 Now, to properly welcome everybody to this evening's lecture, both online and in person. This is the third research seminar of summer 2023, which is a series that was co-organized with Rick Woodstra, who is not here in person, but is joining us online, so hello, Rick. It is a great pleasure to welcome everyone here and online to the fourth event. The series really thinks about the porous relationships and boundaries between the arts and the landscape and spaces that we inhabit. The hope for the whole series has been to create conversations that allow us to think expansively about what art is and what architecture is as well. So last week we heard from Moa Carlson about the wide-ranging impact of coal on the British national landscape as well as architecture. And this week we will continue with a very different but incredibly relevant and important topic, the relationship between architecture and disability. In today's lecture titled Architecture of Disability, our speaker David Kissen will explore a set of new ideas from his book with the same title, published this year with the University of Minnesota Press. Instead of seeing disability as an afterthought or a separate category as it has and still often is considered to be the book positions it at the heart. How can architects and designers cater to a wide range of human ability and how can cities be designed for a vast variety of physical experiences? As some of you who come regularly to our events will notice, David's work and today's talk is pushing us also to think critically about the physical space at the Hulman Center, the challenges being in a listed building and how we run our events. Usually our events are held upstairs in the larger lecture room and live stream for audiences online so people can watch from home. This evening we're trying out a different model where the lecture takes place on the ground floor in this seminar room. It is a smaller room but so it should not restrict numbers. We are also live streaming the 12 upstairs if we have more guests than this group Of course this is not necessarily an execution but it is a trial and an experiment that opens up a conversation and concrete steps about how we run events here. Thanks. That's okay. Thank you. But personally it's also really exciting to see scholarship and practical ways of being overlap, not just this evening but as a part of an ongoing conversation and kind of a structural change within institutions and the academy. I'd just like to briefly introduce our speakers tonight. David Kissen is Professor of Architecture and Urban History at Parsons School of Design in the New School and a visiting professor at Columbia. Before coming to Parsons he toured at the California College of the Arts as well as Yale University, the Academy of Finance in Vienna and at MIT and he completed his PhD very close to here at UC Albert Corner. So in addition to his work on architecture and disability he has written widely about architecture, nature and the environment which resulted for example in the book Sub-Nature, Architecture's Other Environments in 2009 as well as Manhattan Atmospheres in 2013. An alternative environmental history of New York. His architectural and design work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the Centre for Architecture in New York City. David Kissen's talk will be followed by a short response from Joss Boyce, an architect as well as an activist, educator and writer. She's one of the founding members of the Matrix Feminist Design Corporative which was the subject of a wonderful exhibition last year at the Barbican. With Matrix she published the 1984 book Making Space, Women and the Manmade Environment. In addition to this she has also done extensive work on architecture and disability. Together with Zoe Partington she's the co-director of the Disordinary Project which rethinks disability in architectural design, discourse and practice. In 2017 she published Disability, Space, Architecture with Rutledge. I feel like we've talked a lot about different titles and projects and I hope we will have time after both sets of the talk and the response to talk about how things relate and we have a reception with Wine next door. So feel free to come to that and welcome. So over to David. Thank you, Surya, so much for that introduction and thanks to you and Ricks for bringing me here. I really appreciate it and thanks to Joss for agreeing to respond to all this. So I want to use this time to take you through some of the key ideas and methodological concepts in the book, The Architecture of Disability. You can see the cover here with these three staircases on it. I'll describe this image later and various times through this lecture I'll also be describing images in case people are participating who don't see well. So one of my themes in one particular chapter at the end that relates directly to what Surya was talking about just a moment ago in terms of historic artifacts and how they relate to disability. So one of the goals in this book was to create what I call an arch-a-total and that by that I mean I wanted to write a book about architecture and disability that engage subjects that are typical in architectural theory. So for those of you that are architects, architectural historians in the room, architectural theory is a thousand-year-old genre of writing that basically lays out the principles by which architects and today the discipline directs its work. So typically works of architectural theory outline an author's approach to the history of architecture like how one might think about the history of architecture in the study of it. Problems of cities and urbanization, aesthetics and the creation of architectural through like formal manipulation or design. Concepts of construction, what's called tectonics. Tectonics is the aesthetic sensibility of building as a constructed object and then more and more today architecture's relationship to nature and environment. So an architectural theory of disability simply offers a disabled lens onto these topics. So I contrast an architectural theory of disability to the way that disability is typically approached in writings on architecture. So typically disability is presented as a kind of self-evident architectural problem of access. And increasing the accessibility to space. So works that examine the problems of access, they often examine the kinds of disconnects between a disabled person's physiology and the relative functioning of existing and future buildings and built spaces. So just I'm saying this simply I'm sure many of you know this but an accessible building is simply one that disabled people can use more fully but also one in which the tensions between the kind of functional needs of disabled people and the space that they utilize begin to disappear. So in developing a response to that something different, an architectural theory of disability I just didn't want to compliment a more typical and historic focus on the problem of access and architectural writing. I also wanted to air some of my own frustrations with the kind of functionalist bias and basis that underlies most architectural approaches to access. So functionalist interpretation of architecture suggests that a building can be designed to optimize or promote a specific task, often defined in very biomechanical terms. So the early writing of the German architect Hugo Herink on functionalism might be some of the most clear of this type, like many functionalists. He was an architect who often used language derived from biology to describe ideal buildings such as fitness, task completion, or the term function itself, which is a biological term. So the problem I see with disabled people embracing a purely functionalist value system for architecture is that disability itself, the category of being a disabled person is often a functionally defined category of humanness or impairment from a human perspective. So one of the ways disability is defined is when an impairment of some sort is determined to be biomechanically insufficient or inefficient. It's a negative, or to use a term from disability studies, it's a medical view or a medical concept of impairment and that is resolved by either transforming the non-functioning, the offending aspect of the impairment or the surrounding environment. And this transformation makes an impairment into something that is more biomechanically normative or that enables task completion. I know we have very brief time, but let me give you a quick example. So recently I had the experience of being scored by a physical therapist for the first time in almost 30 years in which this person had me walk back and forth in a room, walk toe to toe, walk upstairs, and I'm an amputee who wears a full-length artificial leg up to my hip. And so I was deemed not disabled with the exception of my ability to walk upstairs, which they considered me to have a very serious disability. And so they presented me with two options. I could work with this physical therapist to remediate my dysfunctional body or they could have me get in touch with a social case worker who could help me make modifications in my home so that my disability would be less of a problem. I don't have a problem walking upstairs, I like the way I walk upstairs, but for my physical therapist this was an offense that I think I scored a 1 or 2 on climbing upstairs where I scored an 8 or a 9 in terms of my ability to walk. So this admittedly crude example helps illustrate how in many ways, not always, the pursuit of access and architecture can often, not always, but can often emerge from a functionalist interpretation of both people having disabilities and design that can be implied to impaired people. So examples that many of you may be more familiar with is that the common diagrams of accessible design strategies, they often illustrate wheelchair users doing things like putting a cup in a cupboard or going to the bathroom or showing the range of motion within a space, are a much more common illustration of a functional approach to access. Okay, so I'm not alone in seeing problems or tensions with the crude functionalism behind many definitions of disability or the accessibility strategies in imagery. Joss Boyce is certainly one person who's criticized them. In the 1970s Ray Lifscher, who's a Berkeley based