The Center for Independent Living will recognize UC Berkeley architecture and city planning professor Raymond Lifchez tomorrow (Jan. 23) with the second annual Ed Roberts Award, which recognizes and honors individual contributions to the success of CIL and the independent living/disability rights movement.
Lifchez began teaching design at Berkeley in 1970, and two years later started developing what became a groundbreaking study course for undergraduates in which they incorporated accessibility into all their designs. They were guided by people with disabilities — some of them students — who served as mock clients.
He and co-instructor Barbara Winslow authored Design for Independent Living: The Environment and Physically Disabled People(1979), describing their classroom experience and introduction of disability into architecture education. The book was a a finalist for the 1980 National Book Award, in current interest category for non-fiction.
Lifchez’s writings on accessible design and the social history of architecture include Rethinking Architecture: Design Students and Physically Disabled People (1987), which explores incorporating the needs and challenges of the disabled into architecture education.
A commitment to attention and caring
In Rethinking Architecture, Lifchez recounted his growing appreciation of the need for participation by the disabled community in the design process.
“Whereas my earlier professional contact with disabled people had always been channeled through a state agency, in Berkeley I found myself directly involved with the politically and socially active disabled community,” he wrote. “In the few small projects I assisted with, I was overwhelmed by the difference between my earlier experience of having been told by able-bodied administrators about disabled people and now hearing these people speak about themselves, about their experiences, needs and preferences.”
The more he talked to physically disabled people, Lifchez said, “the more I realized that a change in society’s values and attitudes was the indispensable prerequisite to a barrier-free environment. Barrier-free advocates were not asking society to turn the environment into one giant appliance, filled with ramps and grab bars, but rather were asking communities to make a serious commitment to attention and caring.”
Mechanical features added to architectural designs, wrote Lifchez, are not concessions to special or minority communities. Instead, they are symbols of humanity, useful features and aids for constituencies ranging from those with long-term or permanent disabilities to children and pregnant women, the elderly, someone lugging a heavy load for a specific chore or those temporarily disabled by a skiing mishap or a job-related injury.
In 1988, Lifchez founded the Berkeley Prize, an international essay competition for undergraduate architecture students to explore design’s role in social, cultural and psychological life.