Episode 61: Conversation 5: Takeaways with Aimi Hamraie, Jos Boys, Scar Barclay and Paul DeFazio

Aimi: [00:00:00] Welcome to the final episode of a series of podcast conversations where we explore the emerging intersections of accessibility, disability, culture, and design beyond the conventions of functional access.

Jos: In this episode, we wrap up and synthesize our series of conversations called Disability Meets Architecture. We're interested in how productive fictions played out in the four conversations we've recorded between architects, disability activists, and theorists on the question of access.

Aimi: So what do we mean by productive frictions?

We may often think about friction as something like a conflict that shuts down a conversation, a friction becomes productive or generative when it generates further inquiry, curiosity and collaboration in the context of disability, generative frictions have often resulted in new design practices as well as new coalitions, interdependencies, and forms of care.

I'm Aimi Hamraie I'm a disabled designer and researcher, and I direct the critical design lab, which does projects on accessibility through the framework of disability culture. I'm also a Canada research chair in Technology, society, and Disability at York University.

Jos: I'm Jos Boys I'm a design activist over many years.

I have a background in feminist and community architectural practices in the UK, including being part of Matrix Feminist Design Collective in the 1970s and 80s. I co-founded and since 2007, have co-directed The DisOrdinary Architecture Project, which brings the creativity of disabled artists, designers, and architects into collaboration with built environment education and practice.

Aimi: In today's episode, Jos and I talk with Scar Barclay and Paul DeFazio about our takeaways from the podcast miniseries.

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Paul: My name's Paul DeFazio. I'm an architect working in the us. I'm legally blind. I've worked with Amy. I currently work at the Institute for Human-Centered Design.

Scar: Hi, I'm Scar Barclay. I'm a architecture designer, educator and maker, and I work for The DisOrdinary Architecture Project and also work at Central St Martins [Art School] in London.

Aimi: Great. Well, it's so exciting to have us all here together on Zoom. We've been working on a project for about a year now called, Disability Meets Architecture.

And, , this episode of this series is our wrap up for interviews that we did with disabled architects and activists and thinkers, about the question of access and trying to think about how access may tell us something about friction in addition to the sorts of things that we associate access with, like smooth belonging and inclusion.

So, to start, what was our intention for this project in the beginning, Jos?

Jos: Yeah, we had this idea that it would be good to bring together, architects, and, disabled activists, in a whole variety of possible ways to bring together the kind of different frameworks and debates that were being had around access.

And actually to see not just where there was agreement, but also where there were generative frictions, where there was, constructive differences, I think. And some of that was about literally different understandings of the word access. And some of it I think was different understandings of what it is that you do, how you might make change.

So quite a lot of the discussions were much more focused on those kinds of issues.

Aimi: Yeah, like I remember when we first started talking about this project and we've both done quite a bit with like theories of access that are coming out of disability communities and from disabled designers.

And so DisOrdinary did the book many more parts than m and in critical design lab, Paul and I have been working on the critical access primer. And so, we had all these ideas and theories and we were kind of like, what would disabled architects think about these ideas?

How do we get from theory to practice as maybe, one big theme? Another is what are the politics of access like what does it mean to approach access from the perspective that it's going to be perfect and we're gonna check off a box, versus approaching access as something that's more open-ended and there are gonna be mistakes and they're going to have to be many conversations about how to make it better.

And that these are each different kind of like political frameworks.

Jos: I think it was also that it was about [00:05:00] coming across different disciplines, like very definitely people who worked within architecture.

So that is a kind of very strong frame of what it is, how you think about access, and also what opportunities you have to apply it. But I think also we had people who were artists, people who came from psychiatry, people who came from a kind of range of positions that opened that possibility to kind of enrich those different ways in which different disciplines and different people, think about access.

Aimi: Right. Because architecture is such a particular field and, set of, practices and approaches to knowledge too. And sometimes architects can go through their whole careers without ever thinking about something like, how like emotions or affect come into it or different kinds of disability politics. But in the context of talking about access, like actually it is often very interdisciplinary.

And, architects have, who work on access have had to bring in all sorts of different forms of expertise and knowledge bases and things like that. And so it's interesting I think for us to like stage experiments where that happens and we record it and then we can kind of go back and be like, oh, what happened in this conversation and what connections were made and what other connections could have been made, and things like that.

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Aimi: We also have with us Scar and Paul, who are both architects and who are trained in these other paradigms. And so it's interesting working together on this, because your training and your approaches are maybe a little different than other people in the architecture field.

So I'm curious if the two of you had any intentions for this project going into it that you wanna share?

Scar: I was really excited to be part of conversations that I thought that would also challenge me. There was a project about a year ago, where I invited in a, a neuroqueer choreographer, an artist to do like a stimming workshop. And I just started working with DisOrdinary and I was coming across a lot of stuff which was challenging the way in which I thought about space.

So I've been taught to think about space and I was really, really excited about it. And I was talking with this person and, they were quite shocked. They were quite surprised by what I was getting excited about. 'cause the stuff that I was reading was like 30 years old and it kind of highlighted to me even just in that moment how much more developed these conversations are outside of architecture and even the kind of like fringes of architecture that are starting to think about radical forms of access, thinking about disability politics. Like even within that, there's so much more that can be learned, particularly from like an art space, from working kind of interdisciplinary.