architect and educator, did something that was seen as like a major rupture in how architects study disabled people. Instead of filming disabled people, as my physical therapist did, he attached film cameras to their wheelchairs or other devices that they may use to understand the world from their perspective. Okay, very big difference. He's still concerned with the problems of use, but it was much less coarse. Now today's years later, I have colleagues who are very critical of the mechanical character of functionalist solutions to access and they often advocate for a more diversified approach to this. So these include approaches that advocate for an embodied or phenomenological or approach to access. A lot of this often considers how sound or tactility or vibrations are made, for example, like a blind person's navigation of space or how auditoria may be raked differently to enable more efficient communication and sign language, for example, if I was signing so that people in the back would be able to see my hands more easily. I respect this work, and I think it's very important, but I often find that it often just extends an interest in design and biophysicality into more and more kind of ethereal aspects of the surrounding environment. So in the architecture of disability, I wanted to more fully challenge the way functionalist ideas almost always find attachment to disabled people's lives. And so in doing this, I had a lot of allies because, again, for those of you who've studied architecture, architectural history or contemporary architectural theory, know that the very definition of a late modern or a post-modern architecture is its critique of functionalism or late modern or post-modern urbanism. So I'm referring to many different kinds of approaches that attack or criticize functionalism. Some of you may be familiar with French and German language situationists writing that talked about overcoming the rationalization of the city, the work of Guy Debord or Friedrich Stovasser who called himself Huntervasser, for example, Aldo Rossi's concept of an architecture of the city that was about reviving the historical character of buildings to kind of make something that wasn't so crudely scientific or rationalized in its approach. Peter Eisenman's work or Bernard Schumme who taught here for many years are all examples of post-functionalist architects. So all of these authors inspired my thinking. But the problem is that many of them have very capacitiest or to use a term from disability studies, very ableist ideas about how we challenge functionalism. For example, situationist said that people from the city, they were often talking to young men that were very physically hail, should overcome the city and climb the rooftops to challenge the way that we move through cities and streets and sidewalks. Bernard Schumme wrote about how like pole vaulting in a cathedral would challenge the kind of sensibilities of such a space or parachuting in elevator shafts. The post and anti-functionalism of Peter Eisenman is much less physically intense. And in fact, the cover of my book responds to one of his most well-known constructions from the era when he declared himself to be a quote-unquote post-functionalist. This is house six. Now we have very little time, so let me just explain it very quickly. This house was designed and built in the mid-1970s just as the United States was concluding its... Just as the United States was concluding its war in Vietnam and in many ways it challenged the kind of purity or innocence of an American home and involved many different features that were about sort of making almost like a haunted American house, so to speak, including its staircases, which are very well-publicized and famous. One staircase that you could actually walk to the second floor and use was painted green. One staircase that you couldn't use and sort of hung over your head in the middle of the house as a kind of intervention, a dysfunctional staircase was painted red. So the cover of my book is a response to that in a way of playing this idea of post-functionalism. The right side up staircase is red because from a disabled perspective, all staircases are a pain in the neck or difficult or dysfunctional, so to speak. The upside down staircase is yellow because, you know, for us, an upside down staircase is as usable as a right side up staircase and another staircase, which doesn't exist in the house or any of the drawings is turned on its side and becomes something sort of resembling a ramp and that's painted green. And so it's sort of playing with the fact that one must deal with access as a historic fact, but also signalling to a reader that this book is connecting to some historic ideas about architecture. Okay, so there are also concepts within disability studies that challenge functionalist definitions of impairment, but they haven't found much of a role in architectural writing. So, for example, what's called the critical concept or critical model of disability argues that most concepts of disability think of disability as a kind of lack or negative that must be addressed either medically, environmentally, or socially. So the example that I gave of dealing with my physical therapist is an example that both relates to both a medical and a social model of disability in which my physical therapist see me as lacking in some way. By contrast, a critical concept or model of disability argues that disability is simply another lens on being human when it contributes to society and culture. So adherents of this view use terms such as deaf gain or gaining blindness as ways to think differently about visual or oral impairments, right? Both describe how language, writings, or works of art might move through and transform through disabled experiences. The writing of Georgina Klig or the recent film work of Alison O'Daniel with this idea of interest, you have good examples of gaining blindness or deaf gain. So, I know we're a little short on time. So let me just, okay. An even more critical concept of disability than the quote unquote critical concept of disability is sometimes called disability justice. And this argues that disability is experienced unevenly within a social historical reality. And this, of course, is true, let me explain. So this presents a radical challenge to both medical and social definitions of disability that are actually very little explored, I would argue in architecture, with the beginning to be more and more. So the idea is that disability is experienced differently based upon things like race, gender, and class. And to put this very simply, in the United States where I live, the majority of people that are diagnosed with disabilities are black and brown women, okay? Demographically, you know, speaking. So the differences in terms of the population of those social categories that are diagnosed with disability is much more significant than, let's say, wealthy white men. Okay. And these critical and even more critical concepts of disability inform my ideas because they also confront a functional definition of disability. If disability is experienced so unevenly based upon race and gender and class, then it can't be a functionally defined category, right? Okay. So all of this inform my ideas, but curiously the adherence of many of these disability justice ideas often still maintain that architecture's relationship to disabled people should primarily be concerned with the topic of access, okay? So by contrast, I would define an architecture of disability not as a concept of architecture that evaluates how well it functions for disabled people, but a structural critique of architectural thought from a disabled perspective. So where most architects explore the utility of their practice for disabled people, a disciplinary and structural critique of architecture examines how impairment and capacitation are everywhere within architectural thought, within its histories, its theories, its practices, its pedagogy, even the production of architecture itself. By that I mean the way that we build buildings. Okay. So this relocates the problem of disability away from a focus of on use and towards a consideration about how impairment permeates our discipline. Okay. So that lays out some of the theoretical aims of the book. This is the chapter contents if you want to look at that for a moment. Let me just say something briefly about methods and then I'll show a case. Am I okay with time? Yeah, I think I'm okay. Okay. So one of the more alienating qualities that I find as an architectural researcher and practitioner is what I call methodological athleticism. And I need to find a better term for that because that's a mouthful. But by this I mean that when like a historian or an architectural researcher sets out to write a book or is reflecting back on their work, oftentimes they'll say like, this book is the result of years and years of me scaling buildings in distant places or an anthropologist for example for the power of the work by saying, I lived in the Amazon without water, without food for years to develop my work. And so my problem is there's a subtext to this that the more physically intensive one's research is, the more intellectually rigorous it is. And in developing this book I really wanted to challenge that. So where most books, that's a vast understatement, where many books of architectural history and theory often rely on even the most subtle forms of methodological athleticism. It could just be a talent for multiple languages for example. I tried to center my relative weaknesses in writing this book and in many of the chapters you're often hearing about what I can't do, which I think is a really powerful way to begin and develop a lens, a disabled lens on the discipline and very important to me. So one of the ways that you can experience that more generally as an ethic in the book all of the images in the book have alt text which is not so untypical, but what that is is simply a bit of text that explains to a non-cited reader what a sighted person can see. Now what's different in this book is that often in alt text is buried in a file that only people that use access tools made for blind readers can hear or listen to. You're looking at three different staircases, one's red and one's green. In this book it's not only is the alt text