Designing for the Disabled: The New Paradigm

Selwyn Goldsmith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135141769
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Selwyn Goldsmith's Designing for the Disabled has, since it was first published in 1963, been a bible for practising architects around the world. Now, as a new book with a radical new vision, comes his Designing for the Disabled: The New Paradigm. Goldsmith's new paradigm is based on the concept of architectural disability. As a version of the social model of disability, it is not exclusively the property of physically disabled people. Others who are afflicted by it include women, since men customarily get proportionately four times as many amenities in public toilets as women - and women have to queue where men do not - and those with infants in pushchairs, because normal WC facilities are invariably too small to get a pushchair and infant into. To counter architectural disability, Goldsmith's line is that the axiom for legislation action has to be 'access for everyone' - it should not just be 'access for the disabled', as it presently is with the Part M building regulation and relevant provisions of the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act. In a 40-page annex to his book he sets out the terms that a new-style Part M regulation and its Approved Document might take, one that would cover alterations to existing buildings as well as new buildings. But architects and building control officers need not, he says, wait for new a legislation to apply new practical procedures to meet the requirements of the current Part M regulation; they can, as he advises, act positively now. This is a book which will oblige architects to rethink the methodology of designing for the disabled. It is a book that no practising architect, building control officer, local planning officer or access officer can afford to be without.

Part 1The evolution of accessibility controls

1 Where I came in

DOI: 10.4324/9780080572802-3

The bug was lurking, I suspect, in the polluted seawater off the beach at Amalfi where we went swimming while on holiday in Italy. But whether it was bred in Amalfi or elsewhere, it was around the middle of September 1956 that I acquired my polio virus. Three weeks later, having brought it home with me, I was removed to hospital and transformed from being a regular able-bodied person into a cripple. I was 23 at the time and had just completed my five years at architectural school.

For the first six days or so that 1 spent in hospital in Nottingham I was literally mindless. Whether I kept going or not was outside my control. I had no comprehension of what had happened to me, and I could not gallantly have proclaimed that I was determined to beat whatever it was. By the time my sanity was restored the critical phase had passed, Five weeks later I was transferred to Harlow Wood Orthopaedic Hospital near Mansfield, where for the next eight months ward four was my home. The initial stage was one of near-total incapacitation and discomforting pain, but it did not last long. As I began to recover, life in hospital became enjoyable.

A feature of polio was that progress towards recovery was unpredictable — it could be steady and considerable, or it could be stalled. I was the only substantially damaged polio patient in Harlow Wood that year, and from day one all the staff in the hospital knew about me. Messages about my progress were relayed each day, and because there was frequently an exciting advance to report the news spread happiness. The pleasure that I was able to give to those whose vocation was to care for their patients was the principal reason why my time in hospital was so rewarding. Another was that life on the ward was fun. Dorothy Aitchison was the ward sister, and 40 years on we still keep in touch; what she wished, she told me when we talked recently, was that everyone was happy and cheerful when she came on duty each morning.

From early on it was evident that my right arm and hand would not, apart from some flexion in the elbow and fingers, recover at all. The left upper limb performed more encouragingly and, aside from the bit used to throw darts at a board, recovered completely. What my legs might be able to do was a more bothersome matter. When I left hospital I could, using a stick, walk with callipers on both legs. My walking technique continued to improve with exercise, so that first one and then the other calliper was discarded, and then the stick. But both knees were permanently unstable, and either could collapse without warning. A slight trip could cause me to topple over and fall flat. In the early years I bounced – I could fall relaxedly without injuring myself. With increasing age the tissues became less resilient, and my falls less comfortable.

Occasional leg fractures put me into hospital, once in the 1960s and twice in the 1970s. In the 1980s they became more frequent. When the leg is healing following a fracture I resort to my wheelchair because I cannot, owing to the useless right arm, manage shoulder crutches. Walking on two legs continues, however, to be my normal means of getting around. For 12 years or so following the time (around 1965) that mobility functions were maximally restored I could get up and down stairs without a stick, walk unaided for miles and climb little mountains, subject to their having grassy terrain and not being steep. With ongoing age, the gradual dilution of muscle power and the battering to bits of my anatomy that has come with all the fractures, I am not now, when walking, as vigorous as I once was. And because any fall that I have is bruising, I have to be much more careful to check where I put my feet. Since 1980 I have regularly taken a walking stick with me when I go travelling, and since 1988 have always used a stick when walking, both outside and within the flat where I live. Virtually all my travelling away from home is done by car, driven either by my wife or myself. In the cause of keeping fit I do not take as much physical exercise as I would wish, and my tummy protrudes more than it should. My major concern being the muscles in my right leg, I sometimes climb the stairs in a public building rather than using the lift. The only regular exercise I now take is at the Latchmere swimming pool down the road from where I live in Battersea.

