About
September 2023 - April 2024︎ Directed Research Project
︎ Master’s of Architecture - McGill
︎ Supervised by Michael Jemtrud
︎ In afiliation with ReCONstruct
My name is Maddie Lachance, I am a queer woman of French Canadian descent who lives and works in Tiohtià:ke (Joh-jaw-gay) /Montreal, unceded indigenous lands that is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations including the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabeg peoples.
To preface my work, I’d like to state that I don’t pretend to be an expert in the disabled experience, and the conclusions I’ve come to were directly informed by the work and writing of many disabled activists and scholars.
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With a focus on concrete towers in Montreal, this project explores a retrofit strategy for our housing infrastructure that emulates the changing bodies that occupy it: one with ‘good bones’ and changing skins. Rooted in the paradigm shift at the foundation of critical disability studies, this work seeks to subvert the norm and start from disability, asserting that all those who occupy space are individual and distinct and deserve the agency to live in a home that meets their needs.
People with low mobility, low vision, hearing difficulties or cognitive disabilities all embody complex and intersectional identities. Additionally, our bodies change throughout our lives, and we all share spaces with one another in interconnected households. This project treats the home as an assistive technology. It introduces slack through the transformation of an existing housing tower, enabling the homes to change and adapt along with their inhabitants. My proposal introduces new typical and atypical housing units, extends the floorplate at key locations, and improves exterior balcony conditions. Exploring the opportunities presented by the process of changing a building’s skin, it upgrades both the architecture and the accessibility of the housing complex.
Starting from Universal Design principles and exploring the writing of Disability Justice activists like Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (they/she), the result is a design that looks beyond contemporary accessibility standards, and instead focuses on the ways our spaces work in dialog with community supports and social systems to meet our diverse needs. Whether formal (ex: home care, long term care, etc.) or informal (ex: community care webs, elderly family members living with younger family members, etc.), systems of care and support are essential to true accessibility. By facilitating the ways we already live and care for each other in community, this model creates intentional space within our housing stock for those who are typically excluded.