The objects that people rely on daily—glasses, pills, adhesives, crutches, hearing aids—make up a kind of cabinet of curiosities. These visible aids are symbolic of the way the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sorts disability by the impairments of mobility, cognition, hearing, vision, independent living, and self-care. According to the agency’s oft-cited data, around 20 percent of the US population is considered disabled. The Social Security Administration (SSA), on the other hand, categorizes potential impairment through the body’s mechanics. For example, its nested subsections shrink from the respiratory system to lungs, then from lungs to breath.
In spite of the stringent criteria used to categorize them, the needs that the CDC and SSA identify are often met with threadbare nets. The American health care system is plagued with high insurance premiums, gaps in coverage, and limited sick leave. People worry about falling ill, affected by the possibility of illness even when they are well. To borrow from critic Andrea Long Chu: everyone is crippled, all presidents, gun owners, and poets. Everyone who is sick. You, reader, are crippled, even—especially—if you are not disabled. Welcome. Sorry.
JUST AS THE HEALTH CARE SYSTEM is plagued with gaps in bodily care, so is the built environment. One set of responses to such shortcomings is what I and others describe through the terms “crip space” and “cripped space.” (The appropriation of the word crip from its initial derogatory use began in the late 20th century and is used not only by people with mobility impairments, but also by those with mental disabilities, people who are autistic or otherwise neurodiverse, and deaf people.)
Defining the marginal nature of these spaces is crucial as nascent interest in disability justice grows among architects and designers. In Disability Visibility, a collection edited by Alice Wong, S. E. Smith defines crip space as “a place where disability is celebrated and embraced,” fostering community through gathering. I, however, make a distinction between crip space and cripped space. Crip space is smug. It will give you handrails and ramps but takes no complaints. It does not actually care about your discomforts. Cripped space, on the other hand, is earnest and funny. It is made through modifications with and by disabled communities. It is the stuff of people’s desires.
Cripping is the action of invention. Just as Long Chu defines gender as the universal reaction to being female, so we might consider architecture to be the universal reaction to being crippled. And while Long Chu defines being female as a condition of self-sacrifice to make room for the desires of others, being crippled is a condition by which one’s value is decided by others. Architects define this value all the time, such as in the assumed mobility of a central stair or a lack of benches. Often represented in photos with no people, the reverence for these moves can be funny, since even the strongest cannot walk forever. Even in the most beautiful train stations, dozens of spry bodies will clutter an expanse by sitting on the floor.
A recent lecture series put on by Natasha Ansari and Shannon Hasenfratz of MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) reflected rising interest among the architecture set in both crip and cripped space. In one of the closing talks (conducted over Zoom), Aimi Hamraie projected an image of a fork balanced on a transparent mound of silicone; two soft sacks of silicone rested on its handle, holding it in place. Hamraie discussed the methods of “crip hacking,” where prosthetics are modified or made from scratch by users. The image was of a custom prosthetic made for a woman named Cindy, who wanted to be able to grip things based on use. This sort of invention can avoid what, in an earlier talk, Sarah Hendren dubbed “disability dongles,” useless devices devised by able-bodied designers.
This sort of adaptation is possible in architecture, too. When a client who was paralyzed from the waist down asked OMA to build a “complex house, because the house will define my world,” the firm responded with an open-plinth elevator that matched the dark concrete of the floors. It allowed the client to access the house’s three levels in one continuous motion. At UC Berkeley, a large red ramp creates a spiral that fills a multilevel lobby space of a campus building designed by Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects. The circular route of the ramp and the hydraulic levers of the elevator are geometries of access that disrupt our expectations of speed and procession. In Disability Visibility, Ellen Samuels writes that “crip time is time travel.… [W]e who occupy the bodies of crip time know that we are never linear, and we rage silently—or not so silently—at the calm straightforwardness of those who live in the sheltered space of normative time.”
In an excerpt from his new book, The Architecture of Disability, David Gissen writes that a building can become “alienating to disabled people by aestheticizing its inaccessibility.” To illustrate the point, Gissen cites Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel in Hudson Yards and Steven Holl’s Hunters Point Library in Long Island City, both designed around stairs. Hunters Point is filled with them, the number of risers rivaling that of the library’s bookshelves. On the primary western elevation, large windows, looking like soft-bellied worms, follow the stairs’ raked profiles as they ascend toward the roofline. The building is a draw for architects; hoping to explore the wonky section, they enter inside and stand with their backs to the shelves to admire the views of Manhattan. This novelty, however, comes at the expense of accessibility, particularly at mezzanine levels. Responding to complaints, library officials said they could simply retrieve the books for patrons. Eventually, these sections of the library were cleared of books and blocked off. Strollers continued to pile up on weekdays outside elevators that were in high demand. A New York Times article published not long after the facility’s 2019 opening quoted a senior partner at Steven Holl Architects as saying the issues with inaccessibility were a “small wrinkle in an incredibly successful project.” In other words, it is a crip space, where access is viewed as antithetical to desire.
Such “small wrinkles” abound in our built environment, rendering it indelibly furrowed. Speaking at the DUSP lecture series, Michael Stein, executive director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, described how when contemplating dinner plans he calls restaurants to vet if they are wheelchair-accessible; design omissions not noticeable to some can impede others from fulfilling the most routine activities. Before the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, access in new buildings was assured on a case-by-case basis. Despite the near-universal ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, private entities such as multinational corporations and nonprofits can still siphon funding to inaccessible spaces. Crip space here is not just a reaction against disabled bodies, but a denial that they exist.
Crip and cripped spaces operate between contradictions. Cripping space appropriates design moves, modifying and building from the desires and needs of disabled bodies. The CDC’s cabinet of aids, SSA’s forensics, and the ADA’s clearance requirements continue to perpetuate crip space through their shortcomings. If released from the isolated conditions of cripped spaces, a universal cripping mode of design would cause ruptures in able-bodied assumptions around time, labor, and value. You, reader, are crippled, even—especially—if you are not disabled. The possibilities of cripping show what could be if ableist assumptions about what constitutes a normative body were unmasked as the myth they are and always were.