ABSTRACT
Selwyn Goldsmith's Designing for the Disabled has, since it was first published in 1963, been a bible for practising architects around the world. Now, as a new book with a radical new vision, comes his Designing for the Disabled: The New Paradigm.
Goldsmith's new paradigm is based on the concept of architectural disability. As a version of the social model of disability, it is not exclusively the property of physically disabled people. Others who are afflicted by it include women, since men customarily get proportionately four times as many amenities in public toilets as women - and women have to queue where men do not - and those with infants in pushchairs, because normal WC facilities are invariably too small to get a pushchair and infant into.
To counter architectural disability, Goldsmith's line is that the axiom for legislation action has to be 'access for everyone' - it should not just be 'access for the disabled', as it presently is with the Part M building regulation and relevant provisions of the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act. In a 40-page annex to his book he sets out the terms that a new-style Part M regulation and its Approved Document might take, one that would cover alterations to existing buildings as well as new buildings. But architects and building control officers need not, he says, wait for new a legislation to apply new practical procedures to meet the requirements of the current Part M regulation; they can, as he advises, act positively now.
This is a book which will oblige architects to rethink the methodology of designing for the disabled. It is a book that no practising architect, building control officer, local planning officer or access officer can afford to be without.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |144 pages
The evolution of accessibility controls
chapter |5 pages
Where I came in
chapter |11 pages
Tim Nugent – the idealist who changed the world
chapter |12 pages
The welfare path that I took
chapter |6 pages
America: into the mainstream
chapter |10 pages
Britain: cementing the welfare fabric
chapter |5 pages
The design standards trap
chapter |6 pages
America: the emergence of the disability rights movement
chapter |14 pages
Britain: discrimination and the force of the disability lobby
chapter |5 pages
Britain: the pressure for regulations
chapter |8 pages
America: the advance towards the Americans with Disabilities Act
chapter |15 pages
Britain: the turmoil on the way from Part T to Part M
chapter |12 pages
The Americans with Disabilities Act
chapter |5 pages
Britain: the Part M building regulation
chapter |5 pages
The European scene
chapter |14 pages
Britain: the Disability Discrimination Act
chapter |9 pages
America and Britain: the faultlines of accessibility controls
part |95 pages
Architectural disablement
chapter |12 pages
Architects and the architectural model of disability
chapter |18 pages
Building users – the real numbers
chapter |13 pages
Public toilets – the issues encapsulated
chapter |19 pages
Sensorily impaired people
chapter |31 pages
My experiences as a building user
part |50 pages
Britain: how accessibility controls might be reformulated