DMA Project Intro: Round Tower with Jos Boys and Aimi Hamraie

Disability Meets Architecture is a co-created podcast miniseries, enabling conversations that cross boundaries between architecture, Disability studies and related disciplines; and across theory and practice beyond the conventions of conventional access.Each conversation featured in Disability Meets Architecture draws on a different productive friction and places two activists, architects, designers, writers or artists in dialogue. This ‘project intro’ with Jos Boys (The DisOrdinary Architecture Project) and Aimi Hamraie (Critical Design Lab) takes place at the Round Tower, Rundetårn, in Copenhagen. It was recorded just as we were planning the series when Jos and Aimi found themselves in the city at the same time.This tower, completed in 1642 for Christian IV of Denmark, features an equestrian ramp which would enable a horse and carriage to rise 34.8m to the observatory at the top. This ramp is not accessible under design guidance. However, it highlights how a design feature, often associated with access, is reimagined as desirable, going as far as displacing the staircase as the primary way to move vertically up this 17th C. tower. It shows how thinking differently about how we move through space, beyond the human, beyond the upright human, can create different forms of pleasurable architecture.Aimi Hamraie (they/them) is the founder and director of Critical Design Lab, a multi-disciplinary and multi-institution arts and design collaborative rooted in disability culture. Aimi is author of Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) and host of the Contra* podcast on disability and design. They are a 2022 United States Artists Fellow, Canada Research Chair in Technology, Society, and Disability and Associate Professor of Social Science at York University.Jos Boys (she/her) is the founder and co-director of The DisOrdinary Architecture Project with Zoe Partington. Jos was also part of Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative in the late 1970s and 80s in the UK. Through her work, Jos has co-authored and acted as editor/co-editor on a number of books including Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader (2017), Doing Disability Differently: An alternative handbook on architecture, dis/ability and designing for everyday life