Our brief look through the BAL collection showed how many areas around disability and architecture remain to be explored. Here, we will briefly pick out 4, to begin to suggest future research that urgently needs to be done:

• how building details illustrate attitudes to, and impacts on, not just the experiences of disabled people, but everyone
• how architecture is part of the 'social construction' of disability as a particular category of difference, which comes to define what constitutes 'normality'; and reflects changing ideas about what makes an 'ideal' community
• how buildings articulate certain ideas about work
• some of the issues about design and deafness

The designs buildings relating to disability which can be found in the BAL for drawings, photographs, books and periodicals collections demonstrate extraordinary shifts in typology and form. By looking at these designs we see how society defines the normal citizen and how it chooses to accommodate the individuals which do not fit these criteria. We see that in some periods of history architecture has been instrumental – even central - in constructing visions of society, in incarcerating, segregating and categorising people because of their differences. The built environment is not simply something which needs to be made accessible or modified for its many different users. It has had (and may sometimes still have) an active role in shaping that environment, in realising social policy and legislative change, and in constructing our ideas of who and what is normal. While it is tempting to imagine that we have moved on from some of the more disturbing designs produced by architects of the past (the celebrated architect of St Pancras Station Sir George Gilbert Scott established his career by building more than 50 workhouses, as did other RIBA presidents) we might also use this historical material to reflect on the current forces, beliefs and legislation which shape our own architectural principles.

Between the loosely planned space of the Lazaretto of Milan where leprosy or plague ridden inmates could move and interact freely and the heavily partitioned and monitored organisation of Claybury Asylum (illustated below) lies, according to Michel Foucault, a huge shift between exiling contagious individuals to leper colonies outside the city and subjecting individuals deemed abnormal to surveillance, categorisation and segregation in institutions within the city.

Hundreds of these vast institutions were built throughout Europe in the nineteenth century to incarcerate groups of people who were either unable to provide for themselves or seemed to pose some kind of threat to society including people with physical and mental disabilities. In the UK at least, policy moved away from the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 which mixed all kinds of people in workhouses towards ever greater segregation requiring separate institutions for different categories. The Lazaretto of Milan was built to accommodate lepers, who because of their contagious disease, were expected to live outside the community.

Individual cells are arranged around the perimeter with ad hoc buildings and a church in the large open space. What is also striking to our modern eyes is that this is little more than an enclosed space. Inmates are not organised into blocks, there is no central administration and they appear to be able move and interact with each other freely within their environment.

In his wonderful book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage Books second edition 1995) Michel Foucault contrasts the treatment of the leper with the way that many cities later treated plague victims. Instead of banishing them to places outside the city like these, the authorities contained them in their own homes, regulating their movements and keeping them under close surveillance. For Foucault these are two very different social models – the leper is merely confined, while the plague victim is disciplined. He writes:

The leper was caught up in a practice of rejection, or exile-enclosure; he was left to this doom in a mass among which it was useless to differentiate; those sick of the plague were caught up in a meticulous tactical partitioning in which individual differentiations were the constricting effects of a power that multiplied, articulated and subdivided itself; the great confinement on the one hand; the correct training on the other.’ (p.198)

Foucault suggests that ideas of exclusion which arose in relation to the contagious leper, now form the basis of our categorisation of the normal and abnormal, and that the disciplinary model replaced the exile model. How are these models reflected in the built environment? To what extent is the disciplinary model still influential today?

We cannot ignore the fact that the reality of much 19th and 20th century legislation was the long term incarceration of huge numbers of people including those with disabilities. But we can also see that the implementation of these laws allowed policy makers and architects to explore a range of different forms of building. These environments do not develop over the years like the buildings, villages and towns we usually inhabit. Instead they are the designer’s vision of how a community of people, separated out from ‘normal’ life, ought to live.

