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Home > Journal > Issue Ten > A Response to Architects Disable: A Challenge to Transform A Response to
Architects Disable: A Challenge to Transform - Yvonne Farrell You would have to spend time, actually in a wheelchair, to even begin to appreciate the difficulties that are encountered by people with disabilities every day of their lives. You would have to be the parent of young children to realise that cobblestones are difficult to negotiate and fire doors hard to open when pushing a buggy. You would have to be eighty five with severe arthritis to know, that even though there is a lift in the building, the fact that the lift is beyond your comfortable walking distance, means it may as well not be there, weak wrists find the heavy fire doors hard to push open, the simplest step becomes a precipice. You would have to be.... That beautiful house in Bordeaux completed in 1998 by Rem Koolhaas is a poetic example of inclusion, involvement and architecture. Inclusion is the starting point for the architecture, because the client had a voice, a face, direct contact with the architects and the architect was able to translate that human need into a new reality. "Contrary to what you expect 'the Bordeaux client told the architect. "I do not want a simple house. I want a complex house, because the house will define my world�. Times Magazine wrote in December 1998�"Built for a wealthy client in a wheelchair who asked that it be made as complex as possible, the house has three stories, in each of which is a 3m by 3.5m hole. The hole is filled only when the client's 3m by 3.5m elevator, which is also his office, is in that square. Get it? Rather than making allowances for its disabled owner, each floor is really complete only when he's there. Abled people are inconvenienced for him". In his article Rob Kitchin not only severely criticises the architectural profession but also criticises the way future generations are taught in relation to disability. I have a tremendous respect for the amount each student learns each year in a School of Architecture. Students absorb an incredible amount of information in their focused years in College. There is no reason why specific disability audits and in-depth social - cultural - disability inclusion issues could not form an integral part of project subject matter. In my own experience this happened very successfully in the UCD School of Architecture when teaching alongside Ruth Morrow. Ruth taught us to consider and to remember to include - to close our eyes, to open our eyes. She had memorable teaching techniques, which showed us how much trust is involved when you have no vision. She made us marvel at our haptic sense. Through her eyes, students saw that some of us were tall - sometimes very tall or small - sometimes very small, students began checking and challenging the accepted view of 'average'. Ruth's special remit in the School of Architecture in UCD was to focus on the inclusion of difference and disability.
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