For a cornucopia of social-issues posts, check out the Blogging Against Disablism Day blogfest. I’m running behind on my own contributions, but I wanted to talk for a minute here about dumb architecture. Not merely bad in the sense of ‘ugly’, for I must grudgingly admit that ugliness is in the eye of the beholder. But dumb as in ‘doesn’t work’. Buildings that don’t meet the needs of the people who use them. Or would use them, if only they were useful.
What stuns me is not that there was a time when buildings were not made to be wheelchair-accessible. There was, after all, a time when wheelchairs, like indoor plumbing, just weren’t a significant part of most people’s lives. Would have been nice to have such conveniences, but you didn’t. Too bad. The architecture of those eras reflect that, and retro-fits to modernize can be a bit clumsy. (But worth it! In both cases!)
But I am continually amazed that we don’t, as a society, seem to have caught on to the bit about how people — all people — ought to be able to get in and out of a building, and even move around in it. I’m reminded of when I lived in a little ground-floor room in Paris and that had a window that let out onto a courtyard. I hosted a party at the end of the school year, and fully expected that my guests, if they wanted to relax on the grass outside, would simply climb through the window. I was stunned to discover that not everyone includes climbing through windows as part of their traveling repertoire.
But I was young then. I was not an architect, not even a builder. My assumption that anyone (among my guests, who were all walking-around kinds of people) could and would climb through windows was naive and a bit self-centered. I assumed that if I could do something, everyone else could, too. Somehow you would think that building professionals would have grown passed that point.
I am fortunate to live in a home that was designed to be moderately wheelchair accessible. Not perfectly so, but better than average. One of the previous owners did a few renovations to make it even better. And the sordid truth? It isn’t that big of a deal. Any grown-up who has, say, studied architecture, ought to be able to whip out fairly accessible homes without too much difficulty. There’s nothing really magical about it.
[Tuning a building to the precise needs of a particular individual or family? Yes. That takes some doing. But being able to get far enough into the ballpark that the residents can easily take it the rest of the way? Not nearly so hard. ]
And curiously, I think that defaulting to accessible architecture would bring down construction costs. Here’s why: in order to make a home wheelchair-friendly, you can’t crowd it up with a bunch of built-ins. And built-ins — cabinets, counters, shelves, drawers, even closets and extraneous doors — these are things that drive up cost.
So why aren’t modern American homes built to a default level of accessibility? It isn’t a lack of space — our homes are larger now, on average, than they were fifty years ago, and have fewer residents. It isn’t that everything goes to two stories, and it’s just so hard to make a two-story home accessible. If that were the case, a) single-story homes *would* default to accessible design, and b) two-story homes would still have an accessible first floor. (After all, even if I don’t have a ground-floor bedroom for my wheelchair-using visitor, it sure is nice for that person to at least be able to *get in front the door*.)
So I’ve got to assume a sort of perpetual adolescence on the part of our building industry. Not surprising in a culture that worships youth and beauty and vigor — I’ve known people with gray hair and grandchildren to openly deny they were ‘old’. So I suppose if you are going to great lengths to fight any appearance of mortality or even maturity, intentionally purchasing a wheelchair-accessible home isn’t going to help you keep up the facade. And for a builder, suggesting someone might actually want such a building some day is going to about as popular as my letting slip to my gray-haired companion that no, she was not actually all that young anymore.
It’s a sad kind of denial. As I rode through the countryside yesterday on the way home from a family reunion, I was myself a little surprised at how many homes had a ramp tacked on to the front. More informative than riding through the city, because in the country you aren’t likely to move when your house doesn’t fit your needs anymore, you just try to adjust your house as best you can.
Not the end of the world — a slapped-together plywood monstrosity of a ramp isn’t particularly attractive, but as I said, this post isn’t about beauty. Look inside our family farmhouse, and the bathroom — converted from a bedroom, I think — betrays that same problem of The Home That Had To Be Brought Into the Present.
But there reaches a point when you’ve got to lose patience with builders and architects who are still building for Some Other Era. Be a grown-up, builders. What you build, people *will* buy — most of us haven’t got a choice but to purchase what is on the market. It falls to you to lead. Recognize that humans are frail, mortal. That not everyone can climb through the window. And it just isn’t a good building if people can’t use it.
