive for but it considers forms of lay expertise such as the acumen of wheelchair users in Beacon Hill navigating you know icy sidewalks as central to heritage knowledge making thank you okay so I'd like to thank David and Jorge as well for organizing this event and for their work on putting together the future anterior volume on disability and preservation my contribution to that issue takes us back several centuries and it's centered on the national institute for deaf youth in Paris a school that dates back to 1760 and was the first of its kind in world history it's still in operation today and has occupied the same sites in 1794 architecturally it's a bit of a historical hodgepodge this was the site of a Jansenist Seminary from the 17th century and comprised four structures of varying provenance the oldest dating back to the early 15th century those buildings were all either rebuilt or renovated in the early 19th century resulting in the form and appearance that you see here despite its obvious importance in the history of disability education this institute is not one that appears to engage preservation issues in an integral way it was a school specifically intended for a deaf community whereas complications have tended to arise when a more general use public building of historic merit has had to consider accommodating its non-normative users moreover deaf students unlike blind or physically disabled individuals did not require customized architectural features for accessibility or navigation and though the deaf institute took over a site with a long and rich history the existing structures were never officially deemed historic monuments that should be preserved however the key decades of the school's expansion and modernization coincided with the period when the preservation movement was formalizing in France and I found resonances between what appeared to be unrelated histories that generated insights on our contemporary paradox today architectural conservation projects in the face of disability typically devolve into a fight over historical integrity versus accessibility as van de Lieberman's presentation just demonstrated this binary construct is artificial one that can and should be dismantled looking at the longer history of the preservation movement further destabilizes this dualism of access versus authenticity between the late 18th and early 19th centuries French society was working through new understandings of both disability and preservation and both developments were profoundly impacted by the French Revolution of 1789 I found that the political struggle for citizenship on the part of deaf and blind subjects in this period mirrored an expansive approach to historic conservation as an instrument of democracy so this investigation for me was something of a thought experiment of using two parallel developments to generate new perspectives on both let me begin with some background on the history of preservation in France and its links to the 1789 revolution art historian Lauren O'Connell has argued that the conversion of monarchical and religious buildings into republican structures during the revolution marked the first step toward a politics of preservation a government body instituted in 1795 the council of civic buildings oversaw the design and planning of all public buildings in the nation and from the start they endeavour to identify monuments and buildings worth conserving for artistic merit a preservationist ethos emerged from and through their work of architectural repurposing as expropriated properties rather than being demolished were put to secular and more democratic uses such as prefectures public schools and courthouses on the screen you're seeing one example here of a hospital installed in the main pavilion of a former abbey which the revolutionary government expropriated and nationalized in 1791 these activities set the stage for the institutionalization of preservation in 1830 with the creation of the government post inspector of historic monuments just sort of a key moment in the history of preservation his role involved identifying structures that merited being classified and protected as a historic monument so this development happened at a time when a new regime the July monarchy hoped to achieve national reconciliation after decades of divisive politics and revolutions it was thought that pride and their shared past and patrimony would help bring French citizens together the movement of romanticism in the early 19th century further fueled public interest in picturesque ruins historic buildings and preservation this print it shows a renaissance palace documented in the illustrated 1820 publication titled picturesque and romantic voyages in old France the 1820s were marked by rampant real estate speculation and a construction boom in major french cities which seems to have heightened a sense of loss and destruction it was in 1825 that the writer victor hugo first published a pamphlet titled guerre au demolisseur which translates to war on the demolishers and was republished in 1832 an expanded form in this essay he pleaded for the conservation of historic monuments and even decried certain restoration efforts as a form of vandalism for hugo the french patrimony embodied a collective national identity that superseded political or ideological divisions so to return to the deaf institute that i began with the school didn't occupy a site designated as a historic monument but its architectural development closely followed this history that i've just outlined the school began in 1760 as a small class run privately by a priest named chelle michelle de lepe in his own home in an era when philosophers were exploring the connection between the senses and cognition and new ways lepe's work helped advance the important understanding that sensory disabilities are not mental handicaps at the time of lepe's death the 1789 revolution raised important debates on public education and social welfare which led to the nationalizing of the deaf school that he had founded in the year 1791 this now public establishment eventually took over the expropriated site of a former seminary the sama gloire seminary in 1794 exemplifying the democratic architectural repurposing of the revolutionary era that set at the foundation for later preservation efforts the state architect directing this project in its key years was anton marie perre who was involved in early conservation and renovation projects through his appointment in the council of civic buildings mentioned earlier under his direction the cloistered religious grounds of old were converted into a state school that aimed to create productive citizens out of disabled and formerly marginalized subjects in the 1820s during that building boom that i mentioned in paris the school did engage in some wholesale demolitions and new constructions on its campus um you're seeing the main casualty of that moment here if you follow my cursor a 15th century church that was partially damaged by a fire and eventually torn down and replaced with this building which housed an assembly hall but as historic preservation activities formalized in the 1830s with government support the institute shifted to a strategy of smaller scale restorations renovations and improvements on the remaining structures of its site it was during this phase that the architect perre first began to include information on the historical details and significance of the existing buildings and reports submitted to the minister of the interior and council of civic buildings which oversaw all of this work so these elevation drawings on the screen are from the 1830s and they show restoration and renovation plans for the corduology which was an early 17th century structure so in many ways the