Also in architecture there's fear around being challenged. And being in conflict as well and being seen as being bad or unethical in some way. It's not the way that we like to portray or think of ourselves. But conflict is, is actually really necessary and really productive.

So I think something about the very seed of that, even when we were writing that Graham Foundation funding application, this idea of friction, being a necessary part of theorizing, and something that both within social justice, because you wanna kind of have this sense of kind of homogeneity and everyone agrees and it's like you're all mutually going for the same thing, but also within a profession, which feels like at times it's under attack and you are questioning its future.

There's sometimes this fear away from the idea of, of conflict or or disagreement, but in order to secure the future of both you need to be able to embrace that. So I think that was something that really got me quite excited at the beginning.

Aimi: Great. Very well said Scar. What about you, Paul?

Paul: I was also really excited about the potential for friction and conflict and just, on the one hand coming from architecture where these kinds of conversations have been largely absent from the worlds in architecture that I've kind of moved through.

But then also knowing that you know, having these conversations isn't just about bringing one disabled person or one perspective into the room and having them talk to architects. There are so many people who have different kinds of expertise in the world of disability and access in the way that it relates to architecture.

And so having people like, Karen Braitmeyer, who was one of the guests who really works with, building code consultancy and like that sphere, versus people who are advocates [00:10:00] or disabled activists. People who are academics like Samir [Pandya] or people who do a lot of work in like media, like Beatrice Alder-Bolton.

Having people come from all these different angles, like for me felt like it was really starting to capture like, the broad conversation that actually I find really exciting. And the idea that like, you know, disabled people actually don't all agree with each other on how our lives and the things we care about relate to the world around us and architecture.

So I was excited to learn from that. And I think I had an intention to really try to zoom out through this project and think about, , the bigger conversation that can, you know, enter into architecture from a lot of different angles instead of just from one place.

Jos: Getting into the frictions when we were originally planning it actually turned out to be much more challenging than we originally assumed. I don't know if you wanted to say a bit more about that, why you think that was the case?

Aimi: Yeah. So we'd put together people that we thought might sort of disagree with each other.

Not fundamentally, like I think fundamentally everyone that we chose for this shared certain, like political orientations. So their friction wasn't the way that we usually think of friction in terms of like political polarization, like left versus right wing or something like that. But we thought that they might disagree about some paradigms and approaches or just do things slightly differently and, that may generate some interesting moments in the conversations.

And I do think that that happened, but it also didn't happen quite the way that we thought. So there's this quote from, activist Adrienne Marie Brown, in her book Emergent Strategy where she says, there's a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have and find it.

And that's like a, directive for conversation group facilitation and stuff like that. But I think that that was kind of what we were trying to do is to say, when we match up this person with that person, what's the conversation that only they can have? And we understood that as having value for a broader audience to read or listen to.

And then, you know, of course, like putting ourselves in the position of people being interviewed. Like you're going into a space to talk to someone you don't know and you're supposed to like fight them or something. And and so like people, I think also found a lot of common ground rather than engaging in explicit conflict because,

of course, the ability to have conflict in a generative way assumes that you have prior relationships that are strong and can hold that. And so, note to the future, anyone else trying to do something like this, like you might have to set it up so that people can actually like, deepen their engagement in a way that does have some of those frictions in it.

What were other people's impressions of how the friction part played out in these conversations?

Paul: One thought that I had was, I think when you come from really different perspectives, sometimes it actually becomes hard to kind of like find that point of collision or like meeting. I think one thing we saw in some of the conversations was really people being like, I don't, I've never really thought about that before.

What do I think about that? Like, kind of figuring it out in real time or putting something forward that the other person was maybe, still processing during the conversation. one thing I noticed was there was a real difference in the way that people talk about what they do.

Like if you're say like a code consultant, then probably there's a lot of technical language and understanding that goes into what you're saying versus if you're an advocate, that's a very different kind of audience. Or if you're an academic, academic language can be, often

difficult to kind of like process quickly and easily. So I think we had a lot of different voices too. And that was something that was a little bit unexpected for me is that actually there was gonna be some really different ways of explaining ideas around disability and access that had to be processed.

Aimi: Yeah. And something I think that we saw in some of the episodes too is that, and, you know, we all experience this in some way, like the way that you represent your ideas to people who you think agree with you can be really different than the way you represent your ideas to people you don't think are gonna agree with you.

And so those of us who do a lot of access advocacy, we tend to assume that the person we're talking to is like not on board and we need to convince [00:15:00] them. But a lot of ideas and critical access and ideas that come out of disability activism and disability arts are actually directed at people who are already on board, but they just need to do better.

And we're trying to like refine and push things further. And so some of that, the tension between those two things, I think played out in some of these episodes where people were kind of like, oh, okay. We share intentions and so let's like go deeper with this instead of thinking of it as this embattled thing where we're like it's different than trying to convince, like a legislator that they shouldn't roll back the ADA or other disability laws and stuff like that we're really kind of on the same page.

Jos: And I think an added a kind of minor component in that was how we operated as interviewers, because it was a kind of idea like there is in a zoom setting and in a podcast setting that you are being interviewed. So I think it took us time. I think the conversations got better over the four episodes because we got better at making that space for people to begin to have those conversations.

Scar: What do you think some of those learnings were by the end?

