We will reveal our proposals to deny/denounce/debunk/demolish GENDER BIAS in the built environment in general and this academy building in particular. This intervention emerges from the seminar of the same name at the Institute for Art and Architecture.
Imagine a world where the door handle is too big and too difficult to operate, your heart attack is misdiagnosed, and you are 73% more likely to be seriously injured in a car accident. If any of this sounds familiar, chances are that you’re not a white western male. Inspired by the book, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, by Caroline Criado Perez, we asked how people of other backgrounds and genders would have gone about designing our built environment. On the basis of these explorations we now make proposals for changes to the Academy Building at Schiller Platz. One may expect these changes to feel uncanny or they could expose the peculiarity of the built environment that we currently inhabit. This seminar challenges the supremacy of standardisation and insists that side by side customisation become far more common. Our built environment can and should accommodate more of us, whatever our gender or abilities, and it will if we insist that it does.