directly under the captions but often times there's extensive alt text almost a page long and that is woven into the text so that you have this odd maybe even strange experience as a reader of reading descriptions that you can clearly see on the next page but you're maybe seeing that in a way that you haven't through reading which is an interesting experience. Additionally, in writing the alt text I blew up the images to a scale not when I was writing it. That can't be what you can see. Just to give you something of a taste that's a good example of how one might gain blindness, for example, in the reading of a book. Among the chapters I just want to briefly outline one of them and relates to some of the theories and methods I just mentioned. The first thematic of the chapter of this book I'm just going to show you this one chapter briefly offers what I call a disability critique of the monument and through a few different perspectives directly to what Shria was talking about with this building before. This presents a criticism of the contemporary practice called accessible heritage and it also offers a kind of criticism of the aesthetics of history that we often build into historic sites. The chapter begins with some reflections on a very famous episode of disability activism in and around the capital of DC which you can see here in this image. This is an image of the west front in the early 20th century showing the cascading steps, the dome, the neoclassical facade and the bronze statue at the top. Now I'm assuming most people, most of my readers know this building and most of my readers who are disabled in the United States at least know this as the site of one of the most important disability protests in 1990. That event was called the capital crawl in 1990. People like myself used to use wheelchairs or people in wheelchairs or people that use crutches, people with mobility impairments transitioned out of their chairs, dropped their crutches and crawled up the four flights of stairs here to protest the delayed passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was such a shocking protest that the bill, the law passed very quickly afterwards. It's very ironic because that they would do a protest that seems to be about access at this building because this building has actually one of the most quote-unquote accessible buildings in Washington, D.C. since the 19th century. The first building in D.C. with a fleet of passenger elevators because the aged men who are congressmen and senators in the U.S. they don't want to climb up a bunch of stairs. You can enter on the ground floor and go up any number of elevators. So it was a sort of, there was more to this protest which was really about how the symbol of our, one of the symbols of our nation has a kind of odd relationship or even disparaging relationship to ideas about incapacity as well. Okay. Okay. And I used the example of the capital and illustrate it with this 100-year-old image and to raise a very broad question like what is a disability critique of a historic monument? Is it solely about making such structures more accessible or would engage other concerns? For example the capital building was constructed by an slave craftsman. It was destroyed by British troops in 1812. A lot of Americans don't know that. It was rebuilt with enslaved craftsmen soon thereafter and of course on January 6, 2021 it was violently occupied by right-wing paramilitaries and their allies. Okay. So in thinking about a disability critique of monuments I ultimately turned to several other case studies and that are more central to architectural history as they are national ones including this one on the Acropolis in Athens Greece to make a series of points. So this site that's canonical in histories of architecture patrimony and histories of architectural preservation is also central to contemporary debates over what's called accessible heritage that I mentioned early. So accessible heritage is the idea that one can balance the authenticity of a site with the need to make it more usable by disabled visitors and balance is the central concept here between historical integrity of what you find or what you have and the necessary transformations that need to be made to make a building more accessible. You can see that idea very well in this photograph of the north face of the Acropolis in which you can see the rocky face of the surviving ancient geology of the site and this rickety construction elevator that's attached to its side. This was built I believe in 2004 and for the Athens Olympics because when you hold the Olympics you also hold the Paralympics which is disabled sport and people have to be able to attend all the events. When I visited the site this was there and I was offered to go up it and I actually chose to walk up instead of going in nothing. And by the way the photographer who had this image told me that the woman inside was actually pregnant so it's an interesting photo you can't see that it's an interesting photo. So where am I? So the irony of the pursuit of balance at most sites and maybe this site is a good example is that many historical monuments many sites like the Acropolis but also places like Sandini in Paris or Les Anvelis the Veterans Hospital among many many other examples they owe much of their historical authenticity to their engagements with impaired people. So for example the Acropolis was once reached via a series of interconnected ramps a lot of people don't know that this was 2,500 years ago and it held several shrines that were built for and visited by impaired worshippers that came to this site specifically. So this is a photograph by Manta Zarmacupi Zarmacupi sorry that shows the Propolae of the Acropolis and in the foreground you can sort of make out these linear fragments and that's all that's left of the monumental ramp that once fronted this building which was one of the largest ramps in ancient architectural the ancient architectural record so one of my points is not just simply these buildings used to be accessible because how could we even really think about a contemporary idea so long ago but one of the key ideas is that the physical inaccessibility of these sites is not an intrinsic aspect of them it's actually built into them to make them take on our romantic idea of what historical experience is and that's so important and it relates to this idea of athletic methodologies ok so for example in much of the 19th century in the early 19th century when the Acropolis was part of the Ottoman Empire the Propolae of the Entrance was reached via many different interconnecting paths of various steepness ok very different than how it's accessed today so today it's reached through a path designed by the Greek architect Dimitri Pikionis and that was built in the early 1950s and this winding path takes visitors up the site in a rubble strewn and increasingly narrow and steep route that terminates into a single file path that you see here with these very exhausted looking tourists trying to make up ones using an umbrella because it's just so brutally hot there as you know ok so this reflects an idea the experience of the past is one in which physical intensity is a form of knowledge of it and it's an example of methodological athleticism one that's built into architecture and Dimitri Pikionis didn't invent this idea he just gave it a very convincing physical form now monuments often hold other histories and relevant to disability history very broadly conceived many, I would probably argue all are sites of violence because they are historic sites think of the US capital again and many were and are violently transformed to represent very singular concepts of history and the Acropolis is a great example in the 19th century the Bavarian architect Leo von Klinze cleared all evidence of Ottoman culture at the site which not only involved demolishing one of the most beautiful mosques in Greece that was at the Acropolis destroying all the villagers who lived in the Acropolis's homes and also killing many of them which often isn't mentioned and to better transform the site into a more pure image of Hellenic neoclassicism okay now the Ottoman cemetery on the site which is one of the few remaining pieces that's still intact from that period is actually just right against that elevator we go to the elevator it's like right there so it's an interesting kind of dialogue there so what I call the preservation of disability is a response to these different histories and practices the preservation of disability which is not accessible heritage considers how impairment weakness and experiences of violence might be a lens through which to reimagine to understand historical preservation reconstruction restoration so this is a picture of the archeological park I'm almost finished at my son in Vietnam that was used as a vietnam base in the French recham ruin site that was restored by French archeologists that was bombed very heavily during the U.S. war in Vietnam and you can see in the foreground this crater that's filled with water and some of the surviving fragments in the map so in thinking through this practice I draw on a diverse range of thinkers the blind art theorist Regina Cleague the deceased Lebanese curator Maurice Chhabab Berlin based curator Julian Chappuy and a deceased restoration theorist Cesare Brandy and all of these people well really Chhabab, Chabuy and Brandy are all concerned with the ways in which physical instability and trauma can be preserved into sites so for example Maurice Chhabab preserved ancient artifacts in the Lebanese National Museum's collection that were damaged in the Lebanese Civil War in the 1980s but he preserved them in a damaged state he refused to restore them and so taking these bullet riddled and molten Roman and ancient Lebanese artifacts he didn't restore them but put them on display and tried to integrate them into the national history of Lebanese art very interesting approach Julian, actually let me just move forward, okay because I know we're almost out of time so one other example is the Italian curator Cesare Brandy explored how damaged might always be experienced in an indeterminate state that is they never feel really complete to us so he developed a conservation technique which involves repairing the damaged or missing pieces of painting