Architectures of Deafness, Disability, and Neurodiversity

Architects, architectural regulation, and architectural scholarship are increasingly acknowledging the differing spatialities of different bodies, and the effects of different bodies on the making and inhabitation of the built environment.Disability scholars like Eli Clare, Margaret Price, and Sami Schalk use the term 'bodymind' to emphasise the interdependence of embodiment, on one hand, and ways of thinking and knowing, on the other.Diverse bodily knowledges of the world help us to imagine it differently.For architects, imagining with Deafness, Disability and Neurodiversity in mind not only has potential to make the world more accessible, but can open up fresh creative opportunities for design.This special issue of arq is curated by Stylianos Giamarelos and Nina Vollenbrker.In their opening 'perspective ' (pp.224-233), Giamarelos and Vollenbrker introduce Lennard Davis's argument that disability 'is not a minor issue that relates to a relatively small number of unfortunate people' but rather 'is part of a historically constructed discourse, an ideology of thinking about the body under certain historical circumstances' .As a result, Davis shows, architects should not only consider 'the person using the wheelchair or the Deaf person but the set of social, historical, economic, and cultural processes that regulate and control the way we think about and think through the body' .As Giamarelos and Vollenbrker write, the papers gathered in this arq understand that architectural processes can also be seen as central producers of disability.'In other words, disability is a social, historical, economic and cultural construction, and also very much a spatial construction.' The authors whose work is collected below grapple with the built environment's long-standing entwinement with ableism.Addressing the partialities of architectural cultures and histories, they examine how we might, in the words of Jos Boys in Doing Disability Differently, 'design -and think -from disability, rather than for it' .