PRIMROSE HILL RD ESTATE

London, United Kingdom

I. Cripping* Architecture

What does architecture look like designed for a completely different archetype of body?

The project — a housing estate in North London situated over an uncovered rail line — is an urban community open to all, but designed with a different bias to standard. It reimagines a world so tailored for use by the body in a wheelchair — to the point where the able-bodied might feel discomfort, despite being technically able to “access” it — that architectural issues far beyond the limited purview of code come to the fore.

front doorway

Architectural form motivated primarily by the ramp-as-equaliser becomes a tool: for empathy, for liberation, for dialogue, for wonder. In Camden’s long typological canon of high-density horizontal housing, from Victorian terraced houses to Neave Brown’s Rowley Way Estate, Primrose Hill includes a range of public and private program types.

The result deals with experiential equality; the right to beauty; the inherent coloniality embedded in “universality”; urban inclusion that neither segregates nor subsumes; the politicisation of form; and a refusal to engage with the intellectual poverty of the “adaptation” mindset so haunted by an assumed neutral ground on top of which adaptations and accommodations must be made.

By rejecting “access” altogether, it creates a cripped architecture for us, by us.

Primrose Hill Rd Estate, view towards Swiss Cottage

II. Critical Heterogeneity

When Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was originally designed, it was entirely disabled-inaccessible**.

While it was to be explicitly dedicated to Jewish victims, a small handful of activists were quick to note that not only were some uncounted victims both Jewish and disabled, but that it was also located steps away from the headquarters of Aktion T4 — the Nazi euthanasia programme which terminated some 300,000 disabled people. They took the issue to Grand Tribunal.

The jury’s decision: Eisenman’s design would have to be revised to include three accessible paths, but to change more would irreparably alter the “artistic vision” of the project.

It seemed that in one fell swoop, two quiet parts were finally said out loud: that the height of our experience of architecture as meaningful art is dependent on nuanced factors beyond our ability to physically access it; but simultaneously, that this non-meaningful physical access alone is sufficient for the disabled to be considered “accommodated”.

It turns out that universality is a fraught concept for the built environment once scrutinised, even outside of disability. One of the foremost ideological challenges that rose and fell in the 20th Century was the question of a “perfect” or “universal” design - from a governing five points for houses to the superstructural city plan. Ambitious and frankly arrogant post-war housing projects exemplified this in London, where now-infamous failures of social engineering from World’s End to Balfron Tower far outnumbered the success stories, owing in no small part to idealistic assumptions rooted in Modernist obsessions with universal design principles.

Berlin, 2013

Meanwhile, for the disabled community, progress comes in rarified waves that stagnate. The 30th anniversary of the ADA was celebrated a year before this project was undertaken — a reminder how nascent our treatment of disability in architecture really is, and particularly when considered against the long canon of architectural history so enshrined by practitioners and theorists alike.

But in the internet era, the community has found new ways to connect and collect, leading to what within the community is called “crip culture” - a sort of counter-cultural existence borne out of exclusion that reclaims a slur. A beautiful, sprawling network of communities has bloomed — one of those actually-fulfilled promises of what the world wide web and social media ought to have been — giving disabled people around the world a chance to participate in the vital act of place-making virtually, even in absence of power over their physical spaces.

This — alongside all that is chaotically good about the internet and its myriad of microcommunities — proves that what we think of as “universal design” does not and cannot fully reproduce equitable architecture on its own. Our current conception of universality — a least-common-denominator model targeting physical access alone — is necessary but insufficient.

windows vs windows

What is required for a truly equitable world is what I term critical heterogeneity — an echo of Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism, for the architecture scholars — which calls for a proliferation of diversity to capture edge cases, rather than solely a reduction in diversity that attempts to capture everyone.

Currently, the disabled community exists physically fragmented across an ableist world - or otherwise heavily and often unpleasantly institutionalised.

Yet in the urban realm, we see local neighbourhood models for other minorities — particularly ethnic groups in the case of the Chinatowns and Little Italies of the world. It is an urban modality that makes intuitive sense for communities of the disabled as well, given both overlapping needs and a shared culture — but one that currently doesn’t exist as part of a cherished urban fabric.

These neighbourhoods in their ethnic iterations give our cities both texture and (oft-literal) flavour, while also historically providing a place that feels like home to those who otherwise would be without one. We are all better for them.

London, 2014

III. The Linear Housing Estate

Rowley Way, 2015

The emblematic linear housing estate to me is Neave Brown’s Alexandra & Ainsworth Estate, known locally as Rowley Way — perhaps in part because I had the privilege of living next to it for several years. On the scale of housing type, it reconceives the London terraced house by flipping it inside out, turning the private back garden into a semi-public front yard walkway. On the scale of the city, it negotiates the legacy of London’s extensive rail network - infamously cantilevering over a train line and using a dramatic waffle-grid to shield residents from the noise.

Of course, there is a third dimension that this linearity offers as well: an inherent compatibility with the ramp’s need for long runs, and the built-in implication of a long, promenading movement of the body through space. Neave Brown’s Camden triumph — a case of post-war housing gone right in large part due to its sensitive response to local context generally trumping imposition of top-down rules — features a smooth, flat, paved brick artery at its centre that is a joy to walk, cycle, hoverboard, scamper, and indeed wheelchair down. And people do; no where else in London have I known there to be so many children who play in the street openly with their neighbours.

Rowley Way (left) and Primrose Hill (right) located along the London Overground / Euston-Coventry National Rail line (yellow)

The project site is located over the very same rail line as Rowley Way a mile to the east, where the trains emerge from beneath higher ground into an open trench. These trenches, deeply cleft across London, are remnants of the Victorian cut-and-cover method of creating underground railways — each instance another case where funding most likely ran out before the “cover” part could come in.