The experience of becoming disabled was not for me traumatic. I was not devastated by it, and nor was it distressing. In the early weeks after my mind had been restored I had no idea what the consequences might be. When it eventually occurred to me that I would be permanently disabled I was not unduly troubled. It was simply a matter of coping with what had happened and carrying on. Following my return home in July 1957 I carried on as the same person as I had been before, as a normal, active, ‘in the mainstream’ person. On many occasions I needed help to do things that I had previously been able to manage on my own. I could not run, jump, skip or ride a bicycle. I could no longer write with my right hand. My left hand had to undertake duties where two hands had served before. But my life was not blighted by disability.

I can only speculate as to how, had I remained a regular able-bodied person, my life and professional career might have evolved. I could have spent my years practising as a third-rate architect. Or, benefiting incidentally from the letters RIBA after my name, I could have found a niche on the periphery of the profession. Or I could have moved into a quite different arena. I do not know. What I cannot conceive is that without the disability my professional career would have been anywhere near as rewarding as it has been.

By the rules of what in Britain today makes an architect, there was none in the family before me, although in. Bournemouth before the First World War two of my mother's uncles practised as ‘Architects and Surveyors’, and in more recent years another relative on my mother's side managed an estate agency business there. My father, from a Norfolk farming family with a record of staunch non-conformism, Methodist lay preaching and diligent public service, was from 1926 a general practitioner in Newark-on-Trent, and it was in the family home there that I was born in December 1932, some 20 minutes before my non-identical twin brother. At an early age I displayed a capability for putting wooden building bricks on top of each other, a flair for mental arithmetic, an absorption with toy construction kits and some talent for drawing and painting pictures. There was also a phase when I avidly collected the numbers of railway engines, Through my later school years my scholastic performance did not shine, but was sufficient to get me to Cambridge in 1951, where for three years I read architecture. I transferred to the Bartlett School in University College London in 1954 for the final two years. In neither school was the architecture course rigorous, and when I emerged in 1956 I was patently ill-equipped to be a practitioner.

My inadequacies were not exposed in the course of the next two months. I was employed by an architect in Plymouth who in turn was employed by a speculative housebuilder; what he wanted, and I could deliver, was plan drawings of retirement bungalow's that were as small and cheap as they could be without being unmarketable. When they were built there was no way that a wheelchair could get into them, but wheelchair access was not then an item which anyone would have thought to put on the agenda. Towards the end of that summer I left to go with a friend on the Italian holiday that took us to the beach at Amalfi and the encounter with my polio bug.

A year later, with recovery continuing at home in Newark after the stay in hospital, I faced the prospect of relaunching my professional career. Gordon Benoy, a local architect who had long been a family friend, was keen to help me on my way. At that time, a year before he set up his own practice, which flourished after I had gone, he was staff architect to a national firm of land agents. A specialism of the practice was the production of pigsties and cowsheds, and it was on those that I exercised my nascent professional skills, A feature of them which was not considered was whether the pigs or the cows might be disabled.

I returned to London in early 1959, my choice of architectural employment being governed by the availability of on-street parking outside the offices where I might work. The firm that I joined, Llewellyn Smith and Waters in South Kensington, produced efficient industrial and commercial buildings, and while I successfully dealt with the professional practice examination which permitted me to put ARIBA after my name, it became increasingly apparent that I was not cut out to be a practising architect. I looked around for what I might do instead, and talked with sympathetic architects, academics and others about where I might go. The advice was clear: the ARIBA letters I had acquired were valuable, and for lack of any other appealing track I should exploit them. ‘How about research?’, I was asked.

Neither at Cambridge nor at the Bartlett had any of my tutors imparted to me any understandings at all of research techniques or scientific method, but ‘research’ sounded attractive by comparison with the daunting chores of architectural practice. Among all the well-informed people whose advice I sought there was none, however, who hit upon the idea that, taking account of my own disability, the disability patch might yield something promising.

It was in the field of hospital building that opportunities to join the research business were on offer. The government had just, in early 1960, proclaimed a ten-year expansion drive which would generate great new hospitals all across the country, and it was to the South-East Metropolitan Regional Hospital Board and its research and development group, whose only member needed an assistant, that I moved. We spent our days imagining the hospitals that would appear in ten years' time, and devising clever things to put into them. But at no time did anyone in the hospital board's offices, or at conferences and meetings where visions of fine new hospitals were glowingly painted, think to enquire ‘what about the disabled?’ Certainly I did not; I happened to have a disability, but I was in the mainstream and I wanted no one giving me the idea that I was a second-class citizen for whom special arrangements ought to be made in buildings. Wheelchairs were not on the menu; it simply had not occurred to anyone in the hospital-building business that access for wheelchair users into and around hospitals, and the generality of public buildings as well, should be a paramount planning and design consideration. And no one came up with the idea that for wheelchair users there ought to be special toilet facilities. I did not wait until it did – after a little over a year my sojourn in the realm of hospital architecture was over.

