Episode 56: Intro: Round Tower with Jos Boys and Aimi Hamraie

Aimi: Hi, this is Aimi Hamraie. 

Jos: And I'm Jos Boys. 

Aimi: And we are here at the Round Tower, in Copenhagen. 

Jos: I wanted to ask Aimi about why this was a good venue, a good place for us to meet. 

Aimi: Yeah. So Jos and I have both been here in Copenhagen this week doing some work with the  Bevica Foundation and, I learned about this tower behind us, which is an astronomical observatory. Do you know when it was built? 

Jos: No. I wish I'd looked that up.

Aimi: Okay. Well, we'll look it up and we'll report back. But what I learned was that the whole tower has a ramp that goes up to the top. And instead of stairs until you get to the very top and was built for like a, some sort of royalty in his horse-drawn carriage.

Jos: Yeah. So you could get a carriage and horses all the way to the top. Yeah. Well, not quite to the top, not to the observatory itself, but almost up there. Yeah. So. What you have is a really, really lovely piece of design, which prioritizes the ramp as a way to move up in quite a tight space and it's quite a steep ramp, but it's kind of very, you know, horses have to go up and down it. So the idea that you get up that number of stories and it takes you right up to the rooftop and you have this fantastic view over the city. 

Aimi: Yeah. 

Jos: And it's a very different way of moving through place. 

Aimi: Yeah. So I'm excited to check it out. Let's go. Let's go do it. See, see what we learned in there.

Aimi: So we're now inside the round tower, starting to go up and I was just observing that the slope feels really steep to me. And what were you saying?

Jos: And I was saying that I was expecting it to be steeper. So I guess that means that I think that it's quite even. I had walked up this once before and I did it on the outside edge of it and I didn't get out of breath at all.

And that felt like a have around, that is quite a street grab that you can climb up without, kind of really needing to stop. I mean, you know, some people would need to stop. But there are also along the side where the windows are niches or little seats. You get this so you've got somewhere to sit down and then you have this view over the rooftops. So it's kind of space. It's very echoing space.. 

Aimi: Yeah. So it's really, it's very interesting that they chose to build this as a ramp and not as a bunch of stairs.

Jos: And that they decided it was worth getting a horse and carriage up several stories. I mean, I think that it says something about values, about Yeah. What's value like. Yeah. That was clearly a really important thing.

Aimi: That was the mobility technology of the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. 

Jos: It's like you can't imagine that's happening now, not just because you don't have horses and cart, but like the idea that there's different forms of mobility that don't demand or an independent able body are important too.

Aimi: Yeah. So let's keep going up and see what we find.

Jos: So, one of the reasons we're together is we want to talk about the project, the Grand Foundation funded project that we're working on. And, we're looking to draw out some of the productive frictions that occur around access, and think about access as a form of knowledge rather than just something that's a kind of functional provision for people.

And I think what's lovely about the ramp here is it just throws up for discussion what kinds of forms of access you have and why you have them. And what gets assumed to be normal and where the resources get put and it, there are lots of things. This is not an accessible building. It would be pretty difficult to, especially going down, say, in an manual wheelchair is really scary. It's just a very different way of moving through a space to the norm. Yeah. 

Aimi: Yeah. We take ramps for granted as a form of access, and this one's really asking the question of access to what and access for whom.

And it definitely wasn't thinking about disability access. Wheelchairs didn't exist when Tower was built. But it is creating a certain kind of human and non-human experience of space. And kind of transcending space vertically that is very unique. And you know, I think about like the Guggenheim Museum, which also has a similar very steep ramp like this one.

And some others that maybe have an aesthetics of access and that so much functional access, but there's so lot that we can learn from.

Jos: Yeah. And I think, I feel like there's a whole thing about the different ways of getting from here to there and that we are very used to those now being treated in a kind of functional access way, particularly around people with disabilities that you think just how do you get from A to B quite mechanically. It's like access is so much more she treated as critical access. It's so much more complex than that.

What that getting from here to there is, it's a whole set of different experiences. Totally. Layered up sensory experiences, social experiences around pleasure and joy and pain and frustration. And that just how we shift the way we think about it. Yeah. And provoke alternatives I think is really. Yeah.

Aimi: Yeah. I'm thinking about like the really different experiences of access that all of the bodies here are having. And, you know, we might think like a ramp exists so there's no friction. But this ramp is made of cobblestones and is very steep. And even though everyone that we're seeing right now is walking, I don't know about you, but walking is kind of a painful experience for me, especially in a city like this where the streets are so cobbled, and you know, there's a lot of exhaustion

and kind of overexertion and stuff that happens. And so, we can think of the ramp as like a place to talk about disability and the frictions that we experience just as much as one that addresses accessibility.

Jos: And I think some of it for me, I just, the pleasure for me is in the kind of craziness of it, like thinking about why it's here and that it's an observatory. 

And there are steps at the top, ah, it's kind of quite tight circuit there that gets you up to the do with the telescope in it. And I'm like, so they've invested in this for a horse and carriage, and is that just to take people up there?

Or is that the supplies? And I just I love that it's really hard to imagine quite how it was used. Yeah. And I put the information here, but I haven't looked that yet. 

Aimi: Yeah. It's curious. Like I, I read that it was made for the King of Denmark. 

Jos: Oh, right.

Aimi: And so maybe the King of Denmark said he can go up 10 stairs and not 500 stairs. And so they built enough of a ram to get him to the ten. I don't know. I'm just speculating. Yeah. 

