Like many campuses, UC Berkeley encounters access challenges at both the building and campus scale. This presentation will focus UC Berkeley’s current effort to address its accessibility between buildings, on a historic beaux arts campus that traverses 300 feet of vertical grade, from west to east.

UC Berkeley is the home of the disability rights movement, as begun by severely disabled students in the 1960s. This movement led to the passage of the National Rehabilitation Act of 1974, and the ADA in 1990. The history of this movement and the campus’ continued commitment to mitigating physical barriers for severely disabled students can sometimes be at odds with the classical campus landscape. Further, design solutions acceptable to the university community do not always fit neatly within The Secretary of The Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation. Creating accessible spaces requires the deep integration of consideration for accessible outcomes at every stage of the design process, but especially at its start.

This presentation centers the viewpoint of disabled people, discussing the common ways we think about disability and providing tools to embrace disability in design thinking. We will aim for attendees to be introspective and begin to understand their individual relationship with accessibility and how this affects their attitudes towards interventions in historic contexts.