On the Architecture of Disability / David Gissen

For our final episode for this season, we speak to doctor and architect Diana Anderson, who has skillfully carved a unique career path for herself as a “dochitect” – by pioneering a collaborative, evidence-based model for approaching healthcare from the medicine and architecture fields simultaneously.

Dr. Diana Anderson is a triple boarded professional – healthcare architect, internist, and a geriatrician. She is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Boston University, and a recipient of an Alzheimer's Association Clinician Scientist Fellowship. She is also a healthcare principal at Jacobs, contributing her thought leadership at the intersection of design and health.

Diana’s website: www.dochitect.com

In our previous episode, we got an overview of medical tourism around the world and the key factors that drive people to travel from one country to another for medical treatments and procedures. Today, we take a closer look at some of the medical tourism hubs along a very specific geographic area, i.e., the US-Mexico border. 

Viviane Clement is an epidemiologist and a cultural Anthropologist whose research focuses on the macro and micro effects of health and environmental policies and politics on under-sourced and under-researched communities. For her article on medical tourism titled ‘In Search of Health: Medical Tourism at the US-Mexico Border/Lands’, she collaborated with Emma Newsome and Dr. Sergio Lemus to apply transborder theory and virtual ethnographies to analyze the variation in access to health care for populations who share the US-Mexico border/lands.

Medical tourism is a rapidly growing industry that has emerged out of people’s need to travel across country borders to access medical treatments and procedures. In order to understand this global movement, we need to understand the reason for travel, the destinations that attract individuals and the web of factors that shape this global industry.

Dr. Valorie Crooks is a health geographer who specializes in health services research. She is a Professor at Simon Fraser University where she also holds a Canada Research Chair and currently serves as Associate Vice-President, Research. For more than a decade she has been qualitatively studying the ethical and equity impacts of medical tourism. This work has taken her to countries as diverse as India, Mongolia, Jamaica, Colombia, Barbados, St. Lucia, Cayman Islands, Guatemala, Mexico, South Korea, and Belize.

More on Dr. Crooks: https://www.sfu.ca/geography/about/our-people/profiles/Valorie-Crooks.html

What is your idea of good mental health? What does it taste like? What does it smell like? What does it sound like? What does it feel like to touch? And if you could design your own safe space, what would it look like? What would you have in it?

James Leadbitter, also known as The Vacuum Cleaner, is a UK based artist and activist who makes candid, provocative and playful work. Drawing on his own experience of mental health disability, he works with groups including young people, health professionals and vulnerable adults to challenge how mental health is understood, treated and experienced.

James’ project Madlove: A Designer Asylum - http://www.thevacuumcleaner.co.uk/madlove-a-designer-asylum/

It has been a while since architects have been attempting to address various forms of disability in the buildings, neighborhoods and cities they design. However, these attempts are most often limited to increasing access for differently abled bodies. Our guest today, David Gissen, argues that a disability critique of architecture is not one that solely seeks to make the built environment more accessible but instead understands how embedded the ideas of physical incapacity and impairment are within architecture.

 David Gissen is a New York-based author, designer, and educator who works in the fields of architecture, landscape, and urban design. His recent book, The Architecture of Disability, has been praised as “an exhilarating manifesto” and a “complete reshaping about how we view the development and creation of architecture.” He is Professor of Architecture and Urban History at The New School University/Parsons School of Design and Dean's Visiting Professor at Columbia University.

 David’s website: https://davidgissen.org/

We don’t talk about the technical and logistical aspects of death enough. For example: How does one’s economic status affect the conditions in which they die? Do gender identities play a role in how people receive end of life care? Can we choose the memories that we want to leave behind for our loved ones? And how does social media become an archive of one’s life after passing? We speak to artist Oreet Ashery about death in the digital age.

Oreet Ashery is a visual artist whose practice navigates established, institutional and grassroots contexts. Ashery was a Turner Bursary recipient in 2020 and won the prestigious Jarman Film Award in 2017 for her web-series Revisiting Genesis, which looks at the emergent field of digital death. Ashery is Professor of Contemporary Art at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.

To watch Revisiting Genesis: https://revisitinggenesis.net/
Oreet’s work: http://oreetashery.net/

Historically, many communities around the world spatialized the bodily function of menstruation and integrated it within their architecture in the form of menstruation huts – often leading to the isolation and oppression of women as impure beings. Our guest today argues that these spaces in the west African Benin Kingdom were intentionally designed for women to rest and recuperate – that the isolation rooms were essentially spas. 

Minne Atairu is an interdisciplinary artist whose research-based practice seeks to reclaim the obscured histories of Benin Bronzes. Utilizing generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and additive fabrication, Atairu reassembles visual, sonic, and textual fragments into conceptual works that engage with repatriation-related questions. She is the recipient of the 2021 Lumen Prize for Art and Technology.

Minne’s Graham Foundation project: http://www.grahamfoundation.org/grantees/6457-the-menstrual-isolation-room-is-a-spa

Over a century ago in 1896, the bubonic plague broke out in colonial Bombay. While the British officials maintained detailed records of the various aspects of the plague, local newspapers reported on the public sentiment towards the disease and its colonial management. Ranjit Kandalgaonkar explored one such archive to draw out a subaltern narrative of the bubonic plague.

Ranjit Kandalgaonkar lives and works in Mumbai and his art practice primarily comprises of a lens directed at the urban context of cities. Most of his long-term projects are research-intensive and attempt to unlock historical and contemporary data by placing the work in the context of an unseen social history. His works have been showcased at Bergen Assembly Art & research Triennale, Colomboscope Biennale, and several galleries in India and overseas.

Ranjit’s city-based practice: http://cityinflux.com

The discourse on care within the field of architecture has recently been gaining a lot of traction as ideas about health are expanding beyond the limits of traditional hospitals. In this conversation with Fiona Kenney, we discuss the history of long-term care facilities, residential hospices and pediatric respite centers, and how they differ from institutions that are aimed at providing cure.

Fiona L. Kenney is a PhD candidate at the McGill University School of Architecture, where she studies spatial expressions of care. Fiona holds an MDes in History and Philosophy of Design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and her doctoral work is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Friends of the CAMH Archives, and McGill University. She currently works at the Palliative Care Division of the Bruyère Research Institute.

 Fiona’s website: www.fionakenney.com

Ever since the pandemic, questions and concerns over the human body and the public health have heightened. We wanted to ensure that the conversations we would have with our guests went beyond our experience of the last three years. Some of the questions we ask this season are:

Can we look at the role of architecture for providing care beyond the design of hospitals?
What are the ways in which medical tourism defines entire cities?
How do we shape our environment to foster healthy living – both physically and mentally?
And how do we leave behind a digital legacy as designers, after death?

With the support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, here’s introducing Season 5.