Accessing Design / Designing Access
Hannah Wong
Decoding the Conversation_February 2024
A conversation with Hannah Wong
February 2024
The vast array of initiatives in the architectural field reveals ongoing efforts to include diverse voices in classrooms, practices, and beyond. Yet rarely do we examine the infrastructure of long-established rules and conventions based on which architects operate and design the built environment. How do these ingrained frameworks affect designers and users of diverse backgrounds? Are there alternative approaches to design that are yet to be explored?
Hannah Wong speaks with AWW guest editor Paul DeFazio about her experience as the first legally blind student at Harvard Graduate School of Design, her approach to disability as a designer, and the promise of access intimacy for pedagogy and practice.
Paul DeFazio (PD): When you’re applying to jobs, or when you applied to school, how and when do you choose to disclose your disability?
Hannah Wong (HW): Because architecture is such a visual field, being blind has some implications—and people are either going to accept that or not. If a school or an employer is going to reject me for my disability, I’d prefer to get that out of the way sooner than later so that I can be in a place that is welcoming and supportive.
PD: Your graduate application essay took a strong position on disability. Disability is generally an understudied topic in architecture schools; there are few (if any) instances where we get to learn about it.
HW: Disability in architecture is often reduced to a set of specific requirements and narrow ideas about access. The reality is that these things are not geared towards a more creative, generative understanding of architecture. As a student, one can make a project about accessibility without taking a stance on how it fits into a model based on standards and regulations.
PD: Does disability ever generate other ways of designing? For me, work often takes longer—and architecture schools are notorious for workloads far beyond any student’s capacity.
HW: It does take longer to do certain aspects of the work. And my instructors often encourage me to explore non-traditional forms of representation as a way to circumvent that, but when you’re saddled with so much work, coming up with new ways of representing architecture can feel like a luxury. So far, with the exception of model making (I don’t use the woodshop or power tools), I’ve tended to follow more traditional ways of working.
PD: There are conventions (or expectations) in architecture, whether at work or in school, that don’t work for people with disabilities. Model making is a great example of that. Another example that I often encounter is the use of lineweights in drawings. If an instructor prefers lighter lineweights over bolder ones, it can result in legibility issues.
HW: Sometimes I can't read my own drawings.
PD: I think there needs to be more flexibility built into those conventions.
HW: People with disabilities are perceived as a small minority in the field so it’s presumed that the conventions in place work for most people. What if there were alternative means of representation, or, more radically, what if there were no drawings at all? How many people might that benefit? When I make drawings using the usual conventions, I don’t make those drawings for myself. I make them for other people. By ignoring my own needs, I wonder how many other people's needs I'm also ignoring.
I’ve had professors in the past who understood that something not working for me could become a moment of learning for them; but getting from there to broader, systemic change is a whole different process.
PD: You co-founded Design.Able, a student-run group at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) that works towards supporting inclusive design practice and dismantling ableism. How would you describe the organization and what do you find is the importance of its mission and work within architecture schools?
HW: Design.Able has a double meaning: It’s about the idea that design and ability are able to come together, and it’s about understanding that disability is designable in the built environment.
One of the reasons I started the organization was because I was really lonely. People tend to congratulate those who are the first to do or achieve something, but no one wants to tell you that you might be the only one. I wanted to create a safe space where people who support disability justice could come together and create a network of support—not just for me but for other students who were feeling marginalized—and address the ways in which institutions often make students feel like they have to compromise certain parts of themselves.
PD: What does Design.Able do to achieve that?
HW: At the GSD, there are not enough people with disabilities, so Design.Able is composed mostly of allies. At the moment, the group is very small; I don’t think we’re doing as much as we could if we had more people. Among other things, the group has hosted a symposium on disability and dance, held workshops on the accessibility of graphics standards and presentations, and invited a number of speakers, including Sara Hendren, Bojana Coklyat, Finnegan Shannon, and Mel Y. Chen.
I am especially proud of the workshops that we’ve organized on how to make print graphics accessible. People generally want to learn and do the right thing, but they often don’t know how to do that or where to start. Disability justice is not a distant, mythical goal. In the context of academic institutions (where everything is siloed, strict, and rooted in tradition), small actions like increasing the font on a presentation or giving visual descriptions to images can make for meaningful steps forward. These kinds of actions can spread and become instances where you can recognize that someone thought about accessibility.
PD: Amanda Bagg’s work with voice-over or Christine Sun Kim’s work with captions show how shifting beyond conventions can become more than just a way to provide access to the content—it can give a project another dimension. You mentioned that you’ve been thinking about the concept of access intimacy lately. For readers unfamiliar with access intimacy, how would you define it? What does it mean to you?
