CRIPPING ARCHITECTURE

Abstract

A study in critical heterogeneity.

Cripping Architecture argues that what we think of as “universal design” - a least-common-denominator model - does not and cannot produce fully equitable architecture on its own. “Universality” is in fact a colonial value; what is required instead for a truly equitable world is a proliferation of diversity to capture edge cases, not just a reduction in diversity that attempts to capture everyone.

What is required for a truly equitable world is what I have termed critical heterogeneity - an echo of Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism - calling for a proliferation of diversity to capture edge cases, rather than solely a reduction in diversity that attempts to capture everyone.

Today, the disabled community exists physically fragmented, isolated, and excluded across an ableist world. This dehumanising inequity burgeons as the global population ages and life expectancy extends, expanding the already 20% of people who are disabled.

Meanwhile, in the urban realm, Chinatowns, Koreatowns, Little Italies and Polands thrive - a model that microcommunities of the disabled could ostensibly also benefit from, if only it existed for them.

The project thus asks what multi-family housing would look like if it was designed for a community of bodies in wheelchairs as the “neutral” norm.

The resultant housing estate establishes sequences according to a different temporal experience - a nod to the “crip time” described in disability studies. Instrumentalising the ramp at multiple scales, it multiplies horizons both interior and exterior, creating an architecture flexible in vantage points for less flexible bodies. It is diverse in ways different than ableist architecture, yet through typological dialogue with the English terraced house and the London railway-adjacent linear housing estate, remains unexceptionally rooted in its local context.

Seven unit types serve a range of household structures - those who can live independently outside of ableist spaces, those who require live-in care, those who cohabitate with able-bodied family. Interior interventions speak to the experience of the body: a 5’ turning circle is privileged throughout, while a unique inverted bay window allows for the face to be fully pressed up against the glass.

Periodic polyrhythmic aggregation of these units yield local heterogeneities at the scale of the sub-community between neighbours; other communities are formed along the alternate temporal axis of the outdoor ramp that links otherwise disparate units together. The Makian group form of the whole yields a new urban topography built on a 1:20 slope - negotiating dramatic local grade changes and stitching opposite ends together with a public green corridor.

The result is a unique community that inverts the status quo of able-designed and wheelchair-adapted to wheelchair-designed and able-adapted. By inviting the public to participate as passers-by, the community is given a place to call home without segregation or isolation - creating a new relationship between a marginalised group finally able to gaze upon the majority, and be gazed upon on the same level.