architectural trajectory of the deaf institute was a product of the early history of the preservation movement but beyond these connections i ultimately see a shared narrative about inclusion in the history of the deaf institute and the preservationist discourse in these formative stages during and after the 1789 revolution if uh disability activists today uh too often find themselves in a struggle with preservationists over the exclusionary features of historic buildings early conservation efforts from the revolutionary era were always about adaption to modern and generally secular and communal needs the architect Eugène Emmanuel Villoliduc was France's leading conservation architect in the mid 19th century best known for his restoration of the Notre Dame Cathedral and in his views restoration could be a creative act not simply a work of maintenance or repair but that of re-establishing an edifice in a state that may never have existed at a given moment to use his words i would argue that the nascent conservation activities that set the stage for Villoliduc's work actually took this creative impulse a step further by approaching historic monuments as instruments for shaping the more democratic society of the future the Paris deaf institute's restoration through adaption for an unprecedented architectural program and for a student population at the nebulous boundary of ability and disability embodied the ethos shaping the preservationist discourse in its formative stages when architecture stood at the forefront of a larger struggle over social democracy the history of preservation when viewed alongside the history of disability reveals that conservation once was and could be again a fluid and socially inclusive practice not one of architectural fossilization i'll conclude with a final thought on how disability and preservation discourses intersected at the Paris deaf institute in retrospect the history of the school not only suggests a more expansive theorization of preservation it was also an early site for the conservation of disability the theme that david highlighted and introducing this event the school's founder le pit and the deaf teachers and students who found a home there advanced a cultural model of disability before it was theorized as such the school's members actively aimed to cultivate and preserve deaf language traditions and heritage especially a sign language increasingly came under attack and was eventually supplanted by oralism or lip reading and speaking by the 1880s the institute is now itself a classified historic monument a designation based on its 19th century architectural remodeling by anton mary bair but one that should perhaps be thought of in cultural terms as well so i will conclude here thank you for your attention thank you david lila and whore hey as well as our final panelists for this opportunity and for including uh rob thompson and me in our presentation or in your presentation today uh we have titled our presentation opening the gates adaptive reuse and the conservation of disability next slide we're going to begin today with david gissons productive provocation really a more radical formulation david says in his introduction is the preservation of disability itself and in our presentation we're going to be doing two forms of presenting first of all i'm going to be showing phrases and words in our powerpoint screen and reading those words and elaborating on them somewhat in rob's part of the presentation he will be showing words and elaborating on them as well as showing and describing a few images next slide so i'm going to start with some critical disability theory that i want to offer for us and we'll begin with three premises or claims propositions of disability studies critical disability studies as we call it now maybe even critical interdisciplinary disability studies and then we'll move from this theory into a kind of meditation or explication about preservation practice in relation to the presidio and then conclude briefly with some theory again about the conservation of disability so one of the first and central claims of critical disability studies is that disability is everywhere once you know how to find it now this claim universalizes disability as a existential and essential human lived experience and it also presents disability not only as a human experience but as a concept next slide so if we conclude that disability is everywhere once you know how to find it we might be able to extend that idea by suggesting that the work of present preservation pardon me is to find disability in the built environment and that's what we want to think about together collectively today here next slide i also want to offer a definition this is my definition one of many of course that could be offered by many of us who work in this area of disability and this definition is that disability is the history of our encounters our human encounters between flesh and world that is written on our bodies in other words existence over time and across space rights or marks on human bodies on human flesh and that is the experience of what we call disability over the arc of a lifetime and i would like to suggest that we can imagine buildings as being like fleshly humans in this way in that the existence of a building or some built item or object in the environment can be marked similarly by existence in the way that flesh is marked by our existence in the world over time and space next slide the third proposition or a claim of disability studies which is really central to what we're doing here today in particular it's central to the presentation that georgina cleague will give later on and that is that the lived experiences of disability give people and communities opportunities for expression for creativity for resourcefulness for relationships and for human flourishing so disability seen in this way or understood in this way is generative it is world-making and the preservation of disability is also a world-making enterprise that we are sharing here today so next slide rob will take over here to discuss the presidio of san francisco as a case study in adaptive reuse thank you rosemary and thanks to all the organizers uh good day i'm rob thompson and um my goal here this morning is to build on what rosemary has said by offering a practitioner's view of incorporating access in the broadest sense into a vast and complex site using existing preservation principles uh which serve to meet multiple public benefit goals next slide please so here i'm showing a map and an image of the presidio of san francisco located at the foot of the golden gate bridge and on the northwest tip of the san francisco peninsula for 218 years the presidio served an exclusive military function and this began under the flag of imperial spain in 1776 and it ended with the departure of the us army in 1994 the former military reservation is now a national historic landmark district which is the highest designation that the nation bestows on historic sites as well as a national park site and it's managed by a federal agency the presidio trust which is who i work for which carries a mandate to and i quote preserve the cultural and historic integrity of the presidio for public use that quote comes out of the uh congressionally authorized enabling legislation that drives our work today next slide please and here i'm showing an image an aerial image of the presidio to give the audience a sense of the scale of the site at 1500 acres and with over 800 buildings along with roads infrastructure design landscapes residential neighborhoods and even a golf course the presidio is effectively a small municipality that's distinct from the neighboring city of san francisco it's surrounded by two sides with water and on the other