Transcriber: Thomas Horejes Reviewer: Denise RQ
[The interpretation provided for this presentation
is live and unrehearsed.
Interpreter(s) assigned
may or may not have had materials in advance for preparation.
Inaccuracies related to the content of the material
may be due to imperfections in the interpreting process.
This interpretation has not been reviewed by the presenter.]
Hello everyone.
Hello.
I am an architect here at Gallaudet University
and have been for seven years now.
And my presentation is the stories
of what I've learned from the deaf community here
and how that speaks to the story of deaf people
searching for the space of their own.
And within the broader world,
how we also are looking for sustainability and livability.
And this is in fact the story of how deaf space,
this innate knowledge and wisdom that deaf people have around architecture,
how that actually tells new and inspiring stories
of different approaches we can take to architecture
that start internally, physically with the body
and then result in more empathetic design.
In my childhood, I grew up and became an architect
during the time of what is known as the modern paradigm in architecture.
I'm going to be referring to the modern paradigm
a number of times in my presentation today.
The modern paradigm always thinks of the building
first in terms of building a beautiful thing,
and the building being important,
but the people are not attended to as well.
So, in this process, we have to start thinking less about the abstract first
and more about the people.
Because they've been secondary to our notion of building,
especially deaf people.
So if we think first in the abstract,
and think secondarily of the people,
then there's a disconnect that's critical.
It creates stressors and isolation.
It creates conflict for the people inhabiting the buildings.
So my question for all of you now
is how in the design world we can create more sustainable design
and design wherein there is
not the disconnect between the people and the architecture of the space itself?
So now I want to look at new approaches
to more sustainable worlds,
and greater connection between the people and the buildings that they inhabit.
I want to contrast this modern paradigm with the organic paradigm.
When I came to Gallaudet, that's when I began to learn about this.
I really learned about it here,
because they don't teach it in architecture.
If you look at the design of a nest, for example.
This is the space where a newborn bird is born.
The design of the nest itself reflects its use,
reflects the creatures that inhabit it.
We have to look at these notions to truly build a sustainable world.
And we have to think a little bit more now
about the search of deaf people for space of their own.
I would like to share with you three different quotes
that establish this philosophical foundation.
[The occupation of space is the first proof of existence.]
The first is the desire to establish a standing space which one owns
that proves the existence of its owner.
The need of human identity
that we must first identify the human identity of a space
before we identify the space itself.
We also have to look at the fact
that peoples and cultures have different languages,
but at the same time,
they also have different sensitivities to the world.
They attend to different things in their world.
So if we studied this a bit and studied this search
for a space of our own,
we have to think about what that means.
How we integrate with these spaces.
So in recent history, we've seen these conversations began.
Many deaf students grow up going to schools for the deaf.
And that's their background for their learning
and establishes a great deal of their identity.
Well, design has a great impact on the schools themselves.
Whether or not they create senses of isolation and stresses,
the notion the buildings can reinforce external perceptions of a group,
that can have a negative impact on one's own identity development.
That can also have a negative impact on a person's well being.
So, indeed, we all agree that had this has a negative effect,
but we also have to look at positive effects here as well,
because it creates a deep need, a deep desire
to create a space that is home.
And there's a wonderful example of this.
Some nine years ago,
a group of deaf people gathered together to work together to create
a new community in Laurent, South Dakota
and this was a wonderful idea.
I agree, we all know that's not currently built.
But there's a lot of energy required to make that happen.
And so it speaks to the great, deep-seated desire
to have a space where one's own language and culture
is present and one's own way of being
and interconnectedness with each other and the space is existent.
Every day, deaf people experience different kinds of struggles
with their environment.
The environment is designed by people like me, hearing architects;
and that's a problem.
It doesn't really fit the ways of being,
and ways of seeing, and language of deaf people.
And so how we are informed of things in the space that we don't see,
the space behind us for example by lighting,
by other architectural features, is important.
It has an effect on the well being of the people inhabiting those buildings.
There is something positive to be found in this, though;
that it inspires new notions about how we modify the world,
modify spaces, and architecture to fit ways of being.
Architects also have their own language of meaning.
We have to examine
how this fits with deaf ways of being and visual language.
We also have to look at the sensory reach that the space allows,
we know we extend sensory reach behind us where we can't see
to infer information about our world,
but how do we do this collectively and as a culture within the deaf world?