The story of how the Designing for the Disabled research project came about can be traced back to the day that 18-month-old Janet Guthrie contracted polio in 1949¹. Her father Duncan, who during the Second World War had served in special operations behind enemy lines, was working at the time on the Festival of Britain for the Arts Council. Troubled as he was to discover that in Britain no national voluntary organization was committed to defeating polio by raising funds for the medical research which would find a cure for it, he left the Arts Council and worked briefly with the Infantile Paralysis Fellowship (now the British Polio Fellowship). Its style did not suit him; with his entrepreneurial talents he decided in 1952 to operate independently and set up the National Fund for Research into Poliomyelitis. But it was in America, where massive charitable funding went into the research programmes on which Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin worked to produce their vaccines, that polio was beaten.

Following the introduction of vaccination in Britain in 1956, Guthrie's fund, which by then was securely established, became the National Fund for Research into Poliomyelitis and other Crippling Diseases – in 1997 it is known as Action Research. With a remit that covered rehabilitation research, an innovative project which it funded in 1957 was the planning and construction of Mary Marlborough Lodge, a daily living research unit in the grounds of the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre at Oxford. Opened in 1960, it was a pioneering venture to which severely disabled people could come as residents for a week or more, to be equipped by technicians and trained by experienced therapists for the challenging task of managing daily living activities on their own.

The success of Mary Marlborough Lodge and the vision it offered of independent living for disabled people encouraged Guthrie to look for further initiatives he could promote in the housing field. In early 1961 he approached Gordon Ricketts, the then Secretary of the Royal Institute of British Architects, to discuss possibilities. One idea was an architectural competition for the design of a bungalow suitable for a housewife in a wheelchair, but what might be better, Mr Ricketts suggested, would be funding for research aimed at the production of a comprehensive practical guidance manual on designing for the disabled. Negotiations followed, the outcome, with support from the Building Exhibition and the Building Centre, being a project which was to be directed by Bill Allen, newly appointed head of the Architectural Association School of Architecture. I learnt of it, put in my application and, very gratifyingly, was appointed. The understanding was that I had a brief to produce a book for architects which would be called Designing for the Disabled, but I was given no instructions as to how it was to be structured or what its scope might be. The clear presumption, however, was that it would be focused on domestic environments and the design and equipping of houses suitable for disabled people to live in.

From the day I took up the appointment at the beginning of October 1961 I was thrust onto the stage of the theatre of disability. My role was to perform in scenes to do with buildings and disabled people, on a stage that in Britain had not been set. In Scandinavia it had been, and it was to Stockholm that I was sent first, to participate in a conference on the physically disabled and their environment. In Sweden and Denmark projects had been undertaken on the planning and furnishing of kitchens and bathrooms geared to the special needs of wheelchair users, research reports had been published and exemplary new housing could be visited and examined, A new realm of architecture was to be demonstrated to me; from being wholly uninformed about it one week I was to become a national expert the next.

The October 1961 Stockholm event, the first of the many hundreds of conferences and meetings on disability topics that I would attend in the course of my professional career, was a landmark in the history of designing for the disabled in Britain and Europe. It comprised two parallel conferences. One, of some 25 participants including myself, was on the topic Problems of handicapped homemakers. The other, of some 15 participants, was on Problems of handicapped persons in respect of community planning and transport. The first made sense to me – I was there to learn about housing for the disabled. The second I did not understand – I recall wondering-what connection there could be between disabled people and community planning. It was, I supposed, a sideshow. I was wrong. The person who had been invited to contribute the principal paper to the conference on community planning, and then to deliver the keynote speech at a public meeting in Stockholm, was an American, Tim Nugent, He was the star of the event, and he came bearing with him the final draft of a document that was to change the world.

2 Tim Nugent – the idealist who changed the world

DOI: 10.4324/9780080572802-4

In the flat lands of midwest America, on the campus of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, Tim Nugent worked from 1959 through to 1961 on its production. The imaginative idea that had set it on its way had been conceived at meetings held in Washington DC in 1957, but he, on his own terms, engineered it. It was a sensational product, one that would benefit everyone everywhere. Around the world governments bought it, and translated it into the law of their land. It was American Standard A117.1 American Standard Specifications for Making Buildings and Facilities Accessible to, and Usable by, the Physically Handicapped. In America it would be the instrument for energising civil rights legislation for disabled people, culminating in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. In Britain it would be the model for British Standard codes of practice issued in 1967 and 1979, and then, in the late 1980s, for the Part M building regulation Access and Facilities for Disabled People.

Tim Nugent was b...