Jos: For me, I feel like I learned a huge amount and it was different with each episode and it was really very much around the kind of way that the discussion went forward. Like Paul said, there were kind of unexpected outcomes for me. There were things around thinking about care very differently, for example, which I think, and again, because I also come from an architectural world, care is often dealt with so very mundanely and mechanically and really around the architect as the caregiver and the disabled person as care receiver in this really problematic binary.

And it was really interesting across a couple of episodes to hear those things pulled out, to hear them linked to notions around, for example, productivity and value, who is a productive body. How we understand different kinds of value of different kinds of bodies and minds. And how those meanings are generated and reproduced through material space.

This was a much broader picture really than kind of how access is understood. It was very much about the assumptions, the underlying stereotypes, if you like, about what material space is and how it gets occupied.

Aimi: So Going back to your question, Scar. I think that some of the things that changed over time were what additional questions we became curious about as interviewers. And to me that is part of the development of theory. 'cause very often, like we have all these ideas and we've compiled them in these books, but the people who come up with those ideas are not in the same room together having a conversation.

And so I think our project was very successful because we were staging these conversations to see what would happen and would the theory develop further. And I think it did, and sometimes it was very subtle and sometimes it was more direct. But I wonder if we could talk about like, from the perspective of, the three of you as architects if you're engaging with this body of thought and theory that's coming out of a project like this.

What are some of the takeaways that you might apply to how you're thinking about users, how you're engaging in design processes, like how you're doing architectural design, any of those things.

Paul: I was gonna say like one theme that I think came up for me in a couple of the episodes and that I am continuing to wrestle with even after the season is, what do you do with standardized access? And I think that that often gets pitted against community led forms of access or disability culture or kind of as though those two things can't coexist or they're in direct opposition to each other.

But I think when I came out of all of the conversations, I was like, I never walked out of a conversation thinking like, oh, this person was right. And I agree with everything they said, and that person, I don't agree with anything they said. I actually felt like there was always a really interesting dialogue and interchange between the two.

I think this is, for me, still a very open question of how do those very powerful approaches to access that have been developed by disabled advocates over the last 60 years or so? How can we acknowledge some of the ways that those fail to address everyone or fail to open up or maybe make it harder to kind of like invent around disability and think creatively without necessarily just kind of like discarding them.

And I think that that came up, especially for me in the conversation between Karen [Braitmeyer] and [00:20:00] Natasha [Trotman] where Karen had this moment that I really loved where she kind of just put like a call out like if there's anyone in architecture school right now with a disability, just like reach out to me and we'll like figure out how to like, get you through it.

Karen who's someone who works really deeply with kind of building codes and standardized forms of access, but also I think is an incredible mentor and person who really cares about having disabled people doing design in whatever way they think is, you know, best and is gonna work.

And just an advocate for just plain and simple, like there being more of us in this field. There are a lot of barriers to that and she's very aware of that too.

Scar: I think there's, there's something also in that that ties in with the final episode where I think it was something that you said Paul, around we were aware at the start of this project that we were entering into this really fraught political climate where a lot of stuff feels in flux and within that, even fundamental rights around functional access feel very under threat.

And you were speaking, I think, in the conversation with Beatrice Alder-Bolton about even those fundamentals of being able to kind of cross the street, the danger around that and then that tied to scarcity. So I think that's something that ideally we would've had this kind of podcast series where at the very least, we have that. And then we're having this conversation about building beyond it into kind of creative modes of access. But again, there's this political climate that creates this enormous amount of tension and pressure in that conversation, because you want to have these conversations around creative disability and neurodiverse informed design, but you don't want to erode those fundamentals of functional access in that process.

But the problem is the people who can navigate that balance are people who are, you're in allyship with, who are interested and motivated.

There's an issue of if you've got people outside of that who are not motivated to include people in those spaces. That's where there becomes this kind of tension, which exists beyond these episodes, which I think is important to acknowledge. The other thing that I think came up for me, which I would've almost liked to have done a seventh episode, whatever episode we're on, is I think we suggested lots of different ways, different tactics in order to challenge the status quo.

And I suppose I would also like us to have a conversation about how people can actually do that in practice. If they're an architectural assistant, they're not necessarily a qualified architect, and they're not somebody who sits in that kind of seat of power within that office as the director.

They're somebody who's worried about keeping their job. They're worried about whether their projects are still gonna be coming in. But they also as somebody who in that allied position, but they're not necessarily in a position of knowing, but in a position of curiosity.

Aimi: Those are really great questions and I think you're both getting at like there are these power structures that we interface with and there are different levels of like persuasion and advocacy that have to happen when you're just trying to fight for fundamental rights not to get rolled back versus doing kind of like more creative work from inside or outside the system. And it's interesting for me as a historian to listen to conversations like this because for my perspective, that really creative work from outside the system predated civil rights for disabled people in many places.

But, the existence of civil rights for disabled people then put pressure on the creative work. And so there's this like tension that plays out between those two things. That's part of the critiques that people make of codes and standards. Then the additional layer is that people who work as an assistant or they work in an administrative position or they're a student or like someone within the institution that doesn't actually have that much power.

People find creative ways to advocate and to insert small changes that have big impacts. And that's been part of the legacy of what's happened when disabled people have entered the architecture profession. And there's a chapter of that in my book, I call it epistemic activism. It's like the activism that exists below the surface of what we can detect.

