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By Barbara Knecht

Making accessibility invisible

It’s possible to illustrate the seven principles of universal design with architectural examples. However, outstanding examples of universal design are so seamlessly integrated into the architectural solution that they are rarely noticed for their common characteristics. “The best projects are those where you don’t notice the design challenge, be it a steep slope or accessibility,” says James H. Collins, Jr., president of Boston-based Payette Associates. “If you approach something as a [design] ‘problem’ that you have to get around, then the resulting design highlights the problem and shows the solution. It says, look how clever the designer was to solve this difficult problem.”

 

Payette Associates detailed the entrance so that everyone comes in through a curved, automatic, sliding door. Photography: © Jeff Goldberg/ESTO

Payette Associates completed an addition to the Barus and Holley engineering complex at Brown University in 2001. The small project (18,000 square feet) provides for state-of-the-art engineering laboratories and classrooms. The new Charles H. Giancarlo Engineering Laboratories has produced a dramatic transformation of the complex. While the addition meets program requirements, it also rationalizes level changes between existing buildings and creates both a terminus and a connection to the campus pedestrian spine.

A 10-foot grade difference between the engineering complex, the campus walk, and an existing parking lot had resulted in a parking lot on the campus side of the building, a wide stairway to a blank wall, and an entrance on the side opposite the campus. The previous circulation through the complex was accessible via a ramp and elevator; the new solution qualifies as universal, because all users enter and move among the buildings using the same circulation system.

 

An entry pavilion provides a visual focal point and organizing element for a large science complex. Photography: © Jeff Goldberg/ESTO

The pavilion is entered from a grade-level plaza through a grand curved facade, the new terminus of Manning Walk, which is the ceremonial and functional campus axis. The elegance of the curved facade is repeated in a curved automatic sliding door, an example of universal design. With a full 8-foot opening, it requires no “dance” at a swinging door as people decide who opens it or who goes first. Conversations continue uninterrupted; opposing traffic doesn’t have to stop to allow others to pass first; heavy wind pressure doesn’t require extra strength to control the doors, and no special opening devices are needed for accessibility. Four hundred people pass seamlessly through the complex every day. The door simply whooshes open as people approach and closes behind them, reminding us that good technology supports universally designed solutions.

Once inside the pavilion, all the new rooms are organized off the circulation ramp that bisects the new building and connects with the older buildings at four different levels. Windows into the new spaces and glass sides on the ramp open light and views horizontally. Spaces adjacent to the ramp permit light and views to penetrate vertically all the way from the clerestories at the top of the circulation “concourse” to the basement below it. The plaza at the entrance to the building, the action in the labs, and the newly rational circulation have made a great new place that, in Jim Collins’s words, is “equally accessible to the poetry major and the math major.”