with little hatching almost like a pointillist painting by Georges Serrat and so from a distance a restored work would look whole but as you came up close to it you could see both the restoration work which was like little points of color but also the damage that the work experienced and this was an idea of conservation that relied on a beholder's optical perception of time and distance and through their position and space and so one can enrich such an idea by considering how conservation might also be experienced or even practiced differently through greater practices of physical and physiological indeterminacy like how could you relate to someone who's blind for example that technique is very much relies on opticality how would you relate that to some other way of perceiving artworks so in the end I think a disability critique of the monument would continue to position or think about historic monuments as vulnerable things in the manner that many of those conservators and curators do but here's where something's a little different but these vulnerable things may take on innumerable characteristics and relative to our or the incapacities and weaknesses of both their conservators and their beholders and the latter possibility is something we haven't experienced in historical anyway thank you very much thank you so much David I really enjoyed that and I have to say for me this book the architecture of disability is a really very important book that offers kind of insights and provocations pretty well on every page and if you haven't read it I really recommend that you do and I also think that David's probably the only architectural theorist and historian who could have written it really because I know that it's been a product of a very long gestation process and I know that because I started reading the work of David or his architectural research and critique that informed this publication and that was like 20 years ago probably and finding David's work at that time was really crucial for me because I was someone who was also trying to think about disability beyond access but as a non-disabled architect trained activist and who was beginning to work with disabled artist Zoe Partington to create the Disordinary Architecture Project we were really looking for what kinds of things really had an impact within the built environment disciplines and that weren't just kind of checklists of things that you left out which seemed to be so common as David said and are still common really in the way education and practice is organized and in fact I was involved in setting up the Disordinary Architecture Project because it was in 2006-2007 and I'd studied architecture in the 1970s and although the legislation had changed actually the way the subject was taught and the way that disability was just put in this tiny little bracket at the end as a kind of functional access need hadn't really changed at all so we wanted to look at how that might be different and again to do that beyond access and at that time I don't really think there was that much we might talk about this David about going on, there were historians like David Serlin, Bess, Williamson both American and there was also this emerging field of disability studies that David's mentioned and had some engagement with and in terms of the architecture and disability book that I put together that was really about saying there's some really amazing work out there from disability studies activists and scholars that just doesn't penetrate into architecture and the built environment disciplines in any way and it's kind of a real gap and I think what's really important about what David's done is because he comes from within the discipline and he knows it really, really well he's able to talk to the people in the discipline in a way that's also very radical so I think we've seen the work on the Acropolis which I remember reading and you also did some work in the 1990s as an architectural student at Yale about the experience of Paul Ruder's building but it wasn't about again it wasn't about access, it was about how you might develop a kind of architectural criticism out of that so these are things that you've been going around and around in many, many ways and for me what was interesting as a book that was about disability even though at that time it wasn't necessarily the way you wanted to articulate it so I think what is it that David does in this book and I'm going to quote him directly because I think it is really clear what the intention is and it is a structural critique of architectural thought through a disabled perspective which re-examines how impairment and capacitation are already situated with an architecture, history, theories practices, pedagogy and the production of architecture itself and the shorthand we used discussing yesterday was disability critique so the very modes of practice that we have are themselves completely inculcated and embedded with ideas about what counts as able, what counts as disabled what counts as the right sort of person to be an architect or the wrong sort of person to be an architect and that sense that it's not just that architecture isn't somehow kind of neutral and well-meaning and that if it just has to learn how to do these things better it's actually right in there in every single thing that that we do and I think what's fantastic for me about this book is that it's very complete, it's one minute it's talking about all of the monuments but then there's a brilliant chapter on construction there's work on urban planning, there's work on environments, every chapter kind of opens up a new lens on how you might think about those things so what I hope to do now we'll have a brief chat and then we'll have a brief chat with everybody else is I think there are kind of three areas and in a way this isn't I'm just these are things I would like to discuss with David I'm just kind of asking you to be involved in them and I'm not sure he wants to discuss them with me but and this is his kind of warning there's three points that I want to talk about three questions and I know it's a very short warning I think first of all it's for me again it's this thing about coming from within the discipline it's about sources and methods and what is an issue I think with really brilliant work from related fields like ethnography anthropology, disability studies feminism to some extent although it's a very strong obviously feminist in architecture field is that there is this revisiting of a tremendous range of well known architectural writings from across history from across kind of architectural theory whether it's Hugo Herring or Godford Semper or Sergio Ferro and that's all done through a disability lens and then that's brought together with a kind of interrogation of archival materials that have previously been ignored or modernized materials like the work in Vienna where people just never really talked about how important disabled activists were to the design of housing so it's bringing that in it's bringing in both his own and other disabled people's experiences particularly in campaigning and it's referring to some key texts from disability studies disability scholars and critics so I'm really interested there's a kind of intersecting sources this is where I want to talk about intersecting sources from both outside and inside conventional architectural history and theory and to some extent from inside and outside the academy and that for me is a very interesting thing because first of all I think for a non-disabled readership and I'll be very interested in both for people in the audience about this if you don't know anything about disability studies scholarship, activism or practice I'm really interested in what kind of responsibilities we have and I speak as a non-disabled writer about these subjects and activists in this field what responsibilities we have to kind of enable new upcoming scholars particularly actually disabled scholars how they're introduced to and learned from and navigate this incredibly contested wide-ranging field what we do about that what we do with stuff that comes from outside the discipline how we engage with it thoroughly and completely and that has personal complexities which I've heard you talk about really clearly you know if you're a disabled person in the arts or in architecture you negotiate your own path about how much that's part of how you want to be seen and how much you you negotiate it just like artists like Yinka Shonibari or Ryan Gander negotiate being disabled artists and really have only come out once they're famous so there's a whole set of things that are just really complicated for new disabled scholars coming into this field which I'd love you to have you know say some things about and also about what it is yeah what is our responsibility and what is the responsibility of non-disabled scholars to if they work into this field and not to misrepresent or misunderstand the second thing is about the total theory you sit at the beginning and say this is meant to be a total theory I'm like yay but then I realised that there was an element in the way that you write and the way you put this together which is both quite subversive and quite deliberately conventional maybe that's subversive but it's a kind of kind of architectural history which maybe this is deliberate the kind of you know Nicholas Pezner and Peter Radar Bannerm and Kenneth Franson that I was brought up you know that we were made to read in the 1970s where there was a kind of very thorough historical analysis but it had a twist because its aim was to persuade you about what should happen next so I feel there's an element of that interested in because within the field that I work which is much more disability, arts and activism it's much more about a kind of opening up and being much more vague about things whereas I think there is a whole kind of academic you know the academia is very competitive like how do you position yourself in that field so what do you do if you work in this area and you're trying to compete in that field how does that affect and you might also see the kind of more active and I'm using that word a lot but you know because to me there are huge activist components in this it doesn't necessarily you know there's very many different ways of being an