Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
“We also had to reassess the structure — we’re now in earthquake country and in a very challenging desert environment [...] To make this a permanent installation, we had to work with the city to assess how to permit it. We couldn’t classify it as a habitable structure because that would trigger the ADA and energy requirements, so we had to classify it as an exhibit." — Palm Springs Life
The house had sat dormant in a Long Island storage facility until its relocation was finally worked out in March of 2015. Site preparations took until last year to commence after the museum added the house to its permanent collection in 2020. The entire 37-year process earned an Advocacy Citation... View full entry
More than 30 years ago, the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, mandating reasonable accommodations and accessibility features for people with disabilities. Yet to this day, ADA noncompliant sidewalks, crosswalks, and public transportation stops permeate U.S. cities from coast to coast. — Next City
The plaintiff in the Hunters Point Library suit against Steven Holl — disability advocate Tanya Jackson — is another high-profile case highlighting the effects of racial health inequality in design and the failures of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) for Black disabled... View full entry
Skanska, AECOM, and SOM have announced the completion of Penn Station’s $414 million Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) concourse renovation. The project, which began in January 2021, set out to modernize and widen LIRR’s 33rd Street train hall corridor, all while maintaining the station’s daily... View full entry
New York City is suing the architects behind the Hunters Point Library for tens of millions of dollars over portions of the structure not being accessible to people with handicaps, in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act. [...]
The city’s lawsuit was filed May 17 in state Supreme Court in Manhattan. The defendants are Steven Holl Architect, PC, aka Steven Holl Architects, and the individuals Steven Holl and Christopher McVoy.
— Queens Chronicle
The original lawsuit was brought to Federal court in November 2019 by a local disability advocate named Tanya Jackson. The project debuted just two months prior and drew the immediate ire of critics who were quick to point out the flaws in its $41.5 million non-universal design. Steven Holl... View full entry
A Manhattan federal judge on Friday approved a settlement to a class action lawsuit that locks the MTA into equipping 95% of subway and Staten Island Railway stations with elevators or ramps — with a deadline three decades away.
The approval by Judge Edgardo Ramos caps one part of a long-running push by advocates for people with disabilities to improve access to a transit system where merely a quarter of the nearly 500 stations comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
— The City
As The City reported, the ruling makes the terms of last June’s landmark settlement official. Judge Ramos told plaintiffs that he knows the push would be a “very difficult thing to achieve.” MTA officials currently plan the upgrades in stages, with 81 stations affected by 2024 as... View full entry
Los Angeles-based Darin Johnstone Architects has offered an inside look at their recently-completed renovation of the Ahmanson Auditorium. Located on the ArtCenter College of Design’s Hillside campus in Pasadena, the 3,300-square-foot auditorium saw upgrades to its lobby, main theater, and... View full entry
Chicago will receive a total of $185 million in federal funding to make several of its Chicago Transit Authority and Metra stations accessible for disabled riders, officials announced Monday as part of a new program tucked into the bipartisan infrastructure law signed by President Joe Biden last year. — Chicago Tribune
The money is part of the larger $1.75 billion provision set aside for accessibility improvements in various urban transit agencies by the federal infrastructure bill from last year. New York is the only city to receive more. Per the Tribune, a total of 42 of the CTA’s 145 stations are not... View full entry
The federal government is taking the Chicago Cubs to court over the team's recent renovations at Wrigley Field, claiming the changes to the ballpark don't comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). According to a lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court by the U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago, the Cubs "failed to ensure that recent additions and alterations at Wrigley Field are readily accessible to and usable by individuals with disabilities.” — CBS Chicago
Between 2014 and 2019, Wrigley Field underwent a significant overhaul known as “The 1060 Project,” which included new seats, expanded bleachers, a new outdoor concourse, new concessions, upgraded restrooms, new team clubhouses, and more. The alleged violations to the ADA Standards for... View full entry
Thirty years on, the A.D.A. has reshaped American architecture and the way designers and the public have come to think about civil rights and the built world. We take for granted the ubiquity of entry ramps, Braille signage, push buttons at front doors, lever handles in lieu of doorknobs, widened public toilets, and warning tiles on street corners and subway platforms. [...] The A.D.A. has baked a more egalitarian aesthetic of forms and spaces into the civic DNA. — The New York Times
Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for The New York Times highlights how public discourse surrounding designing for people with disabilities has changed in the three decades that have passed since the creation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Highlighting the tensions that exist... View full entry
University of California, Berkeley College of Environmental Design (CED) Professor Emeritus Raymond Lifchez has donated $2.5 million to the college in order to create a new endowed teaching position focused on universal design. Previously on Archinect: "Unpacking The Spatial Implications Of... View full entry
Ms. [Rita] Ebel, who has been in a wheelchair herself since a car accident 25 years ago, said the idea was born after a friend of hers, who is also in a wheelchair, said she could not get out of a shop with steps and had to enlist the help of four people to carry her chair down.
Ms Ebel then saw a picture in a medical journal for paraplegics, of a woman in an electric wheelchair going over a Lego ramp.
— RTE News
Earning the nickname 'Lego Grandma,' Rita and her husband work together on the ramps, often spending two to three hours a day building them, reports RTE News. While wood or aluminum ramps would provide a proper solution, Rita says that the bright Lego "makes her message stand out and... View full entry
Ask any disabled person about the gap between the ADA’s aspirations and their hard realities. We are often forced to stop in our tracks and weigh the chances of falling and suffering minor or serious injury against the need to go into a library, store, or post office. But it’s more than that. We believe strongly that we deserve a right to exist in the world. We’re just waiting for the rest of the world to truly believe this, too. — The Nation
Writing in The Nation, author Elizabeth Guffey reflects on the ongoing accessibility failures that impede the everyday experiences of countless people in the United States despite the fact that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was enacted 30 years ago. Guffey takes a look into the... View full entry
Representatives of the United States Attorney's office for the Southern District of New York and the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division announced today that Related Companies and ERY Vessel LLC have agreed to install a new accessibility platform at the Vessel in Hudson Yards... View full entry
Nearly thirty years after the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed, accessibility for disabled people both online and in public space remains severely insufficient. New York artist Shannon Finnegan and design historian Aimi Hamraie, who currently resides in Nashville, held a video chat on October 9 to discuss their respective artistic, activist, and historical takes on disability justice. — Art in America
Aimi Hamraie's 2017 book Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability explores the question of who counts as "everyone" according to architects of the Universal Design movement. Finnegan's artworks include pieces such as "Museum Benches," benches that are inscribed with... View full entry
Yes, messy sidewalks are hard. But so are shops and restaurants with steps at their entrances. So are blocks that lack curb cuts or have ones that are poorly designed. So are broken elevators. So is the fact that in L.A., if you’re a disabled person (which is what Radcliff calls himself rather than a person with a disability), you generally have to spend more on rent, because the properties covered by rent stabilization are older ones less likely to be accessible. — The Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times takes a look at how a pervasive lack of universal design across Los Angeles makes daily life nearly impossible for disabled people. View full entry
