SPACE August 2025 (No. 693)
Installation views of DeafSpace: Double Circles. Visitors can engage in visual communication without facing others directly, thanks to translucent walls and mirrors.
Barrier-free, universal design—these are the policies that often come to mind when discussing ‘disability and architecture’. Yet environmental difficulties remain in the everyday lives of disabled people. Clearly, the systems in place require improvement and reinforcement. But is this enough to simply create better policies? David Gissen and Richard Dougherty – respectively an architectural scholar who uses a wheelchair as umputee, a Deaf architect – respond with a clear ‘no.’ They argue that architecture ‘for’ disabled people, created through regulations applied only ‘after’ design, is insufficient. Instead, the perspectives of disabled people must be embedded from the earliest stages and the discourse addressed even before design begins. What more can we do beyond improving physical accessibility? What does architecture shaped by disabled perspectives look like? Let’s explore the following proposals and accounts presented by Gissen and Dougherty in ‘Looking After Each Other’, an exhibition held at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) Seoul in Korea.
Interview David Gissen professor, Yale University, Richard Dougherty director, Richard Lyndon Design × Kim Bokyoung
Kim Bokyoung (Kim): Could you briefly introduce the work you presented as part of ‘Looking After Each Other’?
David Gissen (Gissen): We exhibited our proposal for a neighbourhood in Berkeley, California, entitled ‘Block Party: From Independent Living to Disability Communalism’. The project reimagines a single block from the perspective of disability and housing justice. These latter terms describe different political frameworks that agitate for greater equality in the use and ownership of private and public spaces.
Richard Dougherty (Dougherty...
