How was your experience of architecture school shaped by disability? I am from really the first generation of paediatric bone cancer survivors, at least in the US, which ultimately resulted in becoming an amputee about five years after I was diagnosed. I had the experience of going through architecture school as somebody who was first in a wheelchair, then used crutches, and then walked on artificial limbs. It really impacted me: I think much of my work has had a subtext of disability or was about my experiences as a patient at a certain time in New York City. The Architecture of Disability incorporates history, theory and memoir from my own experience of being a disabled architect and disabled historian and a teacher, and it combines these into an argument about where the politics and the agenda of architecture and disability might go. My chief argument is that, for too long, discussions of disability and architecture have been too focused on the topic of access and accessibility, which dominated almost all postwar discussions of buildings, cities and disability rights. As important as that work is, disabled people can offer a more total and structural critique of architecture, how it is taught, how we practise and how we think about architectural history.
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