HW: Access intimacy (coined by writer and educator Mia Mingus) refers to the forms of comfort experienced by an individual when their access needs are understood by another person. It’s the feeling you get when you have needs that don’t have to be verbalized for someone to understand them. Although it’s often described in relation to people with disabilities, it can be experienced by anyone. It can be found in relationships built over time, in people with differing political awareness, and so on.
PD: What’s an example that you experience in your daily life?
HW: When someone is describing a drawing or is drawing on a piece of paper to show me, they might instinctively scoot closer to get the drawing within my field of vision without me having to say anything. Even if I still can’t see the drawing, the act of scooting closer feels like a form of access intimacy because I sense that they want me to understand what they’re talking about and are thinking about my needs.
It’s important to communicate your needs—especially needs related to access—but there is a lot of emotional labor associated with doing that. Having somebody else thinking about your needs can be powerful; it creates a more supportive environment because you don’t have to always be doing that work yourself.
PD: Access intimacy as a term sounds like a big concept, and it can be, but it’s also present in the small moments and gestures, as you’ve alluded to. I would venture to say that part of the reason why we value these small victories so much is that we are often going without our access needs being met, so having them met at all makes those moments feel important.
HW: That’s certainly the case. People often don’t have their access needs met, which makes access intimacy more special. Another interesting question is about how we might go about forming access intimacy with those who don’t naturally come to it. It’s easy to have access intimacy with someone who intuitively understands your disability, but what about forming it with those who ignore your access needs or don’t have experience providing access for others?
PD: How do you think access intimacy might inform a design practice?
HW: I think asking questions is an important part of that process: As design professionals, how are we thinking about what we’re designing for other people? What kinds of questions are we asking the users, the inhabitants, whoever we might be designing for? What are we trying to interrogate and understand and what are we going to assume?
I think it’s also important to acknowledge that, even though the conversation about designing for access is expanding to include more than just regulations and standards—and incorporate concepts like access intimacy—the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was a huge win when it was instituted. The ADA generated a mobilization for disability that we had never seen in American culture, and it remains enormously impactful today. As a community, disabled people take a lot of pride in that work.
At the same time, the perception that there are minimum standards to meet—and then call it a day—can lead to a sense of complacency among designers. Standards and regulations also ignore the diversity of needs within the disability community; they imply that by instituting these very specific criteria we're going to make things more beneficial for everyone.
PD: Exactly. It’s not universal. Even in the visually-impaired (VI) community someone might need a lot of light to see, another person might be photosensitive, someone might be both, or see well at a very specific light level. It’s difficult to accommodate all of that without a lot of flexibility and ingenuity.
HW: There's also a lot to be said about those who are not represented in the standards, or, more gravely, what it means for people when those standards go directly against their needs.
PD: What disability topics are you thinking about in your work right now?
HW: One of my primary interests is circulation, thinking about how to get around spaces, how to direct people without telling them where to go. How can we build spaces that do that and that make sense conceptually?
I’m also thinking about representation—specifically the visual representation of the non-visual aspects in the built environment, and the non-visual representation of the visual aspects in the built environment. I hope to continue researching multi-sensory design techniques and explore them through my work in the future.
Hannah Wong is an M.Arch candidate and the first legally blind student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she has founded the student collective Design.Able. She is also a project manager at Critical Design Lab.
Paul DeFazio is an M.Arch candidate at Rice School of Architecture.
Seeing Things
Shantel Blakely
Decoding the Conversation_February 2024
Apollo and Daphne at Mestre
Shantel Blakely
February 2024
In the summer of 2022, I went to see the Splügen Brau warehouse in Mestre (in the mainland of Venice opposite the historic islands), one of several industrial buildings that often come up in an online search of the architect Angelo Mangiarotti. After a slow-moving journey along the back streets of Mestre, there I was. As I stood looking at the building, I was reminded of the myth of Apollo and Daphne and the eponymous sculpture by the Baroque sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini. As the story goes, Daphne was a forest nymph and a huntress who had chosen a celibate life. The god Eros, out of spite, caused his rival Apollo to fall in love with Daphne at first sight; Apollo gave chase. In flight, Daphne called for help. Her father, the river god Peneus, turned Daphne into a laurel tree. She survived, however encased and immobile. The transformation did not deter Apollo, who paid regular visits to Daphne, took the laurel as a personal emblem, and made this tree an evergreen whose leaves would not die. Bernini's Apollo and Daphne and Mangiarotti's Splügen Brau belong to different fields (sculpture and architecture) and different times and contexts (17th and 20th centuries), yet Bernini’s sculpture and the myth it represents provide terms through which to better understand what I saw—and just as importantly, did not see—as I faced Mangiarotti’s warehouse.