To create Primrose Hill, this part of the railway trench is finally covered, and echoing Rowley Way with two backwards-cantilevering bars facing each other placed. In order to negotiate the dramatic topography that spans the site whilst also respecting the neighbouring residential area, one bar rises to meet the high ground while the other stays low to the level of its neighbours.

site and massing model showing two bars that negotiate both the topography and the estate’s relationship with neighbouring housing

To lay ground for ramp-based circulation, units are staggered at a 1:20 slope, and to keep the ramping continuous, the front of the bar is stepped back in plan periodically.

The ground is thus terraced accordingly, creating a second level of hierarchy within the community organisation, with public ramps in the centre helping negotiate the height difference between bars.

The bars are point-loaded; each elevator core can be considered the smallest unit of community, with several points per terrace

While ramps running along against the face provide a unique promenade for residents to reach the ground from their apartment the ‘long way’, while creating yet another ‘neighbourhood’ that spans terraces.

Units of various types are aggregated within this system, creating heterogeneity both laterally as well as vertically.

The central space and pocket balconies create a blend of public and private.

While the development remains related to its immediate surroundings

Creating a unique community that inverts the status quo of able-bodied-designed and wheelchair-adapted to wheelchair-designed and able-bodied-adapted.

Heterogeneity is then embedded at unit scale. Providing both diversity and equity - having interesting interior spaces, but also distributed equally across the board rather than featuring a handful of exceptions - was a primary motivator.

There are seven unit types, and each features a unique protrusion that serves multiple purposes - the first of these being interior spatial heterogeneity.

All units are accessible by anyone, but are clearly biased to the wheelchair user - including being designed on a five-foot grid that allows a full turning circle throughout.

Diversity extends to living configurations and household types. The smallest studio-sized unit is designed so that a person in a wheelchair could feasibly live alone - but it was important to include other units that would accommodate non-independent living.

A huge proportion of wheelchairs-associated conditions - tetraplegia, motor-neuron diseases like ALS or muscular dystrophy, even late-life ageing - require able-bodied live-in care.

Meanwhile, those in wheelchairs of course have able-bodied partners, children, or friends that they choose to live with regardless of their ability to live independently.

Ramps are integrated in various ways into the spaces, sometimes requiring that units “skip” a bay to gain run length

While other units feature elevators conceived as a typical London terrace’s single-loaded hallway turned on its side vertically. While this might seem excessively slow for someone stair-capable, for someone who runs on what is called “crip time” the perspective is very different.

These configurations together can then interlock symbiotically

Fully designing interior space from furniture to fixtures to be perfectly molded to a wheelchair user would be an entire separate project in itself - but Primrose Hill offers some hints at what such an effort could look like.

An able-bodied person has two viewing horizons: sitting and standing. For a wheelchair user, the interior architecture itself might offer a variety of viewing horizons within a single space.

Things that we think of as appendages - like railings - might become integrated natively into the walls

Meanwhile these protruding spaces invert the bay window to create light-filled nooks where a wheelchair user can roll right up to the glass

With space to turn comfortably without having to constantly reverse and back out

[aggregate plan showing parking and point-loaded entry]

The units are accessed from the ground via shared elevators, with semi-covered parking located in the rear beneath the cantilever

The unique protrusions serve to index different unit types from the facade - as well as create 3-dimensional variation in the aggregation.

The aggregation system itself borrows a strategy from music theory: periodic polyrhythms.

Each unit type is repeated horizontally at regular intervals - like this one, which occurs every seven bays on the top floor

Every eight bays on the third floor

And five bays on the second floor

creating a periodic pattern of clusters

This is repeated with each unit type - this two-level unit occurring every seven bays...

...but still creating difference from the other seven-bay repeater

Patterns are thus discernible but constantly varied in fugue

[personal appeal lol] When I lived in London next to that estate, I was on crutches or in a wheelchair full-time - but practically, what this meant was that I rarely left the house.

I spent the better part of two years inside, because going out was so onerous - yet even the interior of my own home continued to alienate me.

My imagined utopia is a space that argues for an alternate perspective at all scales - but perhaps most dramatically at the scale of human movement through space. The experience of urban topography that the development creates is one unique to the wheelchair user, and one which could only be developed from expressly designing for a different type of body.

For no-one else would such a terrain of long ramps and extended promenade be justified. Many of the adjacencies created - “neighbours” created by the same ramp connecting two units far apart in absolute space, for example - are unique.

It creates an alternate temporal space, again a nod to “crip time” - where how long it takes to get from one place to another is experienced differently between those on legs and those on wheels.

And by inviting the public to participate, the community is given a place to call home without segregation or isolation - creating a new relationship between a marginalised group finally able to gaze upon the majority, and be gazed upon on the same level.

* “cripping” (not to be confused with crippling)

First proposed by Robert McRuer in his 1966 book Crip Theory, the act of “cripping the discourse” is to apply a disabilities lens to able-privileged conversations.

This reclamation/reformulation of the slur “cripple” has stemmed crip culture, movements like #CripTheVote, and other examples - a more high-profile one being the Netflix documentary “Crip Camp” executive produced by the Obamas. The term is not without its own controversies within the community.

It is reserved for use only by those who have a disability.

** Fitzsimmons (2016: 87-89)

This segment of analysis belongs to J. Kent Fitzsimmons, whose article “More Than Access: Overcoming limits in architectural and disability discourse” originally outlines this reading of Eisenman’s memorial as well as other relevant arguments to the topic of expanding disability in architecture beyond physical access — many of which this project owes a considerable debt.

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