Search "disability" on the Cornell Journal of Architecture's website, and you will be hit with a “NO RESULTS FOUND” screen. Not one thesis project, not one critical essay, not one mention of the word or architectural design for people with disabilities in four and a half decades of faculty and student writing in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning. For an architecture school long regarded as one of the best in the country, that silence should be concerning.
Walk through Milstein Hall, the building where architecture students spend their studio years, and you'll find a single elevator serving as the primary means of vertical circulation for people with a physical disability. It reflects a missed opportunity where the void under the 14,000 square-meter complex reads as an unused space that could carry a ramp. The elevator is notorious for breaking down consistently. Many times, I’ve walked past it with the gears turning aimlessly while not even in use, signifying that a mechanical component has constantly misfired, leaving anyone with a physical disability unable to move up or down reliably.
The open floor plan floods students with typical office lighting, with no place of respite for neurodivergent students who are particularly sensitive to office environments. Moments of privacy within the desk space and allowing more opportunities for personal lighting adjustments would rectify this while integrating options for personal comfort in their studio. Sensory sensitivities are not covered in the Americans with Disabilities Act and are therefore often not taught or valued when building and designing accessible architecture. Milstein Hall is held up as one of the most architecturally ambitious buildings on campus. Still, it shows how little accessibility factors into that ambition.
What passes for disability education in most architecture programs is compliance training to know the ADA and the minimum clearances — essentially training students to avoid a lawsuit. That's liability management, not thoughtful design. It primes students and professionals to understand disability as a checklist to satisfy rather than a condition to design and empathize with.
I saw the cascading effects of this in the profession when I brought up my interest in design for people with disabilities at career fairs. After showing a professional at the firm Kohn Pederson Fox my portfolio — which had a mix of general architecture work and a winning competition entry for a contest dedicated to accessibility — the moment I talked about hoping to work with people with disabilities, the conversation steered toward ADA consulting. I was pushed away from being a licensed architect and toward becoming an accredited specialist in a single conversation. Someone whose responsibility is designated after the design has been made and ensures ADA compliance rather than what I hoped to become: an architect engineering creative solutions to disability issues.
Wanda Katja Liebermann, a historian and licensed architect who studied at The University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University before spending over a decade teaching architecture, wrote an entire book about this pattern called Architecture’s Disability Problem. She argued similarly that architectural education on disability stays minimal and compliance-driven, treating accessibility as legal exposure. Particularly, in her experience teaching and as a student, she states, “I can think of only a handful of students with disabilities.” If a scholar with that much distance from Cornell can describe the same pattern, it isn't a Cornell problem so much as a discipline-wide one that our university happens to reproduce.
This offers a unique opportunity for the program to become a pioneer in the field, much like courses today that have become increasingly accustomed to sustainability research and design. A required course in the first or second year of study could have students take existing buildings, including ones on our own campus, and redesign them for accessibility in ways that go above code minimums, using them as a generative constraint rather than an obstacle. This could be taught in conjunction with the ARCH 2102: “Integrative Design Studio,” as is done for sustainability in the ARCH 2616: “Environmental Systems II” course. There was an announcement of a studio this semester that addresses the topic in depth; however, it is only offered in the fourth or fifth year of education, when established norms of design for disability are already reinforced. The same cascade that permeates the industry today needs to be disrupted in the first or second year or study in architectural education, leading to greater representation of disabled architects and designers in the academic and professional scene.
The main pushback I can imagine from an idea like this would be toward the notion that this is outside the scope and specialization of architects; however, architects are some of the most influential people in deciding how accessible a space is. To leave disability entirely to ADA consultants and compliance minimums means the people setting the vision for a project never had to think about disability. Cornell trains people who will go on to design some of our most remarkable buildings at the most regarded architecture firms. If they leave here having never seriously engaged with disability as a design question beyond ADA, we leave an entire discipline to have another 45 years of a page stating, “NO RESULTS FOUND” when you search “disability.”
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