two sides by a wall a masonry wall dating from around 1900 which contains seven gates that the army used to actively manage and control access to the post next slide please and here i'm showing a image from around 1900 of us army soldiers guarding one of these gates the lombard gate which was the main entry into the presidio both historically and still today so with the military use now concluded at the presidio and preservation at the core of the site's mission we are in a position to literally open the gates to the public along with removing barriers and giving the presidio a new purpose our preservation approach at the presidio relies on the practice of adaptive reuse which is generally defined as converting in a historic resource for a purpose other than that which was originally intended while retaining its historical cultural and architectural values next slide please here i'm showing an image of trust carpenters some of my colleagues working on an adaptive reuse project in this case conversion of an 1864 officers family home into an office building so at the presidio we use adaptive reuse projects to accomplish a comprehensive suite of functional upgrades to our historic buildings including new utilities and data systems seismic strengthening fire suppression systems and amenities such as kitchenettes and new bathrooms along with code compliant accessibility improvements next slide please and here's an example i'm showing one such project this is the lobby of an adoptively reused 1898 barracks building which now functions as an office so here we've found and accomplished this that the sensitive addition of accessibility features such such as the elevator shown at the back of the image on the left and ramps that are used to access the front porch of this particular building by adding these to 19th century buildings we can successfully put them back into service as revenue producing assets while also creating usable spaces within the building such as the attic spaces shown on the right that the army even just used for storage so in addition to meeting code and regulatory requirements for access this practice unlocks significant leasable square footage which the trust can then rent out to generate revenue to support the park that's accomplishing multiple public benefit goals i described earlier next slide please and here i'm showing an image of our main parade which is a rectangular landscape feature that has been converted from an army era drill field as created in 1890s later the army turned it into a parking lot and today it's a popular public open space so adaptive reuse of the city's buildings and landscapes has resulted in the creation of a new layer in parks history one focused on stewardship of its resources and access in the broadest sense to the public so here i'll turn it back over to rosemary to offer some concluding thoughts thank you rob uh for that interesting uh consideration of how the presidio operates to conserve or preserve disability we're going to conclude quickly with some uh definitions that i want to offer and next slide please i'll offer first a kind of thick definition that answers david's provocation and that is what we might think of as the definition of conserving or preserving disability itself so conserving disability is a process of managed change that maintains a supportive material environment a moral ecosystem that's a term i like to use from that i take from my work in bioethics a moral ecosystem where human embodied existence can thrive as it transforms over time so as i said this is thick you may wish to consider it um it pulls together i hope with language many of the ideas that we have brought forward in our presentation and many of the ideas that i think have been brought forward in the future anterior volume which i'm very glad to um be aware of and now to be included in this project next slide a more concise way of talking about this uh might be to use a verb that i like a lot and that is the active verb to shape and to say that perhaps our goal in conserving disability is to shape environments both built and natural and human to fit humans rather than to shape humans to fit into environments final slide i want to gesture also where we want to gesture also here to i think a very interesting provocation that comes from van de Lieberman's really wonderful piece in the volume and van de suggests that a purpose of heritage might be to materialize successive liberation movements and we want to suggest that in some ways the adaptive reuse that rob has described here that goes on at the resideo literally materializes the moments the times the decades of the 1970s 80s 90s and 2000s when the americans with disabilities act and the disability rights movement in general mandated a transformation of the built environment which is a liberation movement for people with disabilities and it continues and it is materialized at the presidio and in many other places of course through the adaptive reuse that rob described so thank you very much hello this is dergina klieg i am the final speaker and i uh thank david and whore hey for organizing this event and for the publication of the volume uh and lila for managing the powerpoint which i believe has now uh appeared to you um i should mention by way of introduction i'm a blind person i'm using powerpoint which i think of as assistive technology for sighted people um to any blind people in the audience i will be uh briefly describing images sort of on a need to know basis but the fact that you know obviously if i was knew i was only talking to blind people i wouldn't bother um but it is my awareness that that sighted people um become uneasy if they don't have something to look at so really the powerpoint is for our sighted friends i'm going to be talking about um a uh project i was engaged i was involved with a collaborative project uh called embodied encounters um which was funded by a program at the san francisco museum of modern art uh called the artist initiative um and the program the artist initiative program invited artists to to submit uh project proposals um where they would engage with uh works in the collection um in uh maybe novel or unexpected ways and offer public programs and uh uh document work um to engage with with pieces in the collection so this was a project uh which began in 2017 it's it's ongoing the documentation of our work together is ongoing uh the lead artist was feyan divi uh who's an australia-based artist um who identifies as a person with a visual impairment um and then the other artists i'll mention briefly and say more about them later uh brian philips also based in australia as a sound artist shelly laska um uh choreographer also based in australia and myself who in this project identified uh myself as a blind person and a haptic docent i'll explain that later um my work on this project uh it was a continuation of collaborations several collaborative projects i've done with feyan divi uh provoked by ideas about blind access and visually impaired access to the visual arts um specifically it came out of work we did together around enlarging our understanding of touch perception of art um and it came from a simple premise which is that in the history of museums from the the beginning of the history of museums uh there's always been some sort of um provision for blind visitors uh giving them special access to touch uh works of art and historical artifacts in museum collections and as a blind art lover i have always availed myself of these programs whenever given the opportunity um and uh i have found them rewarding um to varying degrees but i've felt that museums missed an opportunity um because whenever i've engaged in a touch toward a museum i have observed that sight of people observing me or