And it's really similar to the idea of The Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, that like there are these like tendrils of organizing and resistance and stuff that happen, and I think it would be really interesting to talk about [00:25:00] how people who, you know, engage with these episodes could take some of those ideas about access, about care, about institutional abandonment and other things like that, and practice them in their workplaces, even if it's not in their design practice, although it could be

all those other structures that exist around architecture and different design fields.

Jos: Yeah. It brings me back to the first episode between Karen and Natasha because at one level I think it felt like they were they were kind of going past each other in terms of their discussions, although they were both really interesting and had really kind of solid ways of thinking about exactly that, about how you might move forward.

And I think that because Karen is doing all this very concrete positive work in policy and strategy and working directly with architectural practice and other clients, really working on the ground as you like. And then I think Natasha is much more interested in processes and practices.

So she's always trying to chase and unravel the kind of processes of power that stop things happening. But again, she's working directly with different kinds of clients, quite often community groups or local government to try and change not their access policies or their kind of what they actually build, but the underlying processes by which those things come to be managed and enabled.

And I felt like those kind of different approach approaches they were actually really, really interesting about how they did and didn't overlap. I think there's a lot more just for our audiences, just thinking about that discussion about what kinds of possibilities actually came out of it that maybe we didn't draw out very clearly in the episode itself.

Aimi: Mm-hmm. And I remember that they also on some of those things ended up finding overlap because it may seem from the outside that someone like Karen, her practice is to just like enforce codes and standards, but she also is on multiple boards or has been on multiple boards that create the standards.

And in those spaces, I think she's doing the type of work that Natasha is doing and other kind of institutional and establishment spaces. And so it's interesting to think about part of the skillset of the architect being someone who goes into professional establishment spaces and says, okay, but what if this little thing could change?

Or advocating in really big ways for certain things to be different. And I'm guessing that's not part of architectural training. Like, is there a class in architecture school that's like how to be an effective speaker and writer and advocate? So some people may develop the skillset over time 'cause they have to, because they have to fight for their ability to be there.

And other people may never have to touch on that. But for the people who do wanna do that, what might be some takeaways from some of these episodes?

Scar: I think architects are taught to be storytellers with space.

You are taught to, through your portfolio, through the work that you produce, whether that be models or drawings or photographs or whether it would be a, a soundscape recording. You are taught to tell a story. And the way that you win work, if it's particularly using a competition model, is you go in and you pitch that story and it either resonates with the client and they buy into it and they choose you or they go, I don't want you to be the author around this.

So I think that storytelling and the ability to persuade people of a particular position is like an essential part of architecture within a kind of creative discipline. I think architecture separately from that, when it exists in a more contractual sense, it's about being able to weigh up lots of different perspectives from a consultant team to assess and advise the client on what the best way forward is.

And there is always an element of your own professional judgment around what that best decision is. I think it varies the level of power that you have in both of the situations and depending on what you're trying to do. But there will be instances where you can I suppose exercise that power or make that decision. You probably do it a lot of the time without necessarily realizing it not being a conscious thing. But I would also say that it's quite dependent on the client and what floats their boat and what they want. And you, you're always in a dynamic with a client which could be [00:30:00] good or bad or somewhere in between.

Jos: It was really interesting having, I think, two architects, Anthony [Clarke] in episode two than then somebody who's more academic, Samir [Pandya], in episode three who are really challenging that in quite a deep way. So Anthony is, because you can, he's Australian and in Australia there are kind of still, maybe there are in the States, there aren't in this country,

lots of small house projects. So he's worked with clients with very, with very deliberately worked with clients, disabled clients and quite often quite severely disabled clients and built, so he co-builds those stories over a very long period. And he talks about things like trust and listening and all sorts of things that I think aren't necessarily part of a kind of conventional way of operating.

Also I think Samir from a much more kind of politicized view as somebody who studied architecture but is, is teaching and is an academic was how he was really trying to shift literally the way the subjects are taught and how he's been doing that over several years.

And was talking about how to some extent that is now having a kind of impact at the very basic level that students do see how nuanced and complex and precarious disability is and disabled people, the situations that they're in, and actually try and design around that rather than a kind of universal solution, which is very much how it's taught conventionally.

I guess for me that gives me some optimism about people finding a path. Architects in this case, finding a path through both education and practice into some quite different and quite productive and careful form of making buildings.

Aimi: You're highlighting pedagogy as a site for architects to practice differently. Being in a position to teach means that you can bring in different frameworks and approaches and that that can possibly create some generational shifts as well.

Scar: There was something in that conversation with with Samir and Micha [Frazer-Carroll], where Samir was talking about introducing his students to thinking through architecture, through neurodiversity, was saying that architecture education doesn't necessarily want to adopt this because there's a fear that all the students will fall apart 'cause there'll be such a moment of introspection and kind of challenge that there's a fear around what happens if you start opening that door.

And I think to put that in contrast, you've got someone like Anthony who got visibly very emotional when he was talking about the process that he goes through and being quite vulnerable in that process really with his clients. And there seemed to be conversely, rather than the idea of Anthony falling apart, it seemed to be something that he drew quite a lot of strength from and also meaning in terms of the stuff that he was actually producing and the architecture he was doing.