activist so and I think then there's a whole that relates to a whole set of things about about access and how we think about it and I agree with you completely that it's really important not to centre it in the way that it has been but again I think there's some really interesting work which is a real critique of access which really intersects with what you're doing and I think you probably know that people like Kevin Gotkin who are writing about access ecologies it's like we all have access needs and what we need to do is critique the access ecologies that mean that we build buildings for certain sorts of people and not others so it takes the term access and it completely kind of makes it a critical term I think and Amy Hammeray who looks at you know it sees it as a kind of social construction really so those are my two points and my third point is much simpler which is about what happens next you haven't talked about practice and there's a coder in the book about practice a really interesting coder and there's practice examples throughout so I'd love you to talk a little bit about that and I guess I'm really interested in what research you might have and because for me what this book does is open up it's like every single person in this room could research for the rest of their life and you still wouldn't be filling all the gaps that we have in this subject area it's like a whole new it's the same field but it's a whole new way of looking at the field that's really exciting so thank you David thank you for those provocations I think that was making my job that was really good and an honour because of your leadership in this topic so the disciplinary question is one that I wouldn't even say that I struggle with actually let me back this up a little bit so there is some very interesting work that has been made by architects who have become disabled in the United States some of the most famous examples is very late in his career Michael Graves had a degenerative neurological disease in which he lost you wouldn't use that term in disability in which he could not stand or use his arms or legs and so he used a wheelchair and began to make a lot of work as a disabled architect Christopher Downey is an architect who practices in Berkeley who became blind after having a very long career in architecture from the perspective of somebody who's gone through each of the steps that one does as one enters a discipline first being inspired let's say by a work of architecture going into architecture school and going through the process of education then going to work and practice for somebody as an intern and being kind of acculturated into the ways that people practice architecture and then in my case kind of leaving practice going back to school becoming a historian becoming an academic and so I really felt as if I had spent my entire life within this discipline as a my life within the discipline was entirely as a disabled person and so every step of the way I have thoughts, reflections anger activism as you say and so for me I wanted to do a project that was that kind of extensive everything from how one's inspired at a historical site or who gets to be inspired at a historical site to education of architects to practice to academia so in that way it's a super disciplinary book and I think that's been a little difficult for disability studies people that have read it I mean there's been a very good response from people in disability studies and they recognize that it's let's say a way of thinking about architecture that they haven't at the same time they're like why don't you want to be part of our discipline or why don't you remake the book why don't you remake the book and I'm like well you know I love architecture I don't know I'm inspired by some people in disability studies I'm also just like my issues around architecture I'm not I have a lot of issues, a lot of work that's made in disability studies that is about buildings I mean it seems like buildings are only relevant or useful insofar as they satisfy some urgent and contemporary need like there's not a lot of historical thinking about buildings in disability studies except to think about how they did or did not meet the needs of people in the past so that gets to like the writing style so I mean I have all people in my practice have done some very unusual experiments with how one can write as an architect on some writings that try to recreate some of the experiences that I have not being able to hear well or not being able to see well in like very unusual experimental architectural texts but I want this book to give me allies who are both disabled students and practitioners and academics but also people that are not and for people to really take a look at how they teach how they practice how they work as academics and the language that they know and to really self reflect about that and then in terms of the final point practice you know my friends in disabilities chiefly Georgina Klee she read the book and she said well I know what you can do next and I said what am I going to do next I'll probably write another book she goes no you have to practice now because the book ends with a codon practice that I'm trying to figure out because it's still you know I can sit here and write about these limitations and things it's still and especially in New York I don't like the term ableist it's a capacitist profession you know and I still can't quite find a way to like say like I am going to practice from this relatively incapacitated point of view and how am I going to do that in a way for a project I could go on just a little bit longer but I mentioned this yesterday in a conversation with two of Joss's colleagues at Postman's Park but I'm working on a project now with Georgina Klee actually in a very it's in a very embryonic state at a historic house museum in the US and I think they wanted us to come to like help make this place more accessible and we're uncovering histories of disability at the site itself that are making the managers of it you know I wouldn't say it's making them uncomfortable but I think it's like oh like you know you're supposed to be here to help us help people like yourself understand the site better and I think our attitude is we want to uncover the histories of impairment that are embedded in this place and make it what it is but that aren't discussed so that's disability so to speak or bring this into practice it's not it's still there's still a lot of resistance to that or resistance might be too strong a word it makes people uncomfortable yeah and so that I can't figure out yeah and I think I mean it's on my list of things that I didn't mention but it is I feel in some ways there seems to be a real difference in the US and the UK this is stereotypical but it's also about ways in which one thinks of doing these more alternative forms of working and I think and I'm thinking of John Sanders too who in some way I very much respect but in terms of thinking about practice it's still within it's a notion of a conventional practice that has you know real clients which I'm not saying that's wrong but that's a kind of model there whereas I think here if you look there's a really wide range now of different platforms that don't necessarily they do architecture but they don't necessarily do it through clients they do it through their own they like I mean assembles are really obvious you know long term example but resolve collective or there's just dozens of them and there's a real interest too in as there is in the states actually in challenging the kind of work practice of obsession very long hours you know that exactly that kind of as lethicism of the kind of what it is to be an architect so I feel like there's quite a lot of places there's lots of ways which I think somehow don't seem quite so available to you or maybe that you don't you don't want to do that kind of practice you don't want to do something I mean you've been doing provocative work anyway either educationally or in a wider sense yeah I mean I guess a fantasy among the dozen or so fantasy projects that I'd like to come out of this book many of you probably know in the 19th towards even to the middle of the 20th century people like myself let's say or people that are very seriously blinded or have PTSD were often brought into workshops to do manual work to learn how to like you know weave baskets or you know make I shouldn't laugh but you know it's so demeaning right make brooms so I had this kind of fantasy of like taking myself and four or five or more people that all have very serious impairments and having us like twist that workshop model around and do like a kind of have like a building comment kind of workshop on that that I think could be really fascinating but again how you find a patron to like be interested in and bring the money right to create the stuff that you want to create is difficult but yeah there's certainly alternative models of practice and of course being in academia you have access to making things like labs or other kinds of things that can do an usual work and in terms of research you've got a kind of next project you mentioned the next book I know it takes time but I just wanted to well like I said I think I'm trying to find projects so as this book was coming to a close I worked with a very interesting group of mostly disabled team to redesign a very large area of Berkeley, California for a large exhibition that was about the future of the American city post covid so I think that project is going to have a few afterlives this project at a house museum that I mentioned among a few other small things I'm thinking through a few different kinds of book ideas but not something that I could really talk about too easily. The other thing I wanted to mention that was related to your first point was that you know I don't love writing an architecture book and saying okay everybody draw your attention to this group of like aged people that you've all had to read in architecture school like you know as you say like Rainer Bannum, Gottfried Zempel you know all these people, Adolf Loos of all people on the other hand I'm like maybe it would be good to draw the readers attention to the fact that like Adolf Loos was deaf and it's very likely that that informed his work and that he actually did some