The Built Environment: Beyond the ADA

THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT: BEYOND THE ADA

Story by Craig Collins

Before he was a 50-year veteran of the disability movement, an executive, and a board member, John Kemp was, among other things, a kid in a wheelchair. Kemp, president and CEO of The Viscardi Center, a nonprofit network that provides lifespan services and advocacy for people with disabilities, was born without lower arms or legs, and when he was younger it was difficult to plan outings. He never knew whether he’d be able to enter the building he wanted to visit: Most other people lived, literally, on a higher plane, and though it was a difference of only a few inches, it might as well have been a mile. “We always did a drive-by,” he said. “That’s how we learned whether we could get into a place. We’d either call someone who’d been there, or we’d drive by it. Prior to 1990, we had no expectation of accessibility when we traveled or moved about our communities.”

Of all the obstacles confronted by people with disabilities in society, one of the most immediately conspicuous is the inability to simply move around: to access a world designed and built by other people. It was one of the first obstacles to be addressed amid the disability rights movement; in 1961, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the nonprofit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards, created the first set of guidelines to ensure that individuals with disabilities would be able to enter and use public facilities. In 1968, Congress made these standards mandatory for federal facilities with the Architectural Barriers Act (ABA), the first federal effort to ensure access to the built environment.

The ABA’s enforcement provisions were weak, and Section 502 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was, in part, an attempt to strengthen them by creating an independent board to take charge of designing and enforcing accessibility standards. As groundbreaking as they were, the Rehabilitation Act’s standards applied only to facilities owned, leased, or funded by the federal government. The results, said Kemp, were underwhelming. “A study of that law showed that almost 90 percent of the buildings failed to comply with the Architectural Barriers Act and Section 502,” he said. “So wherever we went, we found hotels that had barriers everywhere, restaurants with barriers everywhere. People were literally isolated, and limited in what they could do.”

The story of America’s disability rights movement is full of grim ironies that perfectly illustrate this point: As activists with disabilities became more outspoken about their lack of access, authorities often encountered – as if for the first time – the difficulties they faced every day. Several of the activists arrested and sentenced to probation for staging a protest in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in March 1990 to persuade House leaders to vote the ADA out of committee and bring it to the floor found themselves unable to report to their parole hearing, because the office, administered by the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, had no wheelchair ramp. The court officer had to meet with the activists outside.

Titles II and III of the ADA restate and expand the federal mandate for access. Title III’s general rule, which mandates equal access to public accommodations, is stated with forceful eloquence: “No individual shall be discriminated against on the basis of disability in the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation by any person who owns, leases (or leases to), or operates a place of public accommodation.”

The Expectation of Access

A quarter-century later, American society is undeniably more accommodating, says Kemp. “The passage of the ADA, the changing of transportation systems, real enforcement of the building code, the expansion of coverage to include smaller businesses, the effort to make sure people understand what public accommodation is, and where and how they can comply – it has changed things,” he said. “We’ve gone from the expectation of inaccessibility to an expectation of accessibility. It’s made a huge difference in our lives.”

According to Catherine Kudlick, a professor of history and director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University, the ADA’s physical access provisions have also transformed the greater society. “At San Francisco State, someone using a wheelchair expects to be able to enter any building and even find an accessible restroom. It’s presumed – though not 100 percent certain – that basic things like the elevators will work,” she said.

These physical alterations – such as the simple curb cuts that allow wheelchair users onto sidewalks – have done nothing less than open up a world that had been closed off to millions of Americans. The ADA’s physical access provisions have created arguably the most accommodating civil society in the world.

Protesters in Los Angeles, California, in the mid-1980s break a curb to demonstrate the inaccessibility of the built environment.

Tom Olin Photography

And yet these changes in the built environment have also exposed a yawning gap between the principle of accommodation – a task undertaken with varying degrees of generosity, if not with downright resentment – and the spirit of inclusivity the ADA’s champions have hoped America would embrace.

In what he calls the “second era” of physical access, Kemp said, “We can get into buildings. We’re just not respected or included.”

It remains impossible to legislate people’s attitudes, and there’s a seeming disconnect between the ADA’s aspiration to “full and equal enjoyment” and the rules and regulations – most recently spelled out in the Department of Justice’s 2010 Standards for Accessible Design, a

279-page document – that provide the template for pursuing that ideal. It’s another grim irony: In order to regulate and enforce access to the physical world, it’s necessary to specify what that means. Architects and designers of the built environment – and their clients – must learn minimum and maximum slopes, heights, widths, depths, spacings, diameters, and elevations. The results of their efforts, says Kudlick, often reveal that they might be missing the point.

