– Katie Lloyd Thomas in: Lines in Practice: Thinking Architectural Representation Through Feminist Critiques of Geometry
– Katie Lloyd Thomas in: Lines in Practice: Thinking Architectural Representation Through Feminist Critiques of Geometry
In the current pandemic, everyday normal lives have been shifted out of place; as what is conventionally public and private, inside and outside, visible and invisible, included and excluded has been re-mixed across assumed locations, spaces and encounters. This has produced an intense awareness, requiring the paying of new kinds of attentiveness to the simplest tasks, noticing dis/ordinary encounters with others, and with local built and natural spaces, and explicitly taking a position over issues of care and interconnectedness. The unpredictability and uncertainty of going to the shops or the park, or finding a place to have online meetings, requires creative skills in navigation and negotiation – an expertise many disabled people would say they already have just by living in that normal world.
What, then, can be learnt from lockdown? By precisely mapping and reflecting on these changed everyday practices, as they intersect with our already diverse bodyminds and particular situations, can we open up spaces for designing differently? Can we take the opportunity to work towards a new and better world? Can we imagine experimental and provocative spaces that liberate and value diverse bodyminds, rather than merely going back to perpetuating a world designed for normative bodies and relationships?
Zoe Partington and Jos Boys from the DisOrdinary Architecture Project work with a network of disabled and deaf artists to develop models of new practice for the built environment, led by the creativity and experiences of those artists. In their regular meeting place in London we talk about how hard it is to challenge norms, who is enabled or disabled by existing spaces, and how their projects enable architecture students to explore built spaces beyond their usual perspective.