So I think it is interesting when you got Samir who works largely in education and Anthony who then works mainly in practice kind of actually talking about the kind of fear around what might happen and then the kind of reality manifesting and kind of dispels some of that fear in a way that Samir was referring to.

And perhaps also counterintuitively the care episode, actually is the one that then talks about direct bodily conflict.

It talks about wrestling and about managing trauma. It's interesting how creating a space to talk about care then actually manifested as I suppose probably the most emotional episode really talking about things that were actually really, really difficult and often about the absence of care.

Aimi: And talking directly about friction, I think as a technique. Yeah. In material production, and design but in like such a different way than I have encountered before.

Jos: Paul, you, in the last episode you talked a little bit about, what you try and do in terms of kind of resisting the conventions of architectural education and practice. I wondered if you just wanted to talk about that and then in, in the context of the episode and the broader aim of these podcasts.

Paul: Yeah, yeah. I, I think that's a really important conversation to always be having is how the disabled people who decide to enter into architecture school or go through that, how they can not just make it out of the other side, but actually change something in the process of being there. I remember when I was in architecture school,

I went in without a real, like political identity around disability. I don't think I even put that I was disabled on my architecture school application because I was like afraid of being rejected. During that process I became a lot more open and a lot more [00:35:00] politically disabled.

And before I did that, I had thought. I don't think there's anyone else in this program who's disabled or who's openly disabled, like feeling like very alone in that. And then after I started being a lot more open about it and actually doing advocacy and starting to try to rethink things that I was working on, I was pretty shocked by the number of other people who came up to me and were like, oh, I'm actually also disabled.

Like, I have some sort of neurodiversity or ADHD or even like the building manager at the architecture school I was at came up to me at one point and it turned out we had the same kind of blindness, and I had never met someone else who had like the specific condition that I had.

And he had been passing and hiding it in that environment. I think that really speaks to the fact that there actually are probably a lot more disabled people in architecture that we know about who are being suppressed by the culture or suppressed by the sort of labor practices and the expectations of what kind of person an architect is supposed to be.

And I think the more of us who end up in a position where we can be open about it, because I don't think that everyone is necessarily has the privilege of being openly and proudly disabled in architecture right now because I think that you can face consequences for that still in a lot of spaces.

But, I think the more of us who can be open and figure out how to do things in our own way, like I think that for me really feels like epistemic activism or the kind of thing that's under the surface that can shift the currents and change the field.

Aimi: I wonder if we might wanna also get into some of the provocations that the non-architect interviewees brought forward. And of course to say there aren't really these like strict divisions and a lot of the people that we included in these interviews are often collaborating with architects or urban designers or doing art practices that are spatial.

So that lent itself better to some of these conversations. But yeah. What were some of the moments of theoretical and political provocation that stayed with us from these interviews?

Jos: Obviously there were some overlaps in terms of thinking about care as something that's kind of negotiated and not just a simple binary of, you know, you get it or you give it. But [Jeff Kasper] who also talked I think in a really fruitful way about building I'm gonna use the expression safe places, although I think there's lots of other ways of talking about that.

Building somewhere where disabled people can actually feel their agency and feel the opportunity, have the opportunity to make creative work and to engage with access in a very rich way because it takes place in that artistic realm, is just pushing boundaries and doing really wonderful creative things in a way that is not so obvious or easy in architecture as a discipline or the built environment as a discipline.

And then I think what was really interesting about Misha is because she comes to this from a kind of mental health perspective and from the history of mental health, and kind of ideas about productivity and how people began to get sorted in different ways as to who was of value and who wasn't, she also saw that through the lens of like how that happened spatially. So she comes to it from a particular understanding of kind of psychiatry and its histories. But then in terms of how you get the asylum and the workhouse and the factory, how those things are part of a kind of sorting of humanity.

So, for me, these people were bringing a kind of richness, really, because they were operating in a way that is not so common in the world that I work in. And then I think Beatrice, talking about what's going on in terms of, this idea of strategic abandonment, what's going on when in valuing some people and not others.

Some people's needs are met and others aren't. And it's not just, they're not, it's that that process of not meeting those needs is also often demeaning and discriminatory and often even aggressively vicious to disabled and other marginalized people. So again, I think for me, that kind of activism and those people are very different in how academic they are about it or how activist they are about it.

And again, those are not binaries, but I think what it brings is the opportunity to think of, of a whole range of strategies, I suppose, I think, and tactics. It feels like that was something that was beginning to go on in quite a lot of the episodes, which is what do we do here?

What can we do? What are some of the different ways, kind of creative, imaginative, but also kind of political in the widest sense ways that we can broaden and push in all sorts of different ways around [00:40:00] what access might be rather than what access is so often stereotyped as.

Paul: Jos, that makes me think of like I think that architecture and architects are often very comfortable with the idea that architecture is interdisciplinary. But I think one thing that this conversation series made me think about was a lot of the ways of being interdisciplinary that architects maybe don't do, but have a lot of potential.

And I think that came out in all the different people who are maybe approaching architecture from a different angle, whether that be from the politics of public health or social practice art or even through policy. I mean, I think that when architects say they're interdisciplinary, I think what they often are referring to is that they have relationships with people like engineers, people who are contractors work on construction sites.

And I think there's actually, like you were saying, so much more space to broaden that and there are lots of architects who do kind of radical work that is interdisciplinary in really interesting ways. But I think that, like for example, after listening to Jeff, I was like, I wanna work with a social practice artist.

