Architecture as Prosthesis: A Cultural Reimagination of Disability on Boston Harbor
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Abstract
How does architecture approach disability? Might this play a role in forming our
cultural beliefs? Increasingly specialized attitudes of the modern era, critiqued by
Hans-Georg Gadamer, move us to approach disability with afterthought accessibility
formulas, often displacing these “other” bodies to the margins of cultural life
rather than constructing them into it. As the prosthetic extension of our shared
cultural body, how can architecture engage bodies of all abilities to reimagine the
connections between external environment, self, and others? As Federica Goffi has
suggested architecture to be an inventive medium for participating in history, this
thesis enlivens cultural memory in order to advance cultural perception of bodies
labeled as “other.”
Boston’s Museum of Disability History and Prostheses assembles historical fragments
of the city’s untold transformation story along with spolia of Boston’s crumbling
almshouses into an exquisite corpse on Boston Harbor. Acting as an extension of
the user’s body, the museum becomes a prosthesis for the user to reimagine one’s
own body image through reinterpretation of the well-known condition of phantom
pain. A cubistic encounter of restorative fragments reconstructs conceptions of
disability in architecture and in culture, framing a reality for the user to imagine
new ways of perceiving self and others through embodied experience.