“The requirements don’t specify that people should be going through the front door, and not the back door, to get into a restaurant,” she said. “So maybe they’ll build a ramp into the back door of a restaurant, and somebody in a wheelchair goes past all the garbage cans and the kitchen and the toilets to get into the restaurant. Yes, they can technically get in, and yes, that was enabled by the ADA. But it’s two different doors. It’s a double standard.”

This new world, this second era, consists of mandatory accommodations: curb cuts, grab bars, Braille-marked elevator buttons, bumpy transition strips, and wheelchair lifts, many of them tacked on to existing facilities or conveyances. All of them are necessary, and yet each of them, by itself, can’t help but leave people wanting more. To many, the way accommodations are applied to America’s built environment seems a failure of the imagination, a failure to embrace the spirit of the ADA.

While physical access provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act have improved accessibility for people with disabilities, advocates would like to see architects, designers, and builders embrace the spirit of inclusivity in the ADA, rather than simply comply with the law.

Rocky Mountain ADA Center, a project of Meeting the Challenge Inc.

But to Kemp, ever the optimist, it merely marks the threshold to a third era: “I think we’re at another pivotal point here,” he said. “I think in the next 25 years we’re going to see ourselves having an expectation of inclusion.”

The Letter versus the Spirit of the ADA: Creating “Full and Equal Enjoyment”

The difference between these second and third eras is the difference between “accessible design” – a process that focuses on accommodating and correcting for specific barriers – and “universal design,” a term coined by architect Ronald Mace, who founded the Center for Universal Design at North Carolina State University in 1989. Universal design, which aims to serve every imaginable user of a building or a facility, acknowledges an important fact that many Americans prefer to ignore: At some point most of us, and especially if we’re fortunate enough to live to old age, will be disabled – if not by a physical limitation, by something as simple as the need to carry a heavy package, or to push a baby stroller.

If this seems a subtle difference in worldview, it’s not: One view is prescriptive, the other visionary. Many professionals responsible for creating the built environment remain fixated on requirements.

Sarah Boehm, an interior designer and assistant professor at Florida International University’s College of Architecture + The Arts, has explored how design professionals approach ADA requirements. She conducted a pilot survey among several Florida designers in 2008 that revealed a view of the ADA as prescriptive, punitive, and also, paradoxically, too vague and open to interpretation. She recently conducted a follow-up survey of more than 300 designers, and while she hasn’t finished compiling the results, she has discovered the same overall attitude of resignation about the law, which she summed up as: “We’re doing what we’re supposed to.”

In their academic writing, Boehm and co-author Jean Sherman, director of the Center on Aging and Disabilities at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, offer several recommendations for changing this thinking and for cultivating understanding of the comprehensive spirit of the ADA. They’ve also pointed out that our current thinking about “access” continues to be narrowly focused: When we think about transportation access, for example, we think about wheelchair lifts. But that thinking fails to account for entire classes of people with disabilities, such as people who are cognitively or intellectually disabled (ID). A brief consideration of the barriers people with ID face in navigating a public transit system – complicated routing and scheduling, transfers, unfamiliar destinations – opens up exciting possibilities in urban design. A transit system could be designed to interface with a GPS-enabled navigational aid, for example, or a new “smart environment” could be programmed to offer cues and prompts.

Even for those limited strictly by mobility, there can be an obvious difference between “accessible” and “universal” design, says Boehm, who specializes in design for the hospitality industry. The amended ADA, she points out, requires access to swimming pools, and around the country, more pools are being equipped with wheelchair lifts. That may be the only alternative for an existing pool, Boehm says, but a better solution for a newly constructed pool would be a “zero depth entry” or “beach entry,” where the deck at one end simply slopes into the water at a gentle angle. “Nobody’s saying it’s specifically for disabled people to get into the pool,” she said. “A lift is giving us accessibility, applying the law. But integration of accessibility into the design gives us a better result for everyone.”

A digital sign displays transit information at the Portland Transit Mall, Portland, Oregon’s downtown transit hub. Such displays, when paired with audio announcements, provide helpful information for all transit users – those with disabilities and those without. Universal design aims to serve every imaginable user of a building or facility.

Photo by Steve Morgan

A zero depth entry pool would take up more space – and cost more – than a traditional pool. But as Boehm points out, these trade-offs are made constantly in the built environment. “In the end, mothers can wade into the pool with their disabled children. So you’re serving that client,” she said. “You’re serving the older person who may be not as mobile, who may have an easier time accessing the pool in that way.”

