Christopher Scarffe

I am a London-based designer graduating from the MA Architecture course at the RCA.

During my time at the RCA, I have developed an interest in the complex, often contradictory ways that spatial design and the built environment play a role in empowering, or indeed, disabling differently-abled minds and bodies. My interest in the intersection of disability and architecture stems from my personal experience of living with congenital upper limb impairments.

My design practice is informed by disability activism, disability theory, and the disability arts movement. Equally pivotal to my design practice is the affirmation model of disability and impairment; a model which rejects 'tragic' or 'medicalised' perceptions by actively reinforcing a positive and valid identity for differently-abled minds and bodies. I am keen to exercise my agency as a designer to challenge the way disability and impairment are perceived and responded to in the world today. 

Prior to my MA, I completed my undergraduate degree at Leeds School of Architecture. My thesis project, which questioned conventional modes of regenerating inner-city areas, was nominated for the RIBA President’s Medals and awarded an RIBA Yorkshire Student Award. Last year I studied with ADS2 - led by David Knight, Diana Ibáñez López, and Ahmed Belkhodj - and explored the politics of development and generation of new forms of architectural agency in the context of National Parks. My project, nominated for the RIBA London West Student Award, harnessed the playful exuberance of the recreational navigation endemic to the Broads National Park to generate a more contextual and engaging solution to the rising sea levels that are already consuming the park’s cherished landscape. 

I hope you find my work interesting and engaging. Please feel free to reach out if you have any feedback or thoughts you would like to share with me!

Despite a great deal of societal and legal progress, for those with physical, neurological, and sensory impairments, navigating the world around us is still laden with barriers. Adjustments to society’s structures and systems, such as my inclusion plan displayed below, are undoubtedly well-intentioned and work towards offering greater inclusivity and awareness of the social and spatial needs of differently-abled bodies. However, these adjustments are usually only carried out to an extent that society deems ‘reasonable’. What is defined as ‘reasonable’ is entirely open to interpretation and often governed by market-driven values. As a result, the exclusion of those that do not fit the ‘normate template’ is repeatedly justified through financial viability or historical preservation.

Furthermore, in a world full of ‘reasonable adjustments’, disability is still seen as an undesirable state, with disabled bodies devalued as abnormal and treated as separate to the dominant abled body. This is because while society values productivity, economic growth, and profitability above all else, disabled bodies will continue to be framed as burdensome, unproductive, and unprofitable. Additionally, our medicalised conception of disability and impairment means we respond to those with diverse social and spatial requirements with purely functional solutions that frame disability as a problem in need of a solution. It is rarely considered how this approach might (negatively) frame society’s perception of disabled individuals, and indeed, disabled individual's perception of themselves.

To that end, this project asks: can you imagine a version of our world where inclusion plans aren’t necessary? Where being differently-abled isn’t bad nor good, but instead, just a fact of human diversity. Where the different needs of differently-abled bodies are viewed as a design opportunity rather than a constraint. What might the infrastructural elements that make up the very fabric of our built environment look like as a result? And how might they enable a different way of moving through and experiencing the city? In such a world, spatial experience is predicated on enjoyment and the human flourishing of all members of society, rather than speed and profit-driven productivity for a select few. 

The primary spatial focus within the project lies in reimagining what Keller Easterling calls ‘Infrastructure Space’. These spaces and structures are often considered apolitical or not even considered at all, however, they are arguably the finest example of the dominant and singular logic within spatial design manifested. As Easterling argues, they set “the invisible rules that govern the spaces of our everyday lives, making certain things possible and other things impossible”.

Rather than designing a new reality where the traces of structural ableism are not present, the project utilises the cartoon landscape to radically re-imagine the structures and spaces that govern our reality. In doing so, the aim is to reveal the instrumentality of ‘infrastructure space’ in forming our perspective of difference and to encourage designers to begin to image how the world could be. In this way, dis/forming becomes a discursive act because, as Jay Dolmage argues, “we readily see the world in terms of physical space and spatial relations. Thus, spaces already convey information, and reconstructing or reimagining these spaces is a mode of argument.”