um people hearing about my experience after the fact are really really curious really really eager to know what what is that experience like uh basically i've come to the understanding that everybody wants to get their hands on art um but art conservators do not want everybody to get their hands on art uh so it is a special accommodation um uh provided to a limited number of museum visitors um so anyway uh i have felt and uh fey and devia has also collaborated in this the feeling that therefore people who have this special privilege of getting to touch art have a obligation and an opportunity to share that cultural knowledge with institutions and to the the public that they serve um so that that access becomes a two-way uh interaction it's not just a charitable act but bestowed on uh blind people but it is blind people um bringing that knowledge into culture okay um the project that we did at SF MOMA involved um four different works uh the project had a a conservation element in that we were looking at pieces that were ephemeral uh that is to say that they were not on permanent display and so in some sense our interactions with these works were conserving uh their presence uh even after they were removed from the museum and then some pieces um were ephemeral in the sense that by design they were made of materials which were um changing over time and so the the appearance of pieces were changing but i'm only going to talk about one of them next slide please and that is the sculpture by Richard Sarah Sequence which was built finished in 2006 and i have here two images of the sculpture on the left uh is the sculpture in its site where it now resides and where it was destined always to live at the Cantor Art Center at Stanford University and then the image on the right is a picture a picture of it in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in a gallery that was built specifically to house it um this is a massive work of sculpture uh it's made of steel specifically a type of steel used in shipbuilding um it weighs uh it's it's made up of 12 um plates uh steel plates um configured as nested S curves um it is 13 feet high it's uh 67 feet long by 42 feet wide um it weighs uh approximately 235 tons um so it's it's an extremely large piece of work um Sarah uh like many sculptors um has often in interviews and in writing complained about the way uh sculpture is perceived um and displayed uh because he he emphasizes that of course sculpture is three-dimensional work um and that it can't be viewed as as two-dimensional works paintings are viewed uh that it needs to be displayed in a way that allows for um people to move around it and view it from all angles um with this piece its massive size means that you a sight of person literally cannot get a full glimpse of it uh standing near it um the only way to get a sort of sense of its of its um whole design is from a distance or from an aerial view um this piece like some other pieces by Sarah is also uh meant to be moved not only around but to be moved through uh visitors can um follow pathways through the sculpture as I said configured as nested S curves so one describes a path that is this kind of figure eight um through the sculpture the walls of the sculpture are not perpendicular to the ground so they curve and um uh lean uh in in different directions sometimes closing in overhead and sometimes opening outwards um the uh so the the part of the um the interest of this project is that the sculpture was originally designed to be an exterior piece uh then it was moved to SF MoMA in uh 2016 to this custom built gallery where it stayed until 2019 um so for the conservators at the museum this this posed a number of interesting questions which I'll touch on briefly uh which had to do with the fact of uh you know it's having been exposed to the elements to the air to pollution and also to touch uh when it was um exhibited at Stanford and then being brought into the museum to be cleaned to have its oxidized surface uh maintained um uh also to to um perform some repairs uh from the way it had been used as an outdoor sculpture uh and then to be displayed as sculpture is displayed in museums where people are not allowed to touch and I'll just mention one one sort of amusing thing that I learned from conservators with this piece is when it first came to the museum in San Francisco um they discovered that high up on the interior walls in some of the sections there were dusty footprints and apparently um this came about uh that visitors to it at Stanford performed a a rock climbing maneuver where I guess you brace your back against one wall and then you can climb up with your feet against the other wall um this is all to say that um when it was at Stanford even though I I think there may have been signs outside saying please don't touch the sculpture everybody touched the sculpture um whereas in San Francisco uh it's in a museum uh it was in a museum there were signs saying please don't touch the sculpture and there were patrolling guards who um uh discouraged people from touching um I'm here to tell you that every time I visited the piece at SF MoMA people were touching the sculpture um but the conservators and uh the the museum kind of maintained this policy that it should not be touched our project was to um visit the sculpture to interact with the sculpture to think about the sculpture in a number of different ways to perform workshops with museum staff um and some public programming which were um meant to engage with the sculpture in in sort of more multimodal multi sensory ways um uh and this involved uh the experience of the sculpture as a blind person uh and I'll just say one one thing about that to navigate this sculpture to um follow its path it's a sinuous uh figure eight path um it's impossible for two people to walk side by side uh which might be the typical way for a blind person to do this um because one was forbidden from touching uh one could not uh do what blind people often do in such as situations which is known as to shoreline meaning uh to touch um intermittently with one's cane one one wall to follow its contours and thus navigate that way um to be honest the the statute of limitations I think it's up when I first encountered this sculpture which was at Stanford um that was how I did it I did I did touch the sculpture um uh but in our encounters um at SF MoMA uh we had to get special permission uh to be able to touch um the sculpture so that we could communicate what the experience was so the piece is a feat of engineering engineering it's an architectural piece it's a choreographic object it imposes a certain kind of movement on the visitor we also discovered that it was a sonic object this came from an observation uh when I was there visiting and there were two um young boys I think about 10 years old maybe they were siblings or they were um friends who were running around the sculpture at uh great speed and emitting um little boy sounds at one point they were obviously in different parts of the structure and they were whooping so one would say whoop and the other would say whoop and um the acoustics um were really quite remarkable um so this sort of prompted it an idea of engaging with the piece as a sonic um uh a piece as well as through touch uh and through sight um next slide please okay so this is an image of myself and Feandivi and Brian Phillips inside um one of the sort of more or less circular chambers at the at the heart of the sculpture um engaged in various types of encounters uh Feandivi is in the the center of the image she's holding a um a boom microphone I'm standing um a little bit to her right uh I'm probably speaking I'm not sure what I'm doing Brian Phillips the sound artist is uh sitting on the floor he's looking at the