DEAFSPACE: Lessons on Architecture, Empathy, and Cultural Agency

For the May 2018 meeting, DFA will host Hansel Bauman, campus Architect for Gallaudet University, through a Go To Meeting Screen sharing.

Throughout history Deaf people have employed novel means for modifying the hearing-centered environment they inhabit to meet their unique ways of being. Empathy, a long misunderstood human trait essential to our survival as social beings, is at the heart of these everyday cultural practices and the architecture they produce known as DeafSpace.

This presentation chronicles the work of Gallaudet University’s DeafSpace Project since 2006. Lessons gleaned from Deaf experiences and cultural traditions are used to transform contemporary design practices. The project’s empathic research and design methods inspire new problem-solving approaches for a more human-centered and sustainable world applicable to Deaf culture and beyond.

Hansel Bauman is co-director ofDeafSpace Institute (DSI) and adjunct faculty at Gallaudet University. Founding partner of Hansel Bauman, Architect + Planner.

He is the recipient of the International Association of Universal Design’s 2015 Gold Award for the “DeafSpace Design Guide” developed through the research and design project he established in 2006 with Gallaudet’s Department of ASL and Deaf Studies.

His writings and lectures, including a 2014 TED X lecture and the Smithsonian Institution’s 25th Anniversary calibration of the American’s with Disabilities Act in 2015 explores DeafSpace as a vernacular architecture for a more sustainable and livable world.

_{Image: Rocky Mountain Deaf School, AMC Architects, HB a+p, Denver, Colorado}

For those who qualify, 1.5 LU/HSWs are available.

To learn more about the Design for Aging Committee, visit architects.org/committees/design-aging-committee

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