*STS Circle at Harvard* [image: image.png] * * *Wanda Katja Liebermann* *Graduate School of Design, Harvard* * * on
*Body Building: Architectural Narratives of Dis/ability* Monday, November 21st 12:15-2:00 p.m. 124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 100, Room 106 [image: image.png] Lunch is provided if you RSVP. Please RSVP to sts <[email protected]>@hks.harvard.edu<[email protected]>by 5pm Thursday, November 17th. * * *Abstract:* Beginning in the early 1970’s, disability rights groups in the United States started fighting for and winning key legislation for equal access to (the spaces of) social and economic opportunity, leading to the 1991 enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act. This had enormous impact on the environmental design professions. Twenty years on, however, mainstream architecture has evolved no analytical or creative approaches that extend beyond the limited terms of code compliance. Using a main case study of my dissertation, the brand new Ed Roberts Campus in Berkeley, California, I illustrate how different architectural practices constitute the boundaries of the profession, the products of design, and dis/abled bodies. By telling a tale of two “handicap” ramps—one so discredited that it lead to the firing of the first architecture team, while the second was immediately heralded as an architectural masterpiece—I try to show what it takes to constitute accessible architecture as Architecture. *Biography*: Wanda Liebermann is a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her dissertation, titled “Body Building: Architectural Narratives of Dis/ability,” explores the ways in which meanings of disability become materialized in the built environment and how this connects to discourses and practices of selfhood and citizenship. She is a licensed architect in California where she practiced for fifteen years. She received her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Architecture degrees from the College of Environment Design at UC Berkeley, where she taught architectural studio courses from 1996 to 2007. Her current research is funded by a number of awards, including a 2009 HUD Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant, a 2010-2011 John R. Meyer Fellowship at the Joint Center for Housing at Harvard University, and a 2011 NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant. Her work in the Secondary Field of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School offers techniques and provokes questions for analyzing architecture not typically considered within the profession. A complete list of STS Circle at Harvard events can be found on our website: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/ Follow us on Facebook: STS@Harvard <http://www.facebook.com/HarvardSTS>
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