ARCH 393
Option Design Studio
About
FALL 2022
3B Design Studio
Teaching Team:
Lola Sheppard
Tara Bissett
Designing for disability, or rather, for multiple abilities, and for multiple bodies, should be neither remedial, nor compensatory, but rather, asks: what is an architecture of care, innovation, and inclusion? How might we design beyond the checklist, without relying on building code minimums and standards as the sole driver for accessible design? In this studio, we learn from diverse ways of being in the world and critique the idea of the “norm.” Designing for multiple abilities and bodies is an opportunity to challenge current assumptions about building types, institutional organizations, and societal values more broadly. It is an invitation to innovate, to question the basic elements of architecture – a wall, a door, a window, the materials we use, the way bodies move through space and how different people experience and perceive spaces and their stimuli. The intent is to explore what we might take for granted in the design process and what we value in the final outcomes. Sarah Hendren’s question: “what can a body do” moves us away from the idea that a body is projected to move in certain ways. The studio similarly ask what architecture can do when it is unmoored from narrow expectations of what a body is or how our bodies perform.
The studio uses the school as a building type to explore and test ideas about inclusive and design and notions of access. The program of the elementary school allows to consider questions of individual and collective experience, play, socialization, and learning, and to think about the building which helps construct new communities, but is also deeply engrained in the physical and social fabric of existing communities.
Student Projects