recording device I don't think you can see this but he has a whistle in his mouth um so to capture some of the sonic elements of this piece um uh we whistled we clapped we yelled we sang we whispered um uh as we moved through the space and all of this was recorded and those recordings are are being processed um uh all of this is is being documented in a multimodal manner in an online publication which will happen sometime in the future uh including video audio text um uh someone and so forth anyway um next slide please um we we got special commission uh permission uh for me to be able to shoreline uh inside the the sculpture uh using my cane but the museum insisted that I had to put something on the tip of the the cane um so here I am uh and then we had to try out various materials they had bubble wrap they had masking tape they had all sorts of other um materials uh and and we it was a negotiation to figure out how we could um maximize the acoustic effects uh uh while still preserving the sculpture uh Brian Phillips the sound artist is standing with with me um as I'm fiddling with this cane he obtained special permission to hang um contact mics on the sculpture to record the sound of of my shorn lining and other other um sonic and acoustic experimentation we did with the piece next slide please um so here I am uh again in one of the circular chambers in the middle of the piece and I'm shorelining my cane is is touching um very delicately the uh the um walls of the piece Shelly Alaska the choreographer is um semi recumbent on the floor uh part of her project was to take up the provocation of this piece as a choreographic object and to um uh learn to internalize its choreography and then to perform uh sort of interpretations of that choreography outside of the sculpture and this was also part of our idea of of preserving a memory of the sculpture uh once it would be returned to its site uh at Stanford which happened in 2019 next slide please uh and here I am uh with the choreographer Shelly Alaska walking circumnavigating the exterior of the piece uh we were um attempting to uh memorize um the form of the piece choreographically um so the the thing to note about this image is that in we're we're walking but we're in step uh so we were basically um coaching each other about the the the precise the precise uh scale and movement that the piece imposes okay uh next slide please all right here we are at Stanford so we did all this work at SF MoMA and then we went to Stanford uh where the to the 6000 square foot um concrete slab which originally and now houses the sculpture um which is outside the the museum so here I am I have sunglasses on now because it's outside uh Brian Phillips is behind me with a boom mic and he's recording um the sound of my cane um we went there we wanted to um try to find the traces of the sculpture on this slab and um it it was discernible the thing weighs 235 tons um so there was a kind of trace in the concrete but it was uh more more robust in some areas than in others um we had hope to perform the complete choreography of the piece there unfortunately the museum has housed some other sculptures on this plaza sort of temporarily smaller sculptural works were there so it kind of interrupted our path but we we did what we could um um my final slide please this is just an image of me bent over feeling the the the concrete in a particular place where you could feel a sort of intent intent indentation of where the sculpture had rested behind me is um I'm not actually sure which which sculpture but one of the temporarily installed sculptures that was there um which remarkably were surrounded by these uh cast iron ballards and very heavy chains which theoretically I suppose were there to keep people from touching those sculptures um as anybody could notice it was very easy to reach over these um these barriers um uh so it was kind of an odd um move by the museum in fact the day we were there there was a school group visiting and there was a little girl who was disturbed by the the way that the sculptures were chained in and she started a petition which was to free the sculptures so of course we all signed the the petition because of course all the sculptures should be free um that's the the end of my presentation um but I'm hoping that it it gives you an idea of this provocation that fey and dv and I initiated in this particular project to think about um alternative modes of engagement with a work of art uh in the interest of both enlarging cultural knowledge but in this case also uh conserving a memory of a piece that had been temporarily housed in the museum uh and then was returned to its original site so thank you very much for your um attention I look forward to questions and discussion thank you super um thank you so much um everyone for these um really provocative and um exciting contributions I um feel all the uh formats we have access to over the web I'm getting texts chats and one or two questions in for you guys um so also to our audience members I strongly encourage you to write questions into the q and a box um at the bottom um I'm sure you're as provoked as I am by many of the presentations and um you know have had questions for our panelists can can you all you can all hear me I assume yeah okay um so uh while we're waiting for a few more questions let me just um go straight into our our last presentation but it's it's it's really a question for for everyone but um just to make a something of a segue here so um Georgina your um you know your your presentation really demonstrates um what what what for me and I think many of us the the possibilities of an idea of the preservation of disability um offers that it's a it's a double or triple um on tondra that might refer to who gets to become a preservationist um and your project demonstrates what happens uh when we bring disabled people into the field of preservation and how an artifact like our Richard Sara sculpture that is um has for many people has such a strong visual bias a sense of sublimity um might transform um through your own not just perspective but but really your own activity really your own labor as a as somebody who's who's you know using your um your cane and other tools to like um to record it um by the way before we sure we all love to hear recording of that project when it's available so um so we're completely beyond issues of accessing a work I think and into how the perspectives interpretations of disabled people might transform the physical character of the past so I'm wondering if if um both you and other our other panelists have have some more um thoughts about what that might mean like like how does opening up the field of preservation um two two two disabled preservationists or at least their perspectives um if not their um labor like how might this transform the physical character of works there's obviously the issue of um of sense but there's I'm sure there's other issues that um some of you thought might be raised by your various contributions today into the issue well maybe I'll just add briefly uh a couple of points I mean you're articulating maybe the the whole um uh idea behind uh this project um and a sort of philosophy that I put forward in in in my writing and other works which is as I begin to say um simply asking the question about what what is the purpose of access you know um and that sometimes in articulations of access there is a sort of fuzzy um imprecise idea of of inclusion um but what does inclusion bring with it um and so it's to my mind um access in my work with museums the the point I'm always trying to put forward is access that merely um gives people who've been previously excluded or marginalized a point of entry and then essentially says and now you can go home you've