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Architects disable: A challenge to transform - Rob Kitchin
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There are no excuses
If architects want to argue that they are professional practioners, not technicians - that they are speaking, thinking, acting subjects - then in my view they have no excuse not to be socially conscious and to take responsibility for social and economic consequences of their designs. In this context, I can see no excuses for designing buildings that exclude certain segments of the population. Whether intentional or not, architecture does through its present philosophy and practice 'lock' disabled people out of many aspects of society. I cannot see how such a differential outcome is defensible in a civilised society.

It is true there are economic concerns, but this, I think, is simply an issue about scales of economies. If every building had to be accessible, disabled adaptations would rapidly come down in price because they would be standard rather than exceptional items. Two other, alternative economic arguments can be made. First, if buildings were accessible, and thereby allowed disabled people more opportunity to earn, not only would they not be recipients of social welfare they would be contributing tax payments. In other words, there is a realistic argument to suggest that the state should subsidise making existing architecture accessible. This is not 'pie in the sky', this is the justification used in the USA when introducing the Americans with Disabilities Act, a piece of legislation that ensures that public buildings are accessible to all. Second, it is almost certain that in time Ireland will be instructed by the European Union to revise the building regulations and to provide full legal recourse for disabled people to challenge exclusion through architectural design. Any short-term gain in constructing inaccessible buildings will be wiped out by the expensive cost of retrofitting and altering already built structures to make them fully accessible.

Many architects will say that it is impossible to discount economic factors given the reality of bidding in a competitive market. The fact remains, however, that most access features, with the possible exception of a lift, are relatively inexpensive and will add little if anything onto the overall cost. Economic rationality in this context is little more than a convenient excuse. Furthermore, in my opinion, any recourse to purely economic arguments inevitably draws on libertarian models of social justice and limited ideas of citizenship. Consequently, I believe that architecture needs to engage more fully with the philosophies of social justice if it is to reconstitute itself as a progressive, enlightened practice with respect to disability (and indeed other aspects of cultural identity).

Architecture and social justice
Social justice relates to the fair and equitable distribution of things that people care about such as work, wealth, food and housing, plus less tangible phenomenon such as systems of power and pathways of opportunity. In relation to architecture it concerns issues over who has, and who should have, access to a building and public space, and along with associated issues of safety and the ethics of security and surveillance. There are many different forms of social justice and practical constraints limit discussion to sketch just four in relation to disabled access.