Shannon Finnegan, Anti-Stairs Club Lounge at the Vessel, 2019. Photo by Maria Baranova,
Image Description: An outdoor gathering of fifty disabled and non-disabled people to protest Vessel at Hudson Yards in New York City. Vessel is a building-sized, basket-like structure made of 154 interconnected stairways created by designer Thomas Heatherwick.
I wrote a fairly short manifesto for the idea of an "Institutional Model" on the critical architectural website PLATFORM. Here's a snippet.
"Unlike forms of political identity based around shared linguistic or cultural affiliation, and/or physical phenotype, disabled people are defined solely by their simultaneous exclusion and hyper-surveillance. While these forms of repression apply to all marginalized groups, disabled people, much like queer people, often have little in common with each other outside of their shared ostracism. In and beyond the U.S., for example, Black people, indigenous people, and other people of color have been structurally targeted by forms of state-controlled violence, theft, deprivation, and neglect. In response, these communities have responded through varied forms of bottom-up mutual support and solidarity, forming and inspiring countless movements of political and cultural resistance. By contrast, organizing on the basis of shared grievance has been more challenging for disabled and queer people, both within and between other identity-based communities. Within the disabled community, there is a distinction between those who are solely disabled by built structures, and those with less obvious and more stigmatizing forms of disability."
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