A fascinating aspect of the designs we can see in the BAL is that they offer insights into the architectural visions of ideal communities in different historical periods. Claybury Asylum shows us a vision of an ordered ‘disciplined’ society where people are constantly observed and categorised and restrictions are placed on their movements and who they come into contact with. Its great long interconnecting corridors allowed inspectors to do their rounds through the building without retracing their steps, and its ‘airing yards’ were all segregated so that people of different categories would never come into contact with each other. The separation of male and female ensured inmates would not produce offspring.

Alt Scherbitz Asylum, also housing the mentally ill, is from the same period but is complete with factories, farms, landscaping and a variety of residences and an existing village. By the early 20th century this garden city model was catching on in the UK too.

In Meanwood Park Colony different categories of the ‘mentally defective’ were housed in ‘villas’ spread throughout parkland.

Much more recently, Edward Cullinans’ design for Westoning Manor, a MacIntyre home and workshop for adults with learning difficulties, returns to the medieval typology of the cloistered courtyard for his vision of the ideal community.

What models of community do our contemporary buildings for people with disabilities suggest? And do they tell us anything about our contemporary ideals and beliefs about how people should live together?

Other Sources to look at for ‘changing visions of the ideal community’

Samuel Tuke (1819) Plans for pauper lunatic asylum at Wakefield, with Tuke's practial hints BOOKS

Lewis Vulliamy (C. 1838) St Pancras Almshouse, Camden DRAWINGS

Jenkins, Cassidy, Wigglesworth (1900) Report on Asylums of the Continent BOOKS

George Hine (1901) Asylums and Asylum Planning BOOKS

Clough Williams-Ellis (1910) Home for Feeble-minded Boys, Hildenborough DRAWINGS

Clough Williams-Ellis (1910) Home for Feeble-minded Girls, Oxford DRAWINGS

J. M. Sheppard (1941) ‘Meanwood Park Colony’ in The Builder October 1941 pp.303-9 PERIODICALS

‘De Drie Hoven Housing Complex for Elderly and Disabled People, Amsterdam’ (1964-74) in Herman van Bergerijk (1997 Herman Hertzberger Birkhauser pp.42-5 BOOKS

J. Thompson and G. Goldin (1975) The Hosptial: A Social and Architectural History
Yale University Press BOOKS

‘Camphill Movement and the Steiner Influence’ in Architects Journal 1977 Sept 21, pp.529-31 PERIODICALS

Michel Foucault (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison Penguin

Edward Cullinan (1982) Westoning Workshop’ in Architects Journal vol.175 Jun 2 1982 pp.46-9 PERIODICALS

Robin Middleton (1992) 'Sickness, madness and crime as grounds of form' in AA files no 24 1992, pp.16-30 PERIODICALS

B. Howson (1993) Houses of Noble Poverty; a History of the English Almshouse Bellevue BOOKS

The shop windows drawn as a variation on Michael Searles’ elevation in 1789-90 for an asylum (school) for the deaf and dumb in London show that work and buildings for people with disabilities have a long relationship. For nineteenth century philanthropists, work offered people with impairments a way out of poverty and being a ‘burden’ for their families and a diversion from the difficulties of their situation. Employment thought suitable for the deaf included printing and shoemaking, and the blind were taught to make nets, wind thread, knot and to play and tune musical instruments. This elevation of an asylum for the deaf and dumb by Michael Searles is the earliest design for a building for people with disabilities that has been found in the collection. It was probably designed for a site on the Old Kent Road in London and although a school for the deaf and dumb opened in 1792 it was not to Searles’ design. There are no plans of the building but we can assume that, as with so many other buildings like this, we are looking at the administrative block at the front where the director would have had his rooms. Flaps pasted over the ground floor windows show two options, one for plain windows and one for bays typical of shop fronts. It seems likely then that Searles wanted to show that the front rooms could be used to sell merchandise made, presumably, by the residents. Indeed Mogg’s guide to London, published in 1844 writes of the school:

Here these unfortunates are not only taught to read, write, speak and cipher but also various mechanic arts, to enable them to obtain subsistence when they are discharged from the establishment.