For the past several years, one of the leading practitioners of universal design has been Christopher Downey, a San Francisco Bay Area architect and consultant who began his career in 1984. He first truly saw the world from the perspective of a person with disabilities in the 1980s, he says, when an undergraduate classmate who used a wheelchair presented a slideshow.

“I was struck by how weird the slideshow was,” Downey recalled. “I couldn’t figure out what was so odd about it. But then it occurred to me: His camera lens was about 3 feet below my own frame of reference. So it really made me think: Accessibility’s not just about how you engage the space, or how you get through the space. It’s also about the experience. Can you enjoy it? Is it meaningful and effective for you?”

You can tell, if you watch one of Downey’s TED talks online, or if you sit in on one of the courses he teaches about the ADA or universal design at the University of California-Berkeley, that he’s a thoughtful, compassionate person for whom access has always been an important issue. You’ll also notice that he’s blind: He lost his sight suddenly in 2008, after surgery to remove a benign tumor near his optic nerve.

Rather than end his career, Downey’s blindness sent it in new directions: Since landing his first work as a blind architect, a 2009 consultation with the designers of a new polytrauma and blind rehabilitation center for the Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Medical Center, he’s worked on several other projects, including the Duke Eye Center in Durham, North Carolina, and San Francisco’s 1.5-million-square-foot Transbay Transit Terminal.

Too often, Downey says, architects think of ADA requirements as the maximum they need to do to comply with the law, when in fact they’re a minimum level of accommodation. “It’s a really profound difference,” he said, “especially when you’re designing a building that’s specifically for the blind and visually impaired. For people with disabilities of all types, there’s so much more that needs to be done.”

After losing his sight, the first project on which Downey was lead architect was the new Independent Living Resource Center (ILRC) near the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District. Founded in 1976, it was one of the nation’s first independent living centers, but it had been housed for more than a decade on the third floor of a brick building on Mission Street, where the elevator often broke down and left wheelchair users stranded.

Downey wanted to make the new building enjoyable and useful to as many people as possible. Its original design, when he came aboard, isolated people in interior work spaces, with no views or daylight penetrating beyond the entry. One of his first decisions was to open up the interior – not only to bring in light and views, but also to show people with disabilities working inside. He lowered the long windowsill fronting the street to a height many criticized as too far: “But we did that so people working Schindler Elevator Corporationin the back, in wheelchairs, could see out the front to the street,” he said, “and also so they’d be seen. If you look in, you’ll see more than just the top of someone’s head. You’ll see a person at work in a wheelchair.”

A visitor uses an RFID access card with a custom-built widescreen Schindler PORT Technology terminal to enter the new Independent Living Resource Center (ILRC) in San Francisco. The ILRC building was designed to accommodate a variety of abilities.

Schindler Elevator Corporation

The ILRC designed by Downey opened its doors in July 2014, and is still evolving to accommodate a variety of abilities. It’s an expansive space, and a tactile, high-contrast environment for the blind and visually impaired. The polished concrete floor of the common space gives way to cork flooring in the workspaces, with strategically placed transition strips marking the change so that someone can easily navigate using a white cane.

ILRC Executive Director Jessie Lenz provides an interactive tour of the facility’s new Schindler PORT Technology system to members of the local community.

Schindler Elevator Corporation

The ILRC also uses smart building technology: It features the first U.S. installation of Schindler Elevator Corporation’s new PORT Technology, an access and security system that uses touchscreens and radio-frequency identification (RFID) badges to allow people in and out of offices and work spaces. Developers are working on several adaptations:

The touchscreen “doorbells,” which activate a chime to announce to a blind person the arrival of a visitor into a room, may be programmed to deliver a visible flash to make the same announcement to a deaf person. A smartphone application will someday allow users to alert the system and open a series of doors along a route in advance.

Like other people who have lost their sight, Downey has been surprised by the extent to which his other senses help him to navigate the world. Likewise, after losing his sight, he’s discovering a more expansive professional vision: When he teaches at Berkeley or speaks to groups, he says, he runs into the “compliance” mind-set all the time, and gently pushes back against this way of looking at the ADA. The law is really a social pact, he says, and architects and designers are the gatekeepers to a more inclusive world.

“It’s a wonderful opportunity we have, to create a positive environment,” he said. “If you think about it that way, it gives you a much better understanding of why all those regulations exist. The point of it isn’t merely to achieve those minimum clearances. The point of it is to include people, and to create a built environment for as many people, with the broadest and most diverse range of abilities, as we possibly can.”