Unhiding History
Thinking about disability, gender, race, and class should help us access a variety of voices in architectural history and architecture, especially in academe. It is shameful that half a century since the blossoming of the civil rights and feminist movements we still must dig for these perspectives. As a result, I was inspired to design a new seminar, in which we could try to recuperate a variety of views and actors and in the process become more creative about doing both design and history. The purpose of the class was to ask, how can designers and historians practice in ways that are more inclusive?
One place to begin was to ask, for what kinds of bodies do architects design? As architect and activist Jos Boys has observed, “designing for all” is not necessarily inclusive to all. In 2015, Magda Mostafa, who designs grade schools for kids on the autism spectrum, gave a TED talk in which she cleverly showed an audience of a thousand that architects are trained to design for the average: meaning the able-bodied and sure-footed. If you have EVER been pregnant, used a stroller, been in a wheelchair or on crutches, wear a hearing aid, have ADHD or autism, or are very short, then you are not being designed for. In other words, architects, like other designers, tend to design for a small minority (ten people in a thousand, or 1%). Something is very wrong with this story.
“I was inspired to design a new seminar, in which we could try to recuperate a variety of views and actors and in the process become more creative about doing both design and history.”
In order to think about the value of more inclusive spaces, the class looked at the Magical Bridge playground built recently in Palo Alto, California. It is more colorful, has more attractive features, and draws bigger crowds (25,000 visitors a month) than most playgrounds. With its thoughtful design, it is not only more attractive and interesting than others, but it is more usable by more kinds of people. The question it presented us with is obvious: with its gently sloping ramps, multiple bucket swings, and the so-called dignity landings at the bottom of slides that allow children who need time or assistance getting up to move out of the way (figure 1), why can’t every playground be like it? As Olenka Villarreal, who conceived of the playground, has noted, just because something is compliant with the U.S. Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination based on disability, does not necessarily mean it is accessible.
Figure 1. Dignity landing at Magical Bridge Playground, Palo Alto, Calif., 2015, as seen in “A Playground for Everyone, No Matter Your Age or Ability,” PBS NewsHour Weekend, PBS television, October 6, 2019.
As a counterexample, the class examined the new Fine Arts Library at our university, Cornell—a facility so hostile to the body that it seems to have been designed with optics in mind and not users (figure 2). Its floating stacks and grated floors might look terrific in a photograph but there are issues for many. As we observed, wheelchair users have to be careful so as not to be impaled by the metal rods that jut out from the stacks at eye level. Those who suffer from vertigo cannot go up into the stacks. And women don’t dare wear skirts or high heels on the see-through open grates. My colleague Jonathan Ochshorn grew so frustrated with the library that he maintains a blog chronicling its many code violations.
Figure 2. Mui Ho Fine Arts Library, Cornell University, 2019. Photograph by Athanasiou Geolas, 2020.
To consider more mundane injustices, we turned to the domestic sphere. The class watched the film Koolhaas Houselife by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoîne. The film underscores what an iconic modernist structure—a house in Bordeaux, France, designed by Rem Koolhaas’s firm, OMA, for Lemoîne’s paraplegic father—was like from the point of view of a use we usually don’t consider: the woman who cleaned the house (difficult and dangerous) (figure 3). As water leaks (one might say pours) into the house, the viewer is left to conclude that it does not work. The class used the Rietveld-Schroeder house in Utrecht, Holland, and competing historical narratives about it by architect and theorist Kenneth Frampton and feminist architectural historian Alice Friedman, to explore how gender has been written out of—and can be re-scripted into—the story of architectural icons. Standard analysis of the house is cause for concern. For over a hundred years, writing about it followed a narrative similar to that of Frampton’s—one without all the complications and nuances of Truus Schröder-Schräder’s life. The house reminds us to ask what narratives are overlooked in the histories of other buildings?
Figure 3. Publicity photograph promoting Koolhaas Houselife, dir. Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoîne, 2013, depicting Guadalupe Acedo, the person who cleans the house in Bordeaux, France, designed by Rem Koolhaas’s firm, OMA, which is the subject of the film. Photograph courtesy http://www.bekalemoine.com/.
The “Levittowner” tract house and Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, for example, have nothing in common stylistically. Yet both assert class and/or racial privilege. Both embody able-bodied domestic bliss, heteronormativity, and whiteness. From Dianne Harris, the class learned how the design of the suburban U.S. kitchen homogenized cultural difference in the decades after World War II. Appliance design and cabinet layout forced a certain kind of cooking and precluded many kinds of more ethnic cuisine. (To one example from my life, my grandparents had a stove in Mexico with a built-in hot plate between the burners to keep tortillas warm. It was great. This was a typical appliance in Mexico yet I was unable to acquire one in New York.)
Finally, the class considered queer space. Queer space is not defined by its physical form but by its use: in particular, the appropriation of existing spaces for purposes other than for which they were intended. As social historian George Chauncey details, public bathrooms become hook-up spots and beaches became important cruising venues. Other ephemeral activity, such as the drag Balls in New York City in the late 1980s (as seen in Jennie Livingston’s film Paris is Burning) similarly redefine space and, in the process, what constitutes a family. As the exhibition Gay Gotham at the Museum of the City of New York showed, it is important to uncover the lost history of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities. This is a story of countercultural space that reminds the reader that there is a back story or counter-narrative to even the most familiar Hollywood tales (think Greta Garbo.) Sara Ahmed reminds us that Simone de Beauvoir once noted that one is not “born straight” but “becomes straight”. So what are the cultural markers that guide us? And how does architecture play a role?
Architecture has long been elite, white, male, and heteronormative, and the mundane is often ignored as discussions of the aesthetics prevail over the social. This embedded inequality is all too common. Is it naïve to think that after the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1968, widespread racism in the profession, and among historians, ended? Or that after the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, architecture became more inclusive than, say, the days when it was hard for women to even be clients? Indeed, to take another personal example, I have never forgotten that my mother went to the bank in the late 1970s hoping to get loan so she could buy some land. The loan officer told her to come back with her husband. As if only married couples could buy land! My mother took her money out of the bank that day.
It is high time architecture studies become more inclusive and more voices permeate discussion. As part of that, we must consider the extent to which cultural forces guide us to design and do history in ways that obfuscate difference. By the end of the semester, the students in my class became sensitized to their environments, more observant about history, and attuned to the ways in which normative narratives are constructed. Reflecting back, I hope that all of us—as readers, historians, designers, critics, and users of architecture—will learn to always ask, what is the back story? What are the power dynamics at work? Who is doing the designing, or writing the history, and for whom? And who is being left out in the process? In short, how can we practice architecture and architectural history for the 99%? By posing these questions, the civil rights and feminist movements—renewed today through Black Lives Matter and Me Too—can genuinely, and permanently, reshape the field.