But there are many questions around disability and work. Some theorists of disability (many disabled themselves) have gone so far as to suggest that it is western capitalism which has produced our notion of disability. With the industrial revolution, they argue, came new forms of work for which disabled people were perceived as being of lesser capability and therefore of less value. Where disabled people were employed, it was for the worse, most repetitive and poorly paid activities. In an architect’s report of their proposed workhouse where inmates were incarcerated because they were destitute, we read the shocking details of the work that were supposed to do:

Pauper’s own clothes In the upper floor of this Block is designed large Stores with shelving, and numbered divisions for the storage of Inmates’ own Clothes, which are taken from them when they leave the Receiving Wards for their respective Wards in the Workhouse.

Male Vagrants At the South end of this Block is arranged accommodation for Male Vagrants, which are so designed that the Vagrants enter first the Waiting Room where they are examined by the Attendant, and when admitted, bathed in one of the baths adjoining, their own clothes being removed and dried or disinfected in the Fumigating Chamber. Each tramp arriving, will after taking the inevitable bath, be introduced to a separate sleeping cell, which is warmed and provided with every necessary.

Adjoining each male’s cell is a work cell, into which he is admitted in the morning to perform a certain quantity of labour. This he is required to accomplish before leaving, either grinding corn or breaking a given quantity of stones; the test indicated for corn grinding being outside the cell and showing in Corridor.

Ipswich Workhouse transcript

By the mid-20th century, employment for disabled people tended to be articulated less around the deliberately punishing regimes of the workhouse, and more around charitable organisations aimed at 'helping'. Landauer’s stylish 1934 design for a Tottenham Court Road shop front displays furniture made by the blind and encourages customers to ‘Help the Blind’ in huge letters.

In the MacIntyre home designed in 1989 by Edward Cullinan adult mentally handicapped residents work in the in-house bakery which has a small cafe open to the public. In an excellent article in the Architects Journal one appraisal commends this scheme and the opportunity it gives its residents to engage in ‘normal life’ and be part of the local community. The other, while admiring the design, writes that Cullinans ‘have built MacIntyre an aesthetically pleasing gilded cage,’ that repeats the segregationist policies that have been in force throughout the twentieth century and fails to find ways for people to live in ‘real flats’ and earn ‘real wages’. Wherever you may stand on this debate, it is clear that in a society in which everybody is expected to be in gainful employment there is a lot at stake in the issue of work. Other Sources to look at for ‘building for work’

Kathryn Morrison (1999) The Workhouse; A Study of Poor Law Buildings in Britain English Heritage BOOKS

Salter, Adams, Newcombe, (1869-99) Ipswich Workhouse ARCHIVES

RIBA Competition Brief for Epileptic Colony, Langho, Lancs. (1901) ARCHIVES

Bristol Blind Asylum (1938) in Architect and Building News 1938 Jun 17 p. 338 PERIODICALS

Edward Cullinan (1989) MacIntyre Home, Milton Keynes, PHOTOGRAPHS Edward Cullinan (1989) MacIntyre Home, Milton Keynes, in Architects Journal Aug 1989 pp.33-45 PERIODICALS

David Jenkins (1990) ‘Highgate Haven’ on Tim Ronalds building for handicapped gardners in Architects Journal, 12 September 1990 pp.46-61 PERIODICALS

Brian Sims (1999) 'All things equal' on Aspire centre for spinal injury, Foster and Partners
in Building Services, vol 21, no.1, 1999, pp.14-18 (detailed with accessible work areas) PERIODICALS

The two lively photographs shown here, of Richard Cloudesley School, Islington, London, designed by GLC architects focus on the children’s physical interaction with the building and the ways they use it. The details are modest – a double handrail along the wall or a low slung table – and they show how thoughtful design at 1:1 (and probably lots of consultation and discussion) can make a great deal of difference to the ease and confidence with which people with disabilities can use the built environment. When Richard Cloudesley School was completed in 1974 there were no statutory requirements and little in the way of guidance for building with disabilities in mind. But GLC architects found simple ways to make a space which children could use with confidence.

