I have taken the noun “armchair” and made of it a verb, “to armchair.” This came to me over years of activism and working for engineering firms and it means to devise programs and solutions from the comfort of one’s own chair, researching and applying accepted standards, not questioning the pertinence of these standards and not going out to see conditions first-hand or to engage with the people who will be the objects of one’s plans. I was once the chair of a stakeholder group looking to remove an elevated expressway on the Brooklyn waterfront to a tunnel. Later, I was one of the founders of the Grand Army Plaza Coalition, which worked to make a large roundabout and complex traffic junction in Brooklyn safe for all users. In both cases we had to work hard to get the engineers and planners to get away from their desks and walk the sites with us, and at least at Grand Army Plaza our efforts paid off. This is every bit the case in the field of accessibility.
New Utrecht Avenue subway station, N line, Brooklyn. Photograph by Michael Cairl.
This image is from one of the platforms at a subway complex in Brooklyn that was made accessible in 2019. Without a doubt every aspect of this accessibility project conforms to the letter of the Americans with Disability Act Accessibility Guidelines (ADAAG). The ADAAG comprises hundreds of pages of standards about every part of an accessibility project, to the most minute detail. The ADAAG has value. The problem is not with the ADAAG as such but in how practitioners use it. The ADAAG becomes a checklist when it should be a set of minimums.
What’s wrong with what is shown here? A wheelchair user does not have a clear path to the elevator, out of view at the rear of the platform. Anyone wanting to go from the foreground of the photo to the elevator must get around at least the column in the foreground, and indeed the one behind it, on a tortuous path that is neither convenient nor safe. Making the structural changes needed for a clear path would have required eliminating at least the first column. This could have been done as part of the station rehabilitation. It might well have been expensive to do then but it would be a lot more expensive to make this change now. I am well aware that accessibility was one part of the rehabilitation of a station complex built in 1915 and 1916. Shouldn’t safety and accessibility be uppermost criteria for a project like this?
I don’t know whether the designers of this project visited the site. As long as the letter of the ADAAG was applied, the designers did what they were paid to do. This sounds harsh, and it is. I am sure not one person involved in the design of this project imagined themselves in a wheelchair in this station.
Another recent example of a facility that complies with the ADAAG but fails the accessibility test is the Hunters Point branch of the Queens Library. It is architecturally stunning inside and out, no question about it. But all parts of the library are not accessible for all users. Read all about it in two pieces: the first, about the architecture (https://architizer.com/projects/hunters-point-library/); the second, about the accessibility problems (https://ny.curbed.com/2019/10/4/20898755/hunters-point-library-queens-new-york-accessibility). Judge for yourself. Consider the Seattle Public Library’s Central Branch and the Bud Werner Memorial Library in Steamboat Springs, Colorado as outstanding examples of going beyond the guidelines.
Let me be clear: regardless of what is in the ADAAG, regardless of the architectural accolades that followed the Hunters Point library’s opening, it is unacceptable that all parts of the library are not accessible to all users. Full stop. Designers have a professional and moral obligation to ensure their work complies with the ADA and to go beyond that, to imagine themselves as users of a fully accessible facility and design accordingly.
Universal Accessibility is the term and the need. Armchairing works against universal accessibility.
In an upcoming post I’ll discuss the related issue of silos, where a project might originate with one agency and affect, or be affected by, another.