Photograph of the Splügen Brau warehouse. Giorgio Casali, Domus.
The Mangiarotti-designed warehouse sits by a canal that leads to the Venice archipelago. It was built for the beer company Splügen Brau, based a few hundred kilometers away, to provide a mainland depot where beverage cases destined for Venice could be transferred from trucks to boats. Like many of Mangiarotti's buildings, this design was a collaboration with another architect, Bruno Morassutti. The building owes much to a structural engineer as well: Aldo Favini. Its most expressive feature is a roof that hovers spectacularly above the canal. Building on his structural experimentation with prestressed concrete at Baranzate Church, Favini integrated construction method, load-bearing requirements, and architectural expression into a unified system.
Mangiarotti standing at the lower right corner of the photo, beneath the roof. Giorgio Casali, Domus.
What I was not able to see, standing by the warehouse, was the building in its original state—as I had come to know it in the photographs of Giorgio Casali. Casali was the in-house architectural photographer at Domus from 1951 to 1983 and documented the warehouse in detail in 1967. In Casali’s photos, one can see Favini’s interpretation of a trilith structure, its monumental system of beam and roof elements resting on eight slender columns (all of which sits atop a concrete plinth). Freed from structural necessity, the building’s enclosure is composed of (comparatively lightweight) corrugated, sliding metal panels. The roof overhang creates a shaded, sheltered space which extends farther out on the long axis than on the short one, and farthest of all on the canal end of the building. Seen from afar, the exposed ends of the roof system read like a slab resting on a series of beams. Casali’s close-up photos reveal a more sophisticated assemblage: Borrowing from the Hennebique method (devised to reinforce concrete against tensile forces), Favini conceived of the structure as a series of integrated, precast concrete components that could be craned into place.
Favini’s concrete structural component being craned into place. Giorgio Casali, Domus.
Details of the Hennebique method. Domus.
The resulting short-end elevation of each beam is a trapezoidal, jug-like shape, with the bottom of the beam wider than the top.
The symbolic nature of these elements, whose exposed ends read like caricaturesque representations of the beams themselves, underscores the analogy between Mangiarotti’s modern concrete building and architecture’s classical paradigm. (In classical architecture, elements like the triglyph are stone representations of the roof joists common in wood construction.) Casali’s photographs of the warehouse are also eerily reminiscent of depictions of the “primitive hut,” with its elemental structural system plainly visible.
Soane office, RA lecture drawing to illustrate the primitive hut: Perspective of a primitive hut, with flat roof, d: 20. May 1807. Sir John Soane's Museum Collection Online.
Daphne (”wrapped in thin smooth bark”; “her heart still beating” beneath it) came to mind when I considered how much of the detail revealed in Casali’s photos had become attenuated or muted in the building before me: Atop the original roof were added two additional layers, made of sheet metal and shallowly pitched; the plinth was boldly painted in yellow and white safety stripes; the enclosure was expanded to the edge of the porch on the canal side; and a new metal shed was built at the other end. These additions obscure the original design of the warehouse, but it continues to be used in the same way as when it was built. Certain features have remained, like the pale pink paint on the columns, now more faint than before, and the exposed, jug-like ends of the beams which are still visible along the roof's edge. With nothing more to go on than a distant view in an online navigation software, the features that remain visible or unchanged are what enabled me to identify (and find) the building in the first place. The timelessness of its elements blurs the distinction between function and decoration, allowing the building to remain and live in spirit—like Daphne, the nymph-become-tree.
Splügen Brau warehouse at Mestre. Photograph by author, July 2022.
If Daphne in the myth is symbolic of the building’s gradual encasement as described above, Bernini's rendition of the myth in sculpture reveals something else: When comparing Casali’s photos of Splügen Brau to the building in the flesh, it is immediately evident that the open space around the building has been lost. Casali’s images rely not only on the building for their impact and legibility, but also, like Bernini’s two-figured freestanding sculpture, on the availability of open space around it; the photographer’s own movement, as he shifts from one vantage point to another, is recorded in the photographs. The images reveal Casali’s use of open space as he walks a short distance away and peers up at the building, as he (probably) proceeds to walk farther away and turn back to shoot it again, and finally, as he crosses the canal and views it through fronds of grass. In his close-up shots, one can picture Casali standing on the building's plinth as he captures the connection between column and wall. Some of his close-up photos dissolve into patterns so abstract that they are hard to identify as one part or another.