really I think amazing projects with a very large group of completely just you know like very seriously disabled, wounded World War I veterans or you know that Gottfried Zempel was inspired by those workshops that I was just mentioning when he was thinking about the hierarchies of craft and that weaving was the lowest and most kind of simple minded of the crafts were as you know or masonry was the most intellectually and physically hail and capacity an idea that comes right out of 19th century ideas of reform right so that was important but I don't love you know I have to be honest it hurts to talk, to keep rehearsing these people that are part of our discipline yeah no Louis but I tried to balance that with very long passages in the book that are about much more recent work so of course as you all know the most significant reckoning is happening in architectural education in the U.S. is around the topic of race and the kind of really significant transformation over the past three years in terms of building on the people like Mabel Wilson and Mario Gooden and many other people in terms of rethinking like what architectural theory is and the topics of architectural theory and their work is very strong represented in the book and very inspiring no it is and I guess just to finish off on that because I think we'll ask if people have questions is for me you know the notion of what this kind of very enabled the muscular virile asceticism is so much, it's also so much male so much white and the different ways in which capacity are understood I guess I'm really interested in how one might explore how that plays out across in different ways so just thinking about those those assumptions and concepts about what sorts of minds and bodies matter I think for me is a really, it's like the real fruitful beginnings of that and yes especially around race I think and to some extent gender as well as disability you begin to talk about those things and I guess for me part of that working with quite a lot of disabled artists and architects is I really love the way you do these kind of subversive concepts like you look at weakness or you look at dirt or you look at dark rather than all the things that are kind of just assumed to be perfect you know words like community or light or you know that those things are kind of they have so much built in assumptions that they're good words and I think good concepts but for me I think again and I'd be interested what some of the people you showed the book to disabled people because I mean I certainly know well you were there last night at the deaf architecture front a lot of deaf people would not connect the notion of weakness they might have other concepts that are subversive and I think that that for me beginning to develop those kind of what that alternative language might be and I think you do it really powerfully around weakness and capacity but I feel like there's just an enormous range of alternative concepts we might bring to the discipline bring to the party really yeah completely in fact one of the things about this event this last night this launch of the deaf architecture front that was so interesting and and if if this book has another life with more additional chapters or something is to talk about architectural representation I mean I've never seen a lecture delivered by delivered in sign language before by an architect it was amazing and the fact that so much of his work around sign language is trying to figure out how to represent in sign language architectural concepts and ideas such as cantilevers and other kinds of terms program other kinds of terms that we use architecturally without spelling them out trying to find gestures for them so yeah I think that's it's Chris Lang and that project is called Sign Strokes and I recommend you also look at that sorry we've we could probably go on for hours questions is there another microphone or yep lovely anybody want to ask something or comment thank you thank you for the story it's wonderful as introduction to your book which I haven't read yet but I did come across this a couple of questions one is your theories and activism how much do you actually reach to the teachings like in academia for example part of my degree course we covered history and curating but also a lot of architecture but not once the word disability and architecture came together so I'm just wondering how much are you sort of infiltrating the universities to include disability with an architecture and also for architecture courses themselves which I'm not fully familiar with but do they include disability and architecture as part of the modules so that's one thing sorry I'm just I had about three different things for you yes and also for example as a theorist who outside academia who is aware of your theories for example my I wonder if people that actually like government, British government that makes policies and stuff how open are they to listen to your theories or theories alike academia all together coming together is to say this need to be included because if it's made as a policy or some sort of law then architects will have to consider disability as part of the brief every time it won't be sort of optional or you know have an extra money for that something special for disabled people and also disabilities it's not only about access to a place there's so many disabilities and a lot of people suffer from multiple disabilities physical and also invisible etc so how is architecture accommodating or could accommodate multiple disabilities within the realm how much time do we have I mean the first thing is this book is written in the most sort of everyday language it's not like a super academic book it's a super disciplinary book it's a book about architecture but it's written in an extremely accessible language and so in fact I was, I'm not saying this to blow a lot of smoke but just to comment I was on the morning news in the US talking about this book so this is a very it was published in the United States as a trade book it's by an academic publisher but published for a broad audience there's an audio book it's meant to be very accessible and to that end the city of New York the person who's, I forget the department of design or something, the design of buildings this is the department that commissions architects of design buildings for New York City has asked me to speak to her entire staff many of them do everything from reviewing drawings to see if they are accessible to commissioning architects and building projects so I'm already having conversations with municipalities about the ideas in the book which is very important to me it's not like a something that I need to work on thinking about how to communicate that so the presentation that I made here is very much like a Paul Mellon Center presentation in an academic institution associated with an Ivy League school in the US but the book is very approachable so your other question about and is meant to be used by cities as much as it is to be used by students or anybody or just disabled people who are interested in architecture but are not architects so in terms of teaching this is really important to me and it's sort of endless when I was a professor at the California College of the Arts the school was beginning to undergo a series of transformations that would have had the first architecture program that was on one continuous ground floor of a city in the United States and a fairly big school not a super big department but you know hundreds of students I'd say in the architecture program and also just having me there recruiting students really impacted the kinds of people that might feel comfortable for going there so for example we had I want to put this in a sensitive way but also explain that we would have students apply and our colleagues extremely uncomfortable because they had such obvious neurological disabilities right but I was like well they should be able to study architecture as much as anybody else because of this reason that reason the other reason or I would say often say in meetings you would be in meetings and people would say well I don't feel comfortable having somebody like that in architecture school around knives and saws I mean these are ridiculous things to say of course but I would say well these are things that people said about women 40 years ago in architectural education you know so I think we all agree that's a good thing right that we have women in architectural education so anyway so recruiting to use a crude word and recruiting disabled people has always been super important to me and I'm a mentor still for some students from there and others that have read the book and are like I don't want to leave this profession but it's hard for me because I have type 1 diabetes or because I'm a double amputee or anything so that's endless and in terms of my teaching what I don't do is I don't teach studios that are like we're going to do a studio about a group of disabled people somewhere in the world what I do is I try to rethink how I teach studio for example or design courses as a disabled professor so instead of pin ups we have sit downs drawings don't go on the wall they go on the table sometimes you don't make drawings you do explanations I had a very serious medical incident earlier in the year in which I couldn't give lectures I printed out it was like a Jewish Passover Seder everybody had like a signed role and we went around the room and they would read their part and then just having fun like one of the projects I did was called the One Story City so a lot of people don't know this but many neighborhoods in New York the majority of buildings are only one story tall and a lot of you know people love these neighborhoods because of their accessibility or because of their usability also the inverter the trees and the neighborhood grow to very significant heights because they're not in shades of buildings so they're lovely neighborhoods but they're also the neighborhoods that are always threatened with gentrification because developers see the neighborhood of one story buildings that are like rubbed their hands together and think they'll turn it into a dense development so in that we figured out ways to preserve the One Story City intervene the One Story City in the most fun was that each of