In Berkeley in the 1970s, disabled individuals countered their confinement in medical institutions and their isolation in family households. With the support of diverse designs, social and material networks, and mediated by the Center of Independent Living, they worked to unfold their lives within the community. The Center’s ethos departed from the pursuit for assimilation that had characterized previous agendas for disabled people in the United States and rather sought to support the unique lives and goals of each individual. In parallel to that shift, these living arrangements challenged established frameworks of domesticity, with their privileged notions of care, and characteristic forms of labour.

Join us on Thursday 1 August as Ignacio G. Galan explores the activist designs developed within this context by disabled individuals in their own spaces of residence. This seminar will also examine the accompanying disruption of social norms and practices in the household—a process of “cripping” due to their capacity to challenge attitudes towards disability from an intersectional perspective that aligned anti-ableism with the fight against other forms of oppression based on gender, sexual orientation, and race. Through select objects from the CCA Collection Ignacio G. Galán will situate the Center of Independent Living’s transformations of the household in relation to shifting discourses and paradigms of architecture and domesticity.

This seminar is free and open to the public.

Ignacio G. Galán is an architectural historian, architect, and educator, working as assistant professor at Barnard+Columbia Colleges. His work addresses the ways in which architecture mediates power and participates in the articulation of societies, with a focus on nationalism, colonialism, migration, and disability. He has published in JSAH, modernism+modernity, JDH, and JAE, among others, and his monograph, Furnishing Fascism, is forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press (2024). He has exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2014, 2021) and the Center for Architecture (2022), has co-curated the Oslo Triennale (2016), and has co-edited Radical Pedagogies (2022) and After Belonging (2016).