Cassie Herschel-Shorland, access and museum design consultant commented that these would still be examples of best practice, and even today the school website describes how ‘The corridors and doorways allow easy access for wheelchairs and there are handrails along the walls for the children who need extra support when walking’. One of their key aims is ‘to provide an environment that allows for success and which increases self-confidence and capacity for enjoyment.’

You can see many more photographs of Richard Cloudesley in the Architectural Press Archive at the BAL and might want to look out for some of the other detailed design ideas.

In the UK, since the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) from 1995 access to buildings is a right of all users of the built environment and we must now make sure that the details of our designs allow everybody to access them.

The ramp to the physiotherapy pool in Evans and Shalev’s 1988 Home for the Handicapped in London has clearly been designed with wheelchair access in mind. In fact the number of tiled ramps in this small building appear, at least in the axonometric drawings, to be quite overwhelming and clearly mark the building out as ‘different’. For some designers, the disabilities of their clients can become the generators of their architecture. OMA’s house in Bordeaux for a wheelchair user with its famous platform lift at its centre is a brilliantly creative example. Bruce Stratton’s design for a School for the Blind in Canada takes the use of colour and handrails to the limit making an architectural tapestry out of visual and tactile requirements. Sverre Fehn makes a whole design philosophy out of deafness to inform the degrees of enclosure and light of the different spaces in his beautiful residential school for the deaf. All these strategies could just as well be used in buildings which are not designed for particular disabilities – since they are used by disabled and able bodied people alike. Detailed design is where we can think through the direct contact between building and bodies and is particularly important in relation to disability and architecture. Should we use it make difference, even celebrate difference or to find solutions which are as inclusive as possible? And what should we do about conflicts? Textured pavements are a great advantage for blind people but can cause problems for people with physical impairments. Can we always suit everybody? Other Sources to look at for ‘making difference in the details:

Harvey Lonsdale Elmes (1846) West Derby Lunatic Asylum, DRAWINGS

'Beautiful minds'on St Elizabeths’ Mental Hospital (1855) in Preservation, vol 56, no 6, 2004 Nov/Dec pp. 26-32 with fabulous photographs PERIODICALS

George Henry Bibby (1894) Asylums Construction and Arrangement BOOKS

Knights Guide to the arrangement and construction of workhouse buildings (1889) BOOKS ‘Paripan’ sanitaryware for asylums, trade brochure (early 20th Century) ARCHIVES Salter, Adams, Newcombe, (1869-99) Ipswich Workhouse DRAWINGS ‘Detailing for darkness’ (1959) on the Canadian National Insittute for the Blind in Canadian Architect Oct 19 1959, pp.16-21 PERIODICALS

Selwyn Goldsmith (1965) on ‘Bishop Herbert House for the disabled’ in Architects Journal 19 October 1965 PERIODICALS

Christopher Gilbert (1991) English Vernacular Furniture 1750-1900 Yale University Press (incl. chapters on workhouses, asylums etc.) BOOKS

Michael Singer (1998) ‘Millay colony for disabled artists’ in Architectural Record vol 186, Jul 1998pp.78-87 PERIODICALS

OMA, Maison à Bordeaux, Terrence Riley (1999) The Un-Private House, MOMA, pp.92-5 BOOKS

Bruce Stratton Architects (2005) ‘School for the Blind, Ontario’ in Architectural Record 2005 Dec pp.66-69 PERIODICALS

Rigergsborg Beach for disabled swimmers, Malmo in Arkitektur (Stockholm) Oct 2006 pp.18-21 PERIODICALS