Photograph of the Splügen Brau warehouse. Giorgio Casali, Domus.
Casali's photographs underscore the wealth of space Mangiarotti had at his disposal, and the role this played in the experience of the building; as if the architect anticipated and welcomed an ambulatory perceiving viewer, rewarding attention with gradually revealed information. In this respect the warehouse also has qualities in common with Baroque architecture (with its characteristic many-centered spaces exemplified in Bernini's own Sant'Andrea al Quirinale). Much like these distant works, Splügen Brau lends itself to being understood as a totality by way of the viewer's displacement in space.
In Bernini’s sculpture, details of the Apollo and Daphne myth are revealed as the viewer revolves around the object: Apollo is mid-stride, weight on his right foot; he has just reached Daphne and his left arm reaches forward and around her while Daphne, her feet elevated a few inches above the ground, is not quite running, nor standing. Daphne’s head is turned to the right and tilted back, her torso bent back while her arms reach up and forward. Bernini's frozen narrative allows a viewer to see the situation from Apollo's side, and—by moving around the work to the other side—from Daphne's. Apollo’s facial expression is calm, his gestures gentle, his limbs graceful. Daphne's forehead, too, has a youthful serenity, but as Apollo embraces her, the branches emerge from her hands, the roots shoot from her toes, the bark wraps her legs. Her downturned eyes show no sign of what is happening to her but the horror is there in her mouth, which prepares for a scream.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne. Photograph by author at Palazzo Borghese, Rome, June 2022.
As the spectator continues to revolve around the sculpture, a series of physical details are disclosed seemingly on a spiraling line, from Apollo’s right arm trailing gently behind him to Daphne's outstretched right arm reaching in front of her. Shards of bark around Daphne may serve as supports, but they are ingeniously part of the story as well, much more integrated and discreet than the stumps of wood that prop up many classical sculptures. There are no parts of Apollo and Daphne that the viewer is not meant to notice. Similarly on the Splügen Brau warehouse—as Casali captured it—each elevation has a distinctive face.
In the space around the Splügen Brau warehouse, fences cut the land into portions now filled by new buildings, including a factory in the field where Casali once regarded the depot from across the canal. At this point, one can neither view the warehouse from a distance nor walk around it. But just as the god paid tribute to the laurel tree, the owner keeps the building in use. The warehouse sits in a carapace of piecemeal additions that conceal its parts and mute its expressions just as the bark enclosed the nymph within a tree. Luckily for us, it still circulates as freely as ever in photographs.
Shantel Blakely is an architectural historian, architect, and educator. She is an Assistant Professor at the Rice University School of Architecture.
Eavesdropping on Architecture, or “I’ll Have What They’re Having”
John McMorrough
Decoding the Conversation_February 2024
John McMorrough
February 2024
In architecture, talk is powerful. In studios, at final reviews, over napkin sketches with clients, or in front of a screen with co-workers, these fleeting exchanges are a repository of architecture’s possible truths—before drawings, before models, and before buildings. In their reproduction in recording and text, but especially in the pervasive conditioning of social media, the fidelity of these exchanges is elusive, and it is hard to apprehend the original intentions ex-situ. Following Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, their capture changes their character. Through the artifice of its reproduction, the timbre of expression comes to the recipient with resonances far removed from their original utterance. At best, one is eavesdropping on conversations only partially heard.
“Conversation in Deli,” Rob Reiner, When Harry Met Sally, 1989.
A notorious overheard conversation from cinema history is helpful here. In “When Harry Met Sally” (1989), a somewhat distinctive delicatessen conversation about the possibility of platonic love between a man (Harry) and a woman (Sally) culminates with a vigorous demonstration of “faking it” (a well-rehearsed simulation by Sally). The incident illustrates how familiar intimacy can become public spectacle (and is there a better way to characterize the radical escalation of architecture from notion to edifice?). However, even more aperçu is the culmination of the scene, when a woman at a nearby table, coming to the conversation late—and being aware only of its conclusion—says to her waiter, “I’ll have what she’s having.”
Like the woman in the deli, we often find ourselves as distant followers of these architectural conversations, hearing only the highest pitch of proclamations that make it through the aether. With only partial information, we decide if we agree with what is offered, and, if we will also have what they’re having. The menu of recent offerings is an array of ideological flavors, all of which come in recurrent conceptual combinations. In identifying across courses the major ingredients of seriousness and play (which, like sweet and sour, seem best in combination), the resulting taste profiles have some recurring notes: a flavor of the ordinary, but only as reconstructed; a suspicion of irony, but an underlying appreciation of its uses; and a hunger for the real, as stewed in the reduction of the digital. The consistency within variety speaks to a common gastronomy of practices at this juncture, a collapse of old dualities into new frothy mixtures.