There are three powerful impacts we found on these basic ideas:
of form, lighting, and material,
and some of the language of architecture refers to these ideas.
But we have to look also in a visual language
of what are the proximity requirements,
the lighting requirements,
to allow that visual language to occur?
Given a visual language, we have to think about
what is the background for that visual language,
how do we encourage greater sensory reach?
What also are the materials that we're working with
that propagate vibration and inform me
about things happening within my environment?
How do we design a space that promotes
a collective discussion, people unified together
in visual design that is more cohesive?
And if we take all of these ideas together
and put them together in a single room,
you can see some of the implications here
because in a building designed by Edward Hopper, the artist,
he gives us a visualization
of what this kind of interconnectedness of a space and its people would look like.
This image, we see people gathered together
for a very tight-knit conversation.
And you can see also
how the light is pooling around the people
and creating a mood in the environment of this painting,
so you have both the private conversation and the public space in balance.
At Gallaudet, we had the opportunity
to build two new buildings based on this concept of deaf space.
The first one was the SLCC.
In that building, we started the process of workshopping,
we gathered deaf people together
to share ideas about space,
how we could build it in an open way.
And this building was completed in 2009.
You can see many of the ideas coming to fruition there.
However, some missed the mark.
We wondered why we had missed the mark in such a way.
But we realized we went about the process somewhat wrongly.
I say that because the SLCC was designed using the modern paradigm,
contrasting that with the organic deaf paradigm.
And so that has continued throughout the development of that building.
So then we tried a newer approach on our next building.
And you can see that in our new dormitory.
You will see here two pictures showing
the design of the large public-space room
and how it's designed for a visual language.
You'll see that in its tiered sections.
So that can allow
for three disparate areas of conversation or one as a whole.
And the major difference here is it was designed by deaf people,
it had deaf people involved in the architecture of it.
And one of the things that I think is so cool about that
is the nature of the tiered stages
sets a material grounding that people are then connected to
in an intricate way.
This is much more the organic approach,
the organic paradigm,
which is essentially the deaf paradigm as well.
We see this referred to in the field of architecture as the vernacular approach.
The vernacular approach looks at how we create connectedness
in our approach to the buildings that we build.
So how do deaf people connect to these spaces?
This presents a number of challenges.
So now, we have an environment that has lots of isolation and stressors.
How do we transform that?
We do that by making the environment
and its negative impact on the spirit, and the body, and the stressors,
we transform that.
We have to look at how design can create a more sustainable world
that eliminates as many of these stressors as possible.
I'm going to show you now three very exciting challenges
that we have in the world of architecture that deaf space poses to us.
Deaf space presents positive solutions to all of these.
The first is we look at our population aging.
We age pretty quickly, I certainly know that.
But we have solutions to some of these effects of aging;
universal design,
how we design spaces for all people, including the elderly.
Now we also are faced with issues of climate change now.
The world of design has approached this
by trying to build green, more sustainable buildings.
We also have now, more than ever before in history,
people congregating in cities and urban environments
which create additional stressors.
But once again, we have solutions to this.
In looking at social equity, and design, and planning
in these business and economic approaches to equity
are three approaches to external problems within the world that are present.
But one thing we haven't yet thought about
is how the body and the design integrate.
And we haven't thought about this in this visceral way.
For many years, deaf people have known these things innately;
how to alter the environment so it fits their way of embodiment.
So what I propose now
are some specific examples
of how deaf people can contribute to solving
some of these great problems in our world today.
One of these is promoting the idea of embodied design
so that within the design process
we can, you know, inspire new ways of teaching empathetic design,
design wherein the environment and the design policy is affected
by the understanding of the people.
This will also have an effect on the business of design and architecture.
And the main point of this is deaf people do so by leading by example.
Also, we have to think about who makes change happen
in these approaches.
If we're building a building,
then we have to have deaf space principles incorporated into it.
We now have a world-wide community of deaf architects
here at Gallaudet,
and other designers that can create this change more broadly in the world.
If we look at the 6th Street property development,
we're trying to design around deaf space concepts there,
and doing so successfully.
We have to think about development policy
and design policy for our world as a whole.
So in closing, for my presentation,
I would like to just thank all of the people in the deaf community
who have taught me so much
about how we can approach the world differently.
With that, I thank you.