Architecture as Prosthesis: A Cultural Reimagination of Disability on Boston Harbor

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.