If, as eavesdroppers on these architectural exchanges, we are the proverbial lady at the next table, then who are Sally or Harry? At this point, the analogy completes and confounds us, for we are each the actor, the observer, and the audience, as architectural talk is for, with, and by architects. Such a limited audience is not lamentable; rather, what must be understood is that the passion of the bull session, among those who know and care, constitutes the fire that fuels the discipline. As long as the talk is fresh, count me in; I will continue to have more of what they’re having.
John McMorrough is an architect who writes about the relationship between contemporary culture and design methodology, with treatments of architecture extended practices (as buildings, but also work in complementary media such as installations, films, and other structured narratives). John is a partner of studioAPT and a professor of architecture at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan.
More is More
Francis Aguillard
Decoding the Conversation_February 2024
HdM’s Website Overhaul
Francis Aguillard
February 2024
Along with a bizarre mix of product spec sheets, ArchDaily posts, Gmail, house sets, and maybe the project page of one or two design firms, a recent mainstay in my tabs has been Herzog & de Meuron’s (HdM) new website, unveiled in early 2023. If their previous website was esoteric, poetic, and frenetic, this one is direct, soothing, and amenable.
HdM’s former website deserves as much attention as the new one; even as recently as 2019, it had all the energy and UX flair (and not devoid of the usual impracticality) of a trendy academic firm. A clean white background and simple Swiss typeface filled with project windows at the command of a mouse click—each one layered atop another in chaotic fashion. Many architects and designers remember the site fondly. It created a visual display that re-presented how we experienced the internet—always halfway between focus and pandemonium, vaguely aware of the wake of information behind us, creating mental collages as idiosyncratic as each one of us. Or perhaps we loved that HdM, a large, established, and well-oiled firm, could keep all the youthful energy of a start-up in their website.
Former Herzog & de Meuron website. Screenshot by author.
Now decidedly more professional, HdM has approached their revamped website as a public and professional good that seems to prioritize ease of navigation and a certain degree of simplicity over eccentricity and experimentation. Perhaps the transition from esoteric and lofty to more straightforward and practical mirrors a general trend within architectural communication and design, favoring plain, no-nonsense language and messaging.
This shift in language proves most effective in the website section that addresses sustainability—I’d implore you to spend some time with it. Given HdM’s long-standing commitment to building rehabilitation, responsible urbanism, and local material usage, the statement reads as one of the few serious ones posted today, defining sustainability as more than just material usage or operational and embodied carbon.
Similar to its previous incarnation, the site has nearly every project HdM has ever done (619 at last count) cataloged chronologically. #001 dates back to 1978, a simple attic conversion in Riehen, Switzerland; #036, 1986, cladding for a house in Fischingen, Germany; #119, 1994, the Central Signal Box in Basel; #226 the Bird’s Nest; #305 TriBeCa’s 56 Leonard Street—and so on and so forth.
#001, Attic Conversion (1978). Elevation. Herzog & de Meuron.
Once one navigates the genealogical tour de force and selects a specific project, an unprecedented amount of material is available for viewing: finished photographs, construction photos, overall plans, models, detail sections, low-res 35mm design process photos, etc. The abundance of images is one of the site’s biggest departures from the previous iteration. In 2019, we were lucky to get four images of a project. Now, HdM has opened the floodgates, welcoming us into their world and process.
If the old website had all the eroticism of that Hinge match whose Instagram only displays elusive pictures with the occasional toned body part eliding the frame, the new website has embraced its identity as a silver fox who has a lot to teach you, if only you would be a good boy and sit down and listen.
#160, Laban Dance Center (2003). Studying a 1:2 model of the shell of the building. Herzog & de Meuron.
#160, Laban Dance Center (2003). Design process & prototyping. Herzog & de Meuron.
HdM’s “more is more” approach situates their brand temporally while collectively framing the act of architecture. We see employees throughout the firm’s history actively participating in the design process, the public enjoying the spaces, and the workers who built them. The celebration of the construction worker in project after project and image after image is perhaps one of the most refreshing aspects of HdM’s new website. Whether consciously or not, architects often distance themselves from the workers who construct their buildings, but HdM brings the laborer back into frame.
#319, Naturbad Riehen (2014). Construction photo. Herzog & de Meuron.