Jos: And I think the other, you know, it's like with, if you're a tourist in the city, which we both are here, then getting up high and looking over the rooftops , it's a lovely thing to do.

Right? And, and often though that experience is through a lift all through a lot of stairs and here the central core, obviously to do the fear of the door of the book is hollow and you can look down . It is quite scary. Yeah. 

Aimi: Oh.

Jos: But also that it's kind of a way of getting up to the rooftops that will suit some people and not others depending on all sorts of things and. It's just very unexpected. Something very unexpected about it, which is very thoughtful. .

I guess we should talk a little bit more about the project that we're planning. And I think the aim is that it's very much dialogues and discussions and conversations. And that's I think why we're starting in this way. We to have very open conversations, um, maybe difficult conversations, but shared ones.

Aimi: Yeah. Find points of sticky friction and also commonality. And not necessarily resolution, but hopefully better understanding and, ways of moving across disciplines and discourses. Yeah. Yeah.

Jos: And there is the kind of range of threads between architecture and disability studies, disability activism, disability arts, such a rich range of possibilities that still feel like that they're shared, that they're kind of part of a way of thinking about the discourses We have to my point, obviously with the background in architecture, in the discipline, in architectural discipline, how, contained our discourses are often and odd looking. We talk through each other a lot. And that opening that up to other ways of being in the world and talking about the world is, it feels really , actually it feels quite urgent.

Aimi: Yeah, I agree. I feel like a lot of the times the conversation is still kind of at a very disability, one-on-one, place. And disabled designers and artists and activists and people have really just contributed so many ideas that we could be using and integrating and in conversation with. And so we're hoping for this project to give us a repository of those ideas so that we can move forward in that together. 

Jos: And I think that's also about an openness to not just thinking about disability around what architects and others in the little environment fields do for disabled people, but it's actually by and with, and it's about

not just access, but it's about the very practices that we, that architects have, the way that they work, the design methodologies that they use. 

Aimi: Yeah. 

Jos: Uh, the way that access is framed. All those things can be opened up at a really different

kind of paradigm.

Aimi: Yeah, absolutely. I think this building that we're in is a good example of that.

I'm curious what your experiences were. But you know, if we just kind of came here, assuming there was a ramp and so it was accessible and that was the end of the story, we wouldn't get all the textures of the experience that we had on the way up here. How was it for you? About seven, seven and a half stories.

Jos: Seven and a half stories on the ramp. I mean, it was surprisingly easy is the wrong word. It was very enjoyable because it was a very different way, and when I use steps, partly 'cause of my age, I have to concentrate quite hard on, and I'm very aware of, what I can hold on to and that my legs and my knees will get tired. And for me, and again, it will vary so much for different people. For me, the slope of the ramp was actually very comfortable to walk up and it was very, we could do it quite leisurely way. Yeah. There were places to stop. Yeah. There were things to see on route.

There's a little toilet, built when the building was built and the 17th century. So a little privy. So, uh, there's lots of little things that catch your eye. So for me it was great. What about you? 

Aimi: I really enjoyed it. There's a kind of smoothness to not having to pay attention to where all the steps are, which I agree about that.

I'm always like looking to make sure I don't fall off the edge. And at the same time, there are different parts of the ramp that were more steep or less steep, kind of depending on how close you were to the inside of the tower. So there was a little bit of a personalizable experience of that. And I was mentioning that I do get vertigo and sometimes when I feel my body going up into space, I kind of also feel like I'm falling backwards.

But it wasn't so bad. And then at the end we got to those very steep stairs and that was also an interesting contrast where suddenly we were transcending vertical space quite quickly. But one of the things I noticed was. There was a floor where we stopped where there actually were ramps and toilets and like an exhibition.

And then we came out and went back into the ramp and ended up in the floor above. And I expressed that I was surprised that we'd already gone one floor above. 'cause it was much easier. Yeah. On a ramp than it would've been on the same number of stairs. Yeah. 

Jos: Again, ramps are often, I mean, it's not an accessible ramp, but we're very used to ramps being these quite narrow and again, function like just often really thinking about only one person in one wheelchair going up at a time and this has a width to it, a breadth to it that's feels quite spacious. And I think that notion of the rampers are more as also a kind of social space and a public space that's not just about this one functional thing that, it's not about that, but it, it echoes for me about that, about the possibilities of having this kind of quite wide play that becomes. And it is social here.

There's lots of people coming up. There's lots of people coming down. Yeah. There's kids having a really good time running. Yeah.

Aimi: Like people negotiating where they're gonna be in the space, where the people going up and the people going down kind of encounter each other. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. 

Jos: And everybody slows down.

I mean, they slow down partly because of the steepness, but they're also slowing down because you're not just getting somewhere you, your inner space of yourself has a quality that you want to slow down and enjoy.

Aimi: Yeah. Yeah. And it's like this beautiful, like Danish design with whitewashed walls and brick floor and stuff.

Jos: Yeah, yeah. It's very stylish in Danish way. 

Aimi: And the constant benches were very surprising to me, the window wells. Even other places have so much easier for people to pause and be slow. 

Jos: I think going down might be a little bit.

Yes. I like that, that too.

 Jos: So, we just felt that we should mention what the project's called. 

Aimi: Disability Meets Architecture. 

Jos: Yeah, that's what it is. Yeah. And thanks to the Graham Foundation.‍