I think that would like being more like, I think like Jeff for example, just had the ability to be super intentional and use design as a tool to think about relationships and actually like conversations and things that happen between people in a way that I think architects are sometimes uncomfortable about or they think like, well, how does this relate to the wall section that I'm working on?

Or, they might not see these things as relevant, but actually I think they are potentially, you know, these disciplines that are more social and political have the potential to transform architecture in a much deeper way.

Aimi: You know, this also reminds me of something I've been wanting to ask Jos to talk a little bit about, which is some of the parallels between this critical access work we're doing and feminist theories of architecture.

And I was thinking about the feminist philosopher, Elizabeth Grosz, wrote this book called Architecture from the Outside, where she's kind of like, I'm a philosopher, I get to talk about architecture. Architects don't want me to do that, but I have these ideas about how feminist philosophy and theory informed this.

And Jos, you led this whole feminist architecture practice for so many years that I think our audience would really like to know more about. And so I wonder if you wanna like, talk about that, how did like feminist theory inform practice and then are there parallels between that and this like disability work that you're doing now and forms of continuity between them.

Jos: I should say, just as a point of information, I didn't lead Matrix [Feminist Design Co-operative]. I was one of the founding members of which it was very amorphous and there were quite a lot of us. And I never worked for the design practice. But I was a kind of friend of the family in some ways or

part of the gang, I guess. Certainly in the early days. But the different relationships people had to it and the knowledge that they brought to it was very varied as you would find anywhere really with that kind of community activism. It's so interesting because it in a way my response is gonna be a bit like our discussions around the complexity of access.

That's kind of this functional access that we want to go on because it's hardly happened. But at the same time, it interrupts what might happen. And I think what's really interesting to me, having worked in feminism and Matrix actually was one of the first practices that was quite good about conventional access.

Really did put in lifts whenever they could. And thought about those things. It's in there from what was a period where that really wasn't happening. But, when I talk about disability in a kind of architectural feminist world, it's like it keeps getting forgotten. And there have been, of course, incredibly interesting, disabled feminist writing through the sixties and the seventies.

Just really powerful stuff and beyond. And there's somehow this problem, there's somehow this block in architecture, including feminist work it's like they just can't, they can't get there. They can't make that connection. I mean, I think interestingly for me, it's people who are engaged in queer and trans activism that make a much more easy connection, like relaxed understanding, a kind of shared understanding in a way that the sorts of feminists which were mainly kind of white, middle class feminists, both in the UK and the States who, you know, in the post-war period were able to go to architecture school in increasing numbers in a way that hadn't happened before.

So it was still a kind of forefront. So at that level, I'm already saying I think it's quite complicated. And I have written stuff aimed at feminist architects, that it's about time they stopped just ignoring the complexities of disability as a particular form of social and cultural construction, and just a kind of technical problem.

But in terms of kind of different forms of [00:45:00] practice, I think for me, the underlying motivation is always the same, which is unraveling who counts, who gets valued, and then how, through the use of kind of stereotype and storytelling, as Scar has already mentioned, how that becomes translated into our physical world, into our built surroundings.

And it's never one-to-one. It's not like buildings oppress women or maybe buildings do oppress disabled people. We could talk about that. But, that a whole kind of underlying logic about how societies are organized gets played out in material space. So I think for me, the two things are very connected, that act of trying to work that out is very connected and the kind of activism that connects to it is very connected. But the underlying issues, how those processes happen, not only do they play out differently historically and geographically, but they play out differently intersectionally, as we know. So the way in which those things happen for many different diverse disabled people, kind of the way that structure is built is so very different. And then parallel perhaps to how it's built around gender.

Aimi: Yeah. And you know, it's interesting 'cause it's like

there's a theoretical and academic field of feminist architecture, and then there's like a practice. And those are separate, but they have overlaps just like how there's like a practice of accessibility and kind of a field of study around it. And my PhD was in gender studies and a lot of my entry into working on access was through feminist theory of architecture which had language for talking about bodies and norms and how that shaped space that was just like, it went further than it felt like disability studies, like the social model was able to. And Jos, I first read your work in Barbara Penner's compilation Gender, Space, Architecture.

And it was like really obvious to me that it was about access. And a lot of the essays and that book are about access, even though they're through a feminist lens. And people like Leslie Kanes Weissman, who wrote Discrimination by Design, a feminist critique of the manmade environment, like she went on to do disability access work also in the eighties and nineties.

and in the interlocutors that we chose for our series, I also see really clearly the influence of feminist thinking, on Natasha, Micha, Jeff, Beatrice.

And of course, feminism in this moment is also fraught. We're having to deal with like trans exclusionary, feminism, and its effects on the economy and social life and other things. But I think for our audience of this series, it's just interesting to think about how feminist theories of architecture bring us more complex ways of thinking about disability access and space as well, and that we're kind of working in that lineage. And of course, speaking of people commenting on and practicing architecture from the outside, disabled people have had and expressed and practiced so many forms of expertise around design and the built environment that is often unacknowledged.

And we should just like mention that. Also, I would say like queer theories of architecture as well are very influential for us here.

Scar: For people who are listening, I use they, them pronouns, and I identify as non-binary and trans. But when I did my BA undergraduate degree, I went to a women's only college at Cambridge.