been enriched and enlightened is sort of missing the mark um that access as a kind of radical intervention embraces the idea that when you when you open up the culture to people who've been out of it um for centuries the culture is going to change it's going to look different it's going to behave differently um and that's that's scary um and so it it it's understandable that that uh sometimes access is not fully realized because uh you know well you can't put a ramp on that that will ruin the aesthetics uh or you can't put an elevator there because um you know people didn't have elevators in the 19th century um so in in in some sense it's it's when one recognizes the resistance and the fear to these types of ideas um but the the next step is to sort of offer um uh an improvement an enlargement of what the culture is and what it means i hope someone else will weigh in on this i could say a few words because um david your question about you know what how does the practice of you know preservation or restoration change when we open up the practice of preservation actually made me think of um david serlan's article in the future interior volume and i actually see that he's contributed to the q and a chat here so i'm glad he's still on but the idea that um i mean i think vanda's presentation brings us clearly that what we choose to preserve there's a there's a selection that's being made it's not a totality we're choosing which elements are deemed authentic or worth preserving in each case and david serlan's article was uh was a really fascinating one because it takes this school for the blind and physically handicapped and what chose to get renovated were not anything related to the history of disability of that building but sort of like other architectural elements and that if we think about opening up the field of preservation to people with disabilities and that the choice of what is deemed authentic to a building and worth preserving that that calculus would change um so yeah that's just one thought that i had and everyone should read david's article that's great actually yes um as sonny mentioned david just wrote in so actually because his question is related i'll just or and his comment is related i'll just uh read what david serlan just wrote in he wrote um i think one of the things that is raised and engaged by including people with disabilities and the preservation process is to ask and and this is also a question um what counts as historical and who gets to define the historical value of a building a community and a nation and that seems very much i'm at the heart of sonny and and wanda's presentations today as as well as rob's um some of rob's expertise and rosemary's provocations as well if i might jump in um go ahead well i was just gonna say um i mean in a way it's what is deemed as historical but maybe even what you know these are public many of these are public places otherwise it wouldn't be a matter so you know is the issue even that it always needs to be quote-unquote historical because i think we have seen in almost all these cases decisions are being made as to what is deemed to be historical and what is not um authentic or you know um a valid historical record and i think it seems i mean i am more of a proponent um of what rosemary mentioned at the end which i actually as she was saying this i was also thinking this which is the idea that you know just like the body that the built environment which it does already it shows the marks of time of change of society and um so i i guess i i think because disability is still quite stigmatized and i think there isn't a broader discussion currently especially in a lot of uh you know sort of professional but also lay historical societies which is often where a lot of these decisions are made certainly that's the case in the beacon hill um there just isn't a broader debate about what kinds of questions should be included and how the built environment should reflect what is going on in society and so there i mean disability voices end up often in at least in the discussions that i have examined they end up being for political reasons often the way that cities are structures and the debates are structures they end up being uh opponents as opposed to being more collaborators and i think i think part of this is in the way that this takes place is related to the way that the kind of governance structures are sometimes organized as well and even in the way that the law is implemented so i think that there are a number of areas of intervention where more of the questions that rosemary and david just asked and and sunyoung asked that and all those things could uh you know figure in more strongly but there needs to be a more concerted effort in places that we don't always control i'd like to follow up if i may uh this is rosemary what georgina was suggesting um one of the again claims of critical disability studies is that people with disabilities don't must live in a world not built for us and that can lead to resourcefulness but it also can lead to expertise and i think that one of david's most important provocations is what he was talking about in relation to georgina and that is how will it change preservation how will it change the built environment if more actual people who identify as disabled are identified as disabled and who use the world differently because of what i call the human variations that we think of as disabilities how that knowledge and expertise of this interaction between mind bodies considered disabled and a kind of already built and inherited world how how that will operate how that will be generative and changing things and what that means is a couple of things one of the things is we have to be there so that means that people with disabilities need to be understood as members of institutional communities uh whether those institutional communities are educational communities or any kind of public communities in other words we need to be able to go to school we need to be able to get jobs we need to be able to be hired and we need to be able to have some degree of authority and expertise in remaking the world in a just and inclusive way and part of what works against that and georgina and i have talked a lot about this and david you may have to say have something to say about that and that is we aren't expected we aren't imagined as being there we are imagined as being somewhere else we've talked a little bit about this the recipients of something uh the people on the street corner the people that are stigmatized the people that are excluded but in fact we're everywhere and it is our obligation i think to bring forward our expertise into whatever institutions or enterprises into which we can be involved to show how our presence transforms the world and makes it more just and equitable yeah i think that's a really succinct way to to consider those issues thank you um let me i'm going to combine um a few questions we have several questions that are about um expanding this conversation as well as bringing it into more um intersectional discussions so um one attendee asked um this conversation is very analogous if not parallel to many of the issues about access integration inclusion facing higher education from not only a disability perspective but also a gender ethnoracial and socioeconomic perspective my wheels are definitely turning if anyone would like to speak um to this issue that would be nice um regardless i appreciate the insight being provided in this presentation also just to add to that uh one of the first questions asked um mentions that the world health organizations world report on disability promoted a more bio-psycho-social model than i suppose we're using today that expands the idea of disability to include cognitive