DISABLING PRAXIS - TOWARDS RADICAL INCLUSION
This webinar is part of the RAIC 2023 Conference on Architecture, now available to stream!
Topics: Diversity, Equity and Social Justice
Length: 1 hour | What's Included: Video, Quiz, and Certificate of Completion
Through the lens of disability culture, the built environment is often revealed to be hostile insofar as to feel like an assault, a negation, an erasure, or an annihilation of one’s disabled identity. Experience as such is often constructed unknowingly through the process of design–a process that turns its back on the practice of care for disabled communities. When we design spaces based on normative building typologies instead of looking to disability experiences to imagine how we might design differently, we complicitly maintain the status quo in design. But how might we design differently? This session looks at what it means to create equity in the built environment and practice a “duty of care” in architectural design. In particular we explore how we can disrupt the status quo, and propose the centering of disability culture as a creative font of knowledge and experience leading to innovative design possibilities. We begin with the question: what do disabled designers, users, and builders desire? How does this longing and lived experience serve as creative process within architectural design? By changing our perspective and reframing disability and access as opportunities for a paradigm shift in terms of how we approach design, we have the power to radically change our environment.
In part, the impetus for this session emerges from a collaborative project stemming from the University of Waterloo, which brought together scholars, practitioners, disability experts, disabled people, and architects to reflect on and change the way disability in architectural design is taught throughout our Schools of Architecture. The session aims to unpack some of these findings for architects and designers, but it also seeks to widen the discourse and open the discussion more broadly. A platform for conversations and questions, the session begins by examining how our reliance on codes, standards, and proportions are informed by politics of oppression, exclusion, fear, and discomfort, and how these practices confine current architectural approaches to an ableist mode of operation. We will explore the concept of “disability culture” and how it operates as a creative lens on the design process. Interactively, we will engage with strategies that show how we might shift away from ableism and toward radical inclusion. And finally, we will introduce the concept of the “duty of care” and suggest how care praxis can inform inclusivity in architectural production.
Learning Objectives:
By the completion of this session, participants will be able to:
- Recognize disability culture as a critical lens essential to the creative process leading to inclusive design solutions.
- Examine how ableism informs current architectural practices and perpetrates discriminatory acts towards disability communities.
- Propose strategies to shift away from ableist methods towards an inclusive architectural practice.
- Consider what is a duty of care and how a practice of care might result in better design.
Subject Matter Expert:
Ms. Annie Boivin
Architect AIBC, CPHD
Senior Architect, Perkins&Will
From a very young age, Annie experienced the world through the lens of disability. Unaware that the world around her was a product of design, she assumed the assaults on her disabled identity were a necessary part of life. Fortunately, a chance encounter with a passionate aspiring architecture student will derail the course of her life and encourage her to embark on the journey that will eventually reveal the flaws of her childhood naivety and allow her to explore disability as an essential component of creative practice. After receiving an undergraduate degree from Laval University in 2006 and a master’s degree from the University of British Columbia in 2011, Annie started her professional career at the Perkins&Will Vancouver studio where she still practices today. In addition to the work she performs as an architect, through a series of design studios, lectures, conference contributions, and research collaborations, Annie investigates the different ways in which ableist believes are informing contemporary practice. Her research also proposes that the knowledge embedded in disability culture can contribute to create a new framework from which inclusive design solutions are generated. Most recently, she contributed to the University of Waterloo’s effort in developing a curriculum built around the intersection of disability and architecture.
Dr. Tara Bissett
PhD
Assistant Professor, School of Architecture University of Waterloo
Tara Bissett is an urban and architectural historian from Toronto. Until September 2022, she was an Assistant Professor Teaching Stream, at the Daniels Schools of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. Tara’s recent research traces the complex and fractured histories of care and care ethics in architectural history and practice, including the history of women working as architectural educators, architects, planners, organizers, and artists in early twentieth-century Toronto. More recently her work encompasses histories of disability and access; she is a collaborator on a project on access and creative practice in architectural design with an Enabling Change grant at the University of Waterloo.