And it was interesting, I didn't quite realize at the time, but the way I got introduced to architecture is I had a very influential director of studies, uh, Benedict Foo, who was in Matrix. So the way I was introduced to architecture is via Ben. And actually one of the things that's probably is most powerful, as was most pervasive about Matrix feminist design co-operative, is the way that it works in terms of pedagogy and also the famous practices that were developed around engagement because I think those would still be really considered radical ways of engaging with stakeholders, and co-designing space together. And I didn't realize how precious it was at the time, but that was the way that I was introduced to architecture.

And I do sometimes wonder whether that has really set me on a course in terms of the way that I question architecture education, but also the way that I like to practice and the way I think about space. Those were down to like key [00:50:00] conversations that me and Ben had when I was 19.

And it wasn't about being reliant on precedent and following what had been done before. The conversations that we used to have were about how you would feel in a space or how the person that you're talking about or we were talking about children, how that child would feel in that space.

What would bring them curiosity, what would make them want to turn the corner and kind of like, um, explore. I noticed that that was different to what I was receiving in tutorials, even at the time. And it was also practices that I've always kept with me. So I think there's a legacy around Matrix, which is to do with the built form and, thinking about, women's relationships to space and kind of feminism, big picture.

But I think there is genuinely very radical practice methods, which still persist and should be commonplace in architectural education, which is around pedagogy and engaging with stakeholders and how you facilitate those conversations.

And then inadvertently then I ended up working for Jos, so, gradually working my way around Matrix.

Aimi: Amazing. Yeah, it's really cool to trace these lineages. I think this is just me being a historian, this is what I do. Who taught who and who worked with who and where, where did these ideas flow?

It'll be interesting also to trace that with these episodes and if we are ever able to figure out like, did our interlocutors collaborate on something later? Or did someone pick up these ideas and take them in a different direction? Those kinds of things are a part of how theory develops and productive frictions become generative, right? They feed into new ways of thinking.

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Aimi: Okay, so the last thing is I wanna return to some of the ideas in Beatrice's episode, which is very much about this political moment that we find ourselves in across the world where rights are being taken away, funding is being taken away that supports disabled people's lives and living.

And I know Paul, you've been doing some advocacy around the deprofessionalization of architecture and some of the political pressures on architecture to take out diversity, equity, and inclusion language. And this is something that, you know, part of the context of what Beatrice was talking to us about too, in terms of the spread of global fascism and how a certain kind of anti-access politics is part of that. So, what do we wanna draw out from this political moment as kind of instructive for our audience in terms of the conversations that have happened here and like what tools and concepts we have to move forward and survive and strategize and all of that?

Paul: About a year ago I started getting more involved with an organization called the National Architecture Accreditation Board. They write the standards for how architecture is taught in the US.

Originally because, and this was before I think Trump's election or right around that time, there was an increase in language around DEI in the standards. But there wasn't a lot of mention around disability or disabled people. There were maybe one or two places where disability or access were explicitly mentioned, and a few places where it was maybe a subtext was that one of the standards could apply to disability.

So I thought there was an opportunity there to add information about disability and actually do a more rigorous shift in the discipline that, you know, would go to every school. And what ended up happening was over the past year, there have been a series of tactics that the Trump administration has used to put political pressure on schools in the US and that has caused a lot of schools to roll back not only their language around DEI, which a lot of them had been adding, but also that language was often attached to civil rights language. And so often there are these attacks that target both at once. It's not only about taking out DEI, but it's also about rolling back civil rights in the process.

That's what's been happening and in the most recent iteration of the NAB architecture standards in the US. And so I think that this is a moment where actually we were talking about with Beatrice became super clear where I was on the one hand I was thinking through a lens of, oh, there's all this language.

We could add language. We could do all these amazing things to make architecture as a discipline better for disabled people. And then suddenly being flipped into the mentality of saying, oh, I we have to just defend what we have and what's been established in, say, I don't know, the nineties, like things that have 30-year-old civil rights provisions that were in those standards are now kind of under threat.

I've been trying to organize public comment on that just so that we have a record of [00:55:00] people pushing back against those changes. But I, I think it's important, one, to be mindful that the people who are kind of pushing against disability right now are extremely tactical,

often, you know, they might use messaging that is saying, for example, like I think, a lot of DEI policies, I personally felt could get like a little bit performative and I felt that it didn't have the kind of teeth that civil rights legislation had. So I, I had some critiques even though those weren't critiques that I thought it should go away.

But I think that it's important to, to understand that there's sort of a lot of bait and switch happening there. And I think that some of these organizations that feel really dry or for me, like NAB was never an organization that I felt particularly interested in, but I think some of these organizations, they actually have a significant amount of power over the lives of disabled people, especially like in this case, people who wanna become designers.

And I think just for me it feels like taking up some of the, what I would call like some of the boring work of advocacy of just like looking at standards and like leaving public comment and like writing or thinking of those as things that you can revise or change or work on feels important.

Scar: It draws on this tension that was, there was two, two key words that I think I wrote down that came from the conversations around strategic essentialism. I think Samir mentioned, the way it's useful to kind of have a more unified identity in order to kind of advocate for a particular cause, against this idea of strategic illegibility, which Beatrice was talking about.