disorders issues around trauma i'm just adding that in among other environmental factors and mental health which certainly imbue an environment in need of preservation so does anyone maybe want to also if i may add this probably also has to do with what rosemary raised your ideas about um just to find the quote um at heritage that materializes successive liberation movements right i think that that's probably the heart of these questions um yeah i mean i think you know we have i think a lot of work to do on a number of fronts in our various institutions um and public places to include a broader swath of the population and i guess you know thinking about also georgina's presentation uh the and everyone's presentation frankly but the idea that that there is really there are many different points of view and uh subjectivities that provide insight and whether we are talking about disability sensory disabilities or as as the questioner raises issues about socioeconomic status gender and other you know minoritized populations right so i think i was thinking when rosemary was talking that that people with disabilities need to be in all these different places but yeah and they need to be on like historic preservation boards you know and things like that um and you know i don't i don't want to sound pessimistic but i want to say you know optimistically there is room for many different people on a lot in a lot of different spaces that are currently not as diverse and inclusive as they need to be and i mean in this moment that we're talking you know i think there are tons of institutions are penning these statements of inclusion and diversity and so forth um and my question a lot of times when i read the things coming across my email from my institutions um is you know but what are you actually putting into place to proactively effect change um so i'm a little bit i don't want to be a cynic but i'm a little cynical about institutional statements i would like there to be an opportunity for or hoping that what's happening right now is a window where some real changes will take place and that will be inclusive of a lot of different people that have been left out and whose perspectives would really enrich the built environment since that's what we are talking about and and the kind of concepts and practices of historic preservation yeah sonny i was just gonna i was gonna call on you thank you okay did you have a specific thing i wanted to talk about because um i was thinking you deal with the mother of all historical liberation movements which is the french revolution which is you know essential yeah i wasn't going to make people get admired in french revolutionary history again but um i really liked um joseph berry's point there and question in the chat box because i think the disability historians that i discourse with um treat disability as a social category alongside gender race class and that those intersections are very much at the heart of what i think many of us are studying um on my part and just the material that i presented today it's very much about kind of a working class disability and how do we get these you know kids begging off the streets and it's that's sort of part of the dialogue that leads to the creation of these first blind and deaf schools it's very these are very much working class institutions um and i think that point that intersectionality of class and um gender and um probably race as well comes together in vanda's um case studies because i feel like um and i don't think this came up in vanda's presentation but in your article you mentioned how one of the suggestions um was to raise to like have pages lift um all the odopeter onto the presidential dais like instead of building a ramp and surely that kind of suggestion would not have been made if it was a man in the picture i think and so there are all these kinds of you know discourses that intersect and i think you know part of our work that we're doing as scholars and historians is trying to understand how those come together okay yeah please quickly from my point of view you know i'm i'm a public employee and i practice preservation on federal land according to regulations drafted in federal legislation and all of that encourages the practice of preservation in the service of maximizing public benefit for the greatest number of people there's all kinds of language in the laws and regulations that encourage public comment public you know intake of public opinion before making preservation decisions so that is by no means a perfect system as implemented across the country you know not even in my backyard but um the tools are there and i think um public employees in particular can uh take advantage of those tools and and use them very seriously to expand the voices that can input into preservation decisions input into the process of making public assets more accessible more meaningful more usable to more people and that's really what government service should be about so that's that's something i take very seriously and encourage you know all of my public sector colleagues to do the same um did somebody have anything to add before we move on to another okay um we just have time for one more question and then we'll we'll um um uh get to some um final thoughts um just again to i think i can condense several different people's um questions a recurring theme and several the other questions concerns like how rather than um uh create accommodations or adaptations towards disability how how do we begin with um disability and human impairment when considering um the future of the built environment um and also how um do we um one of the uh jennifer stager who's a professor john hopkins and works on this topic um also asks like how do we consider the the the ethical benefits that the public at large gets from disability labor and knowledge like um i think this speaks through all the work across history from sunny sunny's um examinations to all the way to georgina's most recent work how does one begin with these topics um which is very which is very different than what we've seen today where um we're all dealing with pre-existing structures that are then adapted in some way well maybe i'll take a poke at it i um uh so it's what you're asking is is about going forward um that is to say uh you know less about preservation and maybe about what what what's the future of architecture design uh you know programming education different um it's different arenas um around access i mean many many observers have noted that when access is in the design from the outset it not only works better but it's more aesthetic and it's more usable by everyone so a modern building that has you know that has a ramp you know a ramped entrance um rather than an existing building where the ramp is just sort of wheeled in and bolted on to the side uh that that that that designed designed access um has both greater utility and greater aesthetic value and and so the question really is how do you um leverage those ideas to different contexts um and i think part of it is is still going back to what rose marie said that the disabled people are always understood to be somehow elsewhere um and you know that you only card us in on rare occasions um to to evaluate something or else that we wheel in and complain about things um so i think even the kind of the acknowledgement of that fact uh would would make a difference right just the acknowledgement that we're not elsewhere but that we are you know everywhere and we're here um and that we have knowledge and expertise to impart i mean one thing this is a sort of practically consideration but i've become kind of irritable about the the idea of focus groups you know and all sorts of different projects preservation and rehabilitation