‘Cripping Architecture’, the powerful thesis of Shaina Yang, reimagines our world for a ‘different assumed “neutral” body type’. Yang received her master of architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2021, where her thesis project was jointly awarded the James Templeton Kelley Prize for best final design project and the Clifford Wong Prize for best housing design project.
‘Cripping Architecture’ subverts the world’s current, predominantly exclusionary spatial designs, and asks: ‘What does architecture designed for a completely different archetype of body look like?’ Yang explains: ‘As a verb, reclaimed from the slur, “crip” has been in use by the disabled community since the 1960s to describe the act of applying a disability lens to able-privileged spaces, conversations, and practices.
‘The discomfort the term can spark in able-bodied people is exactly the kind of space I wanted to put them in, as they were assessing the project: acknowledging the radicalism behind designing explicitly for a community that has long been excluded from the entire practice of architecture,’ she says.
‘I dreamed of what the world might look like if it was designed to different assumptions,’ she says.
Drawing from her own experience as an able-passing person and rejecting the imposed universalisms of what bodies should be, she carves out an architectural language centred on the ramp, ‘the crux of wheelchair accessibility’ as ‘a tool: for empathy, for liberation, for dialogue, for wonder. By rejecting “access” altogether, it creates a cripped architecture for us, by us.’
Yang’s route to architecture is a less conventional one. ‘I applied to the MArch programme whilst working full-time in London as a trends analyst and insights consultant,’ she says.
It was during that time that she became interested in architecture's relationship to various networks of power, particularly in housing. ‘It’s inseparable from other core issues of class, racial inequality and environmental crisis,’ she says.
For Yang, architecture ‘means being extremely judicious and equitable with one of our most precious finite resources today: space’. She wishes to work ‘carefully and collaboratively’ with a range of organisations, from Nasa to her peers from both the architecture and development fields, but also communities that exist outside of these establishments, such as mutual aid networks and marginalised communities.
Today, Yang works as an architect at Adam Sokol Architecture Practice and lives with her husband in Los Angeles. She has also co-founded a design research collective and mini-studio called yangboydvu. Dream collaborator: Nasa
INFORMATION
Our Next Generation showcase of outstanding new talents appears in the January 2022 issue of Wallpaper* (W*273). Subscribe today!
-
Frieze London 2025: all the fashion moments to look out forThe best fashion happenings to add to your Frieze London 2025 schedule, from Dunhill’s curation of talks at Frieze Masters to an exhibition of furniture by Rick Owens
-
Artists reflect on Kate Bush lyrics for a War Child auctionPeter Doig and Maggi Hambling are among artists interpreting Kate Bush’s 1985 track ‘Running Up That Hill’ for War Child’s online auction
-
Explore Tom Kundig’s unusual houses, from studios on wheels to cabins slotted into bouldersThe American architect’s entire residential portfolio is the subject of a comprehensive new book, ‘Tom Kundig: Complete Houses’
-
Explore Tom Kundig’s unusual houses, from studios on wheels to cabins slotted into boulders
The American architect’s entire residential portfolio is the subject of a comprehensive new book, ‘Tom Kundig: Complete Houses’
-
Ballman Khaplova creates a light-filled artist’s studio in upstate New YorkThis modest artist’s studio provides a creative with an atelier and office in the grounds of an old farmhouse, embedding her practice in the surrounding landscape
-
The most important works of modernist landscape architecture in the USModernist landscapes quite literally grew alongside the modern architecture movement. Field specialist and advocate Charles A. Birnbaum takes us on a tour of some of the finest examples
-
Jeanne Gang’s single malt whisky decanter offers a balance ‘between utility and beauty’The architect’s whisky decanter, 'Artistry in Oak', brings a sculptural dimension to Gordon & MacPhail's single malt
-
An idyllic slice of midcentury design, the 1954 Norton House has gone on the marketNorton House in Pasadena, carefully crafted around its sloping site by Buff, Straub & Hensman, embodies the Californian ideal of the suburban modern house embedded within a private landscape
-
Herzog & de Meuron and Piet Oudolf unveil Calder Gardens in PhiladelphiaThe new cultural landmark presents Alexander Calder’s work in dialogue with nature and architecture, alongside the release of Jacques Herzog’s 'Sketches & Notes'. Ellie Stathaki interviews Herzog about the project.
-
Meet Studio Zewde, the Harlem practice that's creating landscapes 'rooted in cultural narratives, ecology and memory'Ahead of a string of prestigious project openings, we check in with firm founder Sara Zewde
-
The best of California desert architecture, from midcentury gems to mirrored dwellingsWhile architecture has long employed strategies to cool buildings in arid environments, California desert architecture developed its own distinct identity –giving rise, notably, to a wave of iconic midcentury designs