I think you were also talking about Paul and it's necessary to make this conversation more and more complex because all of our sets of needs are incredibly complex and interlocking or also not aligned always. And that difficulty of kind of hitting those two things, I wonder whether do you think there's a way that you can still within that where you're trying to advocate for, basic kind of fundamentals, whether you can still practice kind of strategic illegibility?

Paul: One thing I thought when you said that Scar was that I think that when we're in this moment, when a lot of these sort of established norms around access or disability and how that's dealt with are under threat, I think on the other side of it, you know, if and when the pendulum swings back the other way, we'll be in a position to repair and rebuild.

And, you know, there are a lot of critiques of, for example, the way that the ADA excludes a large number of disabled people who are neurodivergent or like not really talked about, people with environmental illnesses, et cetera. And so some of those things that feel kind of fixed or locked in, I think the one thing that happens if those get rolled back or broken is that we end up in a position to actually if we position ourselves in those spaces, we end up in a conversation about rebuilding them and repairing them.

And hopefully in a way that ends up with something that's better than what we had before.

Jos: Yeah. I really like that. In that episode, in the last episode with Beatrice, there was some discussion of kind of strategic sabotage and kind of doing things under the table, and I wondered both Paul and Scar, whether Paul's response is more positive.

It's about regrouping in a way, but whether there's also a kind of possibility of subversion and reinvention at very small scale. Or maybe these things, again, they're not a binary opposite. Maybe I'm making them a binary opposite when they're not.

Scar: It makes me think of trans and queer space and how a lot of the, the practices that happen within those, they already exceed or go beyond when we're thinking about functional access, for instance, the way people might run event spaces. So I think there's something that actually, if you are part of one of those organizations or you are part of an organization, which is allied with Disability Justice, you just start doing it.

It's not this thing you are always following the legislation, you do the thing beforehand and then that usually catches up. I think we'll probably find that actually a lot of the spaces that we end up working in provided that we maintain being vocal in those spaces probably will continue to forge kind of new ways of doing this, or we're starting to think about much broader ideas around who we invite into space and what that might mean for space and also hopefully architecture being interested in that because architecture does love shiny things that kind of tell it new and interesting ways about understanding the world and is always seeking context that it can build off.

And it's just got a, a massive amount of context around human experience that it's just never really looked into. So I think,, there is reason, reason for Paul's positivity. And unfortunately we're entering a time where a lot of things are under threat, but I [01:00:00] wonder whether there, there's still a way of as Paul was saying, getting something better at the end when things do get kind of reinstated.

That being said, it is rubbish in the meantime.

Paul: Yeah, I would never say that what's happening is good in any way, but no, it's a tiny, tiny silver lining that I look towards. I guess.

Aimi: Yeah, I would just add that, there are ways that we have figured out how to survive for, you know, a long time with limited resources, with very few rights.

And part of that is like the many struggles to keep each other alive. And that requires advocating and fighting at different at scale simultaneously. And I think like a lot of us whose work like straddles design, but also like other types of community work, we see all of that as interconnected and, we strategize how to access resources and distribute the things that we need with what limited things we have available.

And I think that's also true of queer and trans communities. And some of what we can maybe take from these ideas in this series is like the sorts of things that might sustain us as we work with fewer and fewer resources and ways that we can continue to like build creative practices and stretch things a little further.

Not because we should do that or like should have to do that, but because it's kind of like part of what we have always done to survive. Like even before the resources that we had for a limited time were taken away and so it's a kind of like maybe a prepper survivalist mentality that I have.

And I say that kind of in an ironic way. But, we know everything's gonna get worse. So what are the ways that we can remind ourselves of what we already have and what we already know how to do? And the connections that we already have, to kind of make it to the other side of the pendulum swing?

Jos: I so agree with that and I think then there's a kind of other things going on, both for individual listeners and for people who are already part of some sort of network or collective and are at different, like places. They're in different places in terms of the things that are being discussed and some of them may find, you know, you may find that some of it's overly academic or some of it's overly simplistic. I don't know. And for me what's lovely about the range of voices and opinions and activism that we covered in this series is it's like just a whole range of ways of operating.

You do what you can in the situation that you're in, and those ways are, all to be valued, but to be thought about critically as well.

I mean, throughout these podcasts, what we've been wanting to do is to explore productive frictions between our guests and ourselves. Uh, but maybe there's also other valuable, productive frictions. And that's between the conversations we've had over this series and with our listeners. I hope that the series of episodes offers people different voices and different approaches that might help them think about what they do and how they might do it and what they connect to.

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Aimi: Thank you everyone, so much for the work that you've done on this series. It's been really fun to collaborate on this and I'm excited to learn how these ideas travel from here.

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Aimi: You've been listening to Disability Meets Architecture, a series of episodes of the Contra Podcast focused on the productive frictions within critical access theory.

Disability meets Architecture was created by Jos Boys from The DisOrdinary Architecture Project, and Aimi Hamraie from the Critical Design Lab and the Contra Podcast with support from Scar Barclay and Paul DeFazio, and funding from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Our editor is Ilana Nevins.

You can find out more about this project and our respective organizations on Instagram at DisOrdinary Architecture, at Critical Design Lab, and at Labs for Liberation. The Contra Podcast is licensed under a creative commons attribution, non-commercial share, like International 3.0 license. That means you can remix, repost, or recycle any of the content.

As long as you cite the original source, aren't making money, you don't change the credits and you share it under the same license.

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