the students had to take a controversial multi-story building like the vessel in New York by Thomas Heatherwick of course you know from here Statue of Liberty oh that very slender super tall apartment buildings by R.F. Van Neule and they had to interpret it into a One Story form so that was a lot of fun so I tried to have fun with students around the topic of impairment but having a professor that can't take you on endless journeys around the city who likes to sit down to have a lot more fun in studio or to think about studio in a completely different way so yeah I'm going to rather selfishly ask you to speak about a project called Block Party I was really interested in the kind of how you can design projects from a disability perspective while also considering these other perspectives and approaches or kind of more intersectional approaches and also the idea of approaching from perspectives where it does consider vitality or incapacity and how you do action that and build it into practice or see an example of it in the real world and I quite like that project Block Party I think that's quite a good kind of example of how that could be enacted so I'm very selfishly going to ask you to so a few years ago Barry Bergdahl who's a very prominent historian and curator in the United States he was the chief curator of MOMA's architecture program for well Anna Barton is also a curator very involved with issues around motherhood and architecture actually and gender and architecture they set out a call for visions of the U.S. city post COVID and they asked for people to engage with one of three or four different areas one was race one was disability, one was age or elderly people in their experience in the city and the other was children and so disability was a very important and central theme running throughout the whole exhibition and they were soliciting proposals from teams that they would then fund to work with these urban areas in the United States and develop urban plans so I got together with Irene Chang who's a historian and sometimes practices and a colleague of mine from long ago and Brett Snyder who's an architect in Berkeley and we decided to put together a team that was mostly of disabled people so Georgina Klee was on our team Ron Herman is a very prominent disabled dancer Gip Lord is a deaf and experimental architect and many other people was a big team, was like eight or ten people Rod Henmind so just the project itself was a lot of fun we figured out a way to preserve every building that exists in the city and to do interesting strategies that were mostly around what we call the disability critique of property in terms of rethinking the property relations in the U.S. city and how that does or does not work for disabled people and around subjects of race and gender as well so single family zoning is very prominent in U.S. cities which mandates they can only have one single just like the name says, one single dwelling one family living there it's extraordinarily isolating for people that need care and help it has been a way to create mostly white neighborhoods in the U.S. because it immediately raises the property values of neighborhoods and it has this kind of heteronormative subtext that's often built into the kinds of houses that are built in most places so our disability critique of property was ways to rethink these lots their relationship to each other it was a really wonderful project but the two things about the project that were really great and deals with architectural representation I'm just interviewing for an architectural job so when Julianne Barton and now I just named just Barry Bergdahl interviewed us we had a blind teammate we had a deaf teammate we had me it was like a real interesting cast of architectural characters the first question is what is this exhibition going to look like and Georgina said I'm blind, I don't care what the exhibition looks like or they said what is your installation going to look like she's like I don't care what this looks like and it was such a great interview and afterwards I thought oh my god I really hope they hire us because that was so fun and interesting and just settling for everybody in a good way so they did obviously commission us as one of the 14's and it was great because with Georgina we had to make collaboratively models that she could understand so we made a tactile model of our proposal you know this but just for the audience so we wanted to make some tactile models that are made by museums for like paintings or buildings to translate them into things that visually impaired blind people can understand often very crude and infantilizing versions of the work so we wanted to make something that would make her laugh when she touched it he looked at sex toys and toothbrushes and just made this really fun model that was you know had like tactile puns so things that felt like Braille but that actually were very deep and kind of stringy when you pushed your finger down so that was wonderful and then we asked her which was great to narrate the experience of the tactile model to a sighted audience which was really interesting so people got to hear what this blind person was experiencing and it also was a totally different representation of the project it wasn't a reduction of the project it was an expansion and then we conducted all these interviews and we realized oh you know now we have all this audio that's also another way to experience the project and so the audio was over the model experience of that we made a model one of the best moments was we made this model base in which you could roll your wheelchair up and get your face right into a model which was something that a sighted person can easily do so there was one person Sasha I can't remember last name came to the opening and just like wheeled right into our city and that was great so it was just a great experience working with everybody the process was as much fun as what we made in the end and it was a really powerful I think intervention into that part of Berkeley that Irene and Brett who actually live in that part of California may or may not continue to try to implement in some way but yeah we'll see what the future of the project is but they're very interested in seeing it Brett in particular and move forward I'm aware that basically this whole row has like a crab tube what's up it's a very good row we're all just very keen colleagues just my first point is this it's not actually on but it goes to the people online I'm very sorry to everyone online that I just tapped the mic and you probably just had a very loud noise I don't know like I've had thank you so much for this so your presentation and your discussion part of my reaction to it I don't know it's quite personal like being someone who studied architecture as a disabled person and how utterly horrendous it was like you know I graduated well part one 2009 part two 2011 you could not have completed that degree without multiple all-nighters for each project and it's just not possible and then graduating and not seeing anywhere really for someone like me in the profession so I ran away to museums and haven't come back so yeah I just want to say firstly just personal reaction thank you for highlighting it but what I wanted to ask you about and I don't know if this is me kind of I don't know, career ring the conversation another way please do tell me to come back later if I am but as part of my role I've been to the Venice Biennale several times and obviously you talk about academia and that's often a place where people bring these kind of I guess provocations and concepts and they're displaying it the architectural community comes together to talk about these things but in a single time I've been it's just it's horrendously inaccessible and I remember seeing your project there 2018 2021 yeah that one yeah a few different ones but the one that was really mostly about disability yeah exactly and being frustrated is where they put it and it was so dark and I thought oh my god everything about this is lost this great project is just kind of in a corner and then this year going and the German is seen and you maybe think of this when you were talking about heritage sites and who gets to interpret heritage sites and what does it actually mean because obviously if you're building a building like a capital you're making a statement if you're you know all these kind of things and they took their building which was transformed almost kind of put it bluntly statement of the Ubermench kind of nationalism and installed a massive ramp on the outside breaking down this concept of the perfectionist body as essentially it's a white supremacist concept so I can see these glimmers of hope and people are bringing these conversations to but I just kind of wanted to ask you about your experience working at the Biennale and I don't know if that's feel free to just not want to because it's bringing up terrible things but I just wanted to know a bit about it well that's a trigger would it be okay we have a couple of questions online as well so if we did all of them and it was there kind of similar asking for experiences as well so maybe then you could answer them altogether that's okay so the first question is that it seems that there are some disabilities that are more on a spectrum rather than binary for instance lung conditions that so-called sensitive groups have instead of designing upgraded air handling buildings for sensitive groups it would be better to design that way for all people when there are days of air quality disease outbreaks etc everyone needs these upgraded designs thoughts so that's question one and I had a follow up question actually this is not from an online audience but for me about the kind of the relationship between public health and sort of buildings in some sense and disability and access in the sense that a lot of impairments are a result of long term public health outbreaks as well and do architects and spatial people talk to public health officials or what is the kind of gap that's happening there you might be better at that one I think that you cover those issues in the book really well and I guess we haven't talked about them at all about the chapter on environment maybe that would just be worth very briefly summarizing if you don't mind and then you