projects and different types of programming you know a bunch of people from whatever group is brought in as a focus group to sort of evaluate the situation and it's always sort of evaluating something that's already been you know fit a complete um and you know or or else saying do you like this this one or this one and you know my response is often well i don't really like either of them you know because you you you sort of invented this without uh you know without bringing anybody in from the to the drawing board uh so i think that that simple idea that rosemary put forward is that you know we're everywhere another way to think about this that um this question that brings it firmly into the topic of today's panel and the the work of whore hey and the students is um you know we're on the topic of reconstruction right like how do you begin with disability when um the evidence is scant but yet the historic structure will be um or historic site will be reconstructed it could be archaeological it could be um uh ruined from war it could be interest you know it could deal with some of these other intersecting histories that we're talking about in like the history of enslavement and the important sites around that in the united states so how how does one begin with this topic right which gets us completely outside the issue of um authenticity and well i shouldn't say that that potentially removes us from this this balancing act that we always have to um use with pre-existing structures i wonder if in addition to you know leaving authenticity i guess in some ways behind as you were sort of suggesting if the word access um which is of course the legal term but is i think really limiting because as a practicing architect um uh i wrote an article about you know how limiting uh and how limited architects generally approach disabled access and i think you know these laws are incredibly important as are the guidelines that rob thompson talked about but they also end up kind of creating a very rote process and so i think thinking about what we are trying to do is not as access but as something much bigger much more opening up to um many people and giving insight or something like that and i don't know what that word is maybe i'll come up with it but maybe someone else will um i think in a way that that the word access kind of narrows our objectives this question is um still requires some consideration for you also um we are hoping you know we would like to end at three o'clock so if there's also any other final thoughts or issues that um any of you would like to share that you were raised or that you feel loose ends that um that need to be um tied up and addressed please please we welcome your closing comments on this on this topic oh you have to unmute i wanted to just follow up a little bit on what georgina was saying uh following up on what i was saying i guess is uh the idea of people with disabilities that is to say people who have knowledge that is that comes from some kind of atypical embodied experience a mind body that is understood as atypical um that david's work has brought forward i think really in a very powerful way and that is that people with disabilities uh have always been everywhere so they were at the acropolis um because of course they were throughout all of human history and that's part of a of a a piece of historical knowledge that i think we have to hold on to because we have a sense of a progress narrative and i'm i put forward this kind of process narrative all the progress narrative all the time that says um you know in the mid 20th century we had the human and civil rights movements and that has transformed the built environment to make it accessible to people um with all sorts of human variations whether we think of that as disability race gender sexuality who were previously excluded from public life and that's partially right that progress narrative is partially right but it's also partially wrong and i think we need to balance that important narrative of possibility with the narrative that david puts forward and that is you know the acropolis used to be filled with people with disabilities until you know they took down the ramp and and until i got there and then i couldn't get in so i think these various historical narratives need to be blended together and brought forward simultaneously in order for us to do this important work thank you any other final thoughts um as we head towards uh three o'clock closing i just add that um building on rosemary's point that historic buildings and historic landscapes historic built environments are uniquely positioned and and capable of carrying those messages from the deep past forward into the present that's why i got into this business in the first place to experience that and be up close and personal with it um so we've always got a tremendous amount to learn from the past and we can do no better than letting it inform our future outlook on things wanda did you you have something to add no i just wanted to thank everyone for great presentations and a really interesting discussion and for including me in it i really enjoyed your presentation by the way it was really great so it's amazing to watch an article get condensed down to 10 minutes that was a little challenging very good i'm sure for all of us sunny was it i was going to say ditto to what vanda said i mean i guess um one point that i just wanted to say is that you know i think the problem that comes with um preservation in its interaction with disability today comes from the sense that preservation has some solid history that you can look back on and say see this is what historical preservation was and hence why we're reacting in this way whereas from my vantage point as a historian you see that preservation was like really fluid in the way it was approached and that there was no one understanding of authenticity or you know like fossilization of a of a of a structure in some past moment and that once we start sort of like loosening up that understanding and realize that preservation has a complex history as well that that allows us to approach disability and issues of access and inclusion or whatever other word we want to come up with in a more thoughtful way thank you now it's something i feel like your presentation will um really shift how people understand the the history of preservation um and and teach it actually so it was really wonderful to see this contribution it's it was very provocative yeah really fantastic thank you i hope so um any other one final note hi everyone this is uh lila clambuji sub i just wanted to mention that we're getting lots of thank yous um in the chat and in the q&a and i know that most of our panelists are not looking at that so i just wanted to make sure that it's addressed that the audience is very thankful for this discussion and i also as a final note wanted to mention that um or hey is generously offered to mail a copy of the issue a future interior to anyone who would like to request one um and you can do that by sending your mailing address name and mailing address um via email to future dot anterior dot journal at gmail.com and i did put that into the chat um for anyone to see so you can copy and paste it but the words future dot interior dot journal at gmail.com again um so anyone who would like to request a free copy sort of a little treat for those of you who stayed with us throughout the whole conversation and thank you again to all of our panelists for participating uh we deeply appreciate this conversation and we're so delighted to have been able to bring you to gsap thank you so much yes thank you for having us great to be back thank you everybody thank you all thank you hopefully to be continued yes it's our hey fantastic thank you so much