can talk about Venice if you want to or not so yes so one of the things that I looked at in the book is how ideas of normalcy which are very well researched by scholars of disability and architecture Barbara Penner's here always of course does that work Amy Humray is very good in this area, Bess Williamson there's so much excellent work about normalcy and architecture often relying around the physical form the biomechanics of human bodies or even ideas about like digestion for example one of the things that I wanted to bring to that was which I've worked on for years in earlier work was ideas about environmental norms and there are very good disability critiques of environmental norms like Michelle Murphy's work on sick building syndrome for example but I wanted to think about what I guess I don't want to keep reusing this word ad nauseam but like a disability critique of the environmentalization of space so in the book I sort of chart how building off the work of people like Beatrice Colamine and others inspired ideas about air and space and then some of my own work about the solarization of urban space this complicated term simply describes the belief that bringing more and more direct sunlight into urban space and buildings is an automatic good as well as just the kind of norms that are built into space building off people like Michelle Murphy's work I'm trying to rethink all of that and so just within the book one of the things I suppose is that something like darkness as Joss was mentioning earlier which is seen as something that we just think like an architect doesn't build darkness into the city that sounds bizarre to us that in the age of climate change this is something that we may need to rethink as a kind of value like not just shade but like how do you bring darkness into urban space and into the interiors it's something that's immediately associated with sickliness but that's not necessarily the case in the end there's something of a sort of fantasy that I get into which is if you look at a variety of thinkers and how they've thought about environment critically like how could we imagine interior space not as an environment that like acts on us like we're in this room it's a little stuffy right but how can environment or the environment we need or want or desire how can it be something that we achieve somehow both collectively and individually in a space so and what would that be right it's a very it's in a way it's a more democratic idea of what environment in a building might be than a like an air handling system which is a democratic concept like we have studied norms and averages and we're giving everybody an equal amount of air and cooling but it doesn't work right so rethinking how the interior of a building can create much more heterogeneity I don't know exactly what that looks like but if there's a patron sitting online somewhere that wants to fund an installation about that I would love to work on that but that is very interesting and in that chapter I know I talk a lot about my own experience as an amputee as someone who's had enormous amounts of chemotherapy as a young person and how that affects my among many many other things that I don't need to get into now but how that affects my ability to quote-unquote regulate my own experience of environment comfort and how I have a very peculiar relation to these things and so that's so anyway so and that relates to public health of course so as for the Biennale well we did our when Hashem Sarkis and I were first talking about doing something about disability having done one previous installation at the Biennale which was about actually translating historic monuments into an audio form it was all about like how you could do that Brendan Cormier commissioned that which was a fun project also to like what you're also saying it was about disability but I didn't feel comfortable saying that at the time this was eight or nine years ago I in when Hashem Sarkis is Biennale I proposed doing something or would simply make the site more accessible all of it and they felt like it would be too critical of the Venetian managers at plus the difficulty of imagining paying that for that because they really wanted something much more modest from us so yes it's sad that I think our project made people a little uncomfortable so which is why it was stuffed in the corner but yes there's a lot more work to do there and I honestly I didn't need well we both know this I have it's for me as somebody who has a mobility disability it's impossible city to navigate in fact when I went for the opening for Brendan Cormier's exhibition one of my experiences was being on a Vaporetto and falling into Liam Young's arms and him catching me because I couldn't stand up and he went what is this? Okay and I said well you know I wear an artificial leg I can't stand on a boat you know anyway but the point is yes there could be a lot more work done to create work about impairment, weakness, especially in a post-Covid world but also that is it worth mentioning that the genesis of that installation and that of the Biennale the recent one came about during the pandemic that's right so that added a whole other layer of like I'm David's partner do we travel to Italy at all or people going to Italy what does it mean to create an installation from afar and you know I think just in light of the questions around public health the fact of the timing of that particular Biennale relative to the pandemic was interesting you know added another sort of set of complexities yeah it was tough oh right okay right yeah yeah but what's interesting is as a city with many Catholic pilgrimage sites it's been a city in which people with very serious impairments this is one of your have been going to for hundreds and hundreds of years so and the city in which the idea of quarantine of course has a very important role right you know so there's a lot there right that's just not explored by the managers I think we're kind of coming to the end of time end of time we are it's really going to happen I mean I think do you want to do ones online yeah we've got another one over here we have a couple of questions online but I think also that you know we are going to continue the conversation as well we're just going to move to the next room have some drinks and keep talking so if that's okay maybe I'll just quickly ask a question from online so you can actually respond to them as well you get the direct answer so there's a few and I think just to say to the online audiences as well even if we don't make all of them we can we'll pass them on to David and if there are any specific things we'll pass them back on to you one of them is about things coming in as we speak but one is about academic athleticism and how to counterbalance competitiveness of scholarship and academia that Joss also mentioned is slow scholarship one way out of this and I think in a slightly somewhat connected strain how do we empower allyship and collaborative opportunities particularly for spectrum related conditions and neurodiversity to support good inclusive and accessible design and increase action with accountability the big big questions but I think maybe even just to point to the fact that these are questions being asked and this is the kind of thing that is triggered by your book and your talk I just wanted to add because it does bring those two things together that we've been doing some work at UCL where it's really clear that the way in which it's been mainly neurodivergent students who have responded and the way in which they've responded has been very frustrated and angry with the way that assumptions have made that they're not performing correctly and a lot of that is about this you know it is a refusal and resistance to and a lack of thriving under a system that does is competitive is around this kind of what we're doing all hours I mean I think it is it's really interesting in terms of kind of what sort of productions we make and I know that you've talked about it in terms of practice but for me it's really interesting in terms of research and publication because again you have to get the funding for that it's like it's something that I don't I don't do in many ways because I'm an independent scholar I don't have access to time I can't afford that time so I guess there's all of that too about how you manage to research over a long period yeah I mean for me it's just it began like everything has a beginning with academia which is everybody's always a student so as a teacher you just try to create a context and environment in which like I'm trying to think of the word one's vitality does not equal one's capacity right and like how you can communicate that to a student somebody brought that up yesterday at the talk and I thought that was a dancer at the talk we did yesterday I thought that was so important so I mean just some very simple examples for any of you who teach in the room I give my lectures to my students in three different formats or really four technically they can watch me they can listen to me later just audio just like this or they can just look at the pictures and have a visual so just even that I have to tell you not you know in the US I don't know if they do this here we get these student evaluations where people go into great detail about how they did or do not enjoy your teaching and one of the things that students always say particularly ones that come out as being having you know neurodiversity neurodivergence is thank you for giving the lectures in four different formats because I can't sit there and watch you for an hour so but I can listen and I can listen in pieces or I can read you know so that just little things like that and of course it's not competitive when you do that right it's not like oh the ones who can take down every note that I see in the room are the winners right as a colleague you know it's always hard it's a colleague it's very hard because we are encouraged I think to be in competition with each other in ways it's very strange and I think there's so much work I think the new generation of academics are doing a lot to change that my generation was horrible so you know I think there's I think things are changing on that hopeful note we will say goodbye to our colleagues online and say a big thank you to David and Joss