Primer Artículo
Buildings often work in ways that are rhetorical. Through our experiences of accessibility
they can persuade us that we are welcome or unwelcome; through their visual style they can
create conflict with or signal acceptance of aesthetic conventions and the cultures of other
nations; they can express the vernacular or promote rules of decorum, reinforce class
stratification, or define the spirit of an age. Although architectural language is separate from
words, it is, nonetheless, an important expression of cultural identity and cultural exchange.
Its visual rhetoric is crafted with purpose, and it invites reaction. Yet the visual dimensions of
rhetoric have only recently become an important part of communication-related disciplines.
Broadly defined as "those symbolic actions enacted primarily through visual means, made
meaningful through culturally derived ways of looking and seeing and endeavoring to
influence diverse publics" (Olson et al. 3), visual rhetoric is a significant part of architectural
language, but it is by no means the fullest way to reflect the interaction between people and
buildings. Spatial rhetoric is also important: the ways in which people engage physically with
the built environment can define a society's attitude to a disability, and can even define
disability itself. Just as "studying visual rhetoric trains us to discriminate the commercial from
the civic, the propagandist from the democratic, and the sentimental from the memorable"
(Olson et al. 4), so spatial rhetoric can determine the extent and purpose of personal
functionality in ways that explain the value system of a culture and its modes of resistance.
People and environments interact in ways that are political. Occupying space in particular
ways—for example, the political challenge of the "sit in" form of protest, popular in the
1960s—is rhetorically persuasive because, although the impact of localized intrusion may be
small, it is part of a spatial language of protest. Activists attempt to reclaim power, not
through oratory, but through illegitimately occupying space. Metonymically, the "sit in"
signals, visually and spatially, the rhetoric of a countercultural take-over of hegemonic social
space. That is not to say that there are not fundamental differences between linguistic and
architectural forms. Architecture cannot have the clarity and nuance of a verbal language,
but it is nevertheless a mode of communication capable of varying degrees of precision. The
linguistic analogy, nonetheless, persists. For Donald Preziozi, architecture is a "matrix of
visual sign systems at the core of human sociocultural behavior" (Preziozi 12). Nevertheless,
the fundamental problem with discussing urban or architectural semantics, as Roland
Barthes asserts, is "how to pass from metaphor to analysis" (Barthes 168). Barthes is
correct; there is more assertion that architecture is a language than evidence presented to
convince us that buildings and the built environment function linguistically.1
Debates in Disability Studies about the relationship between the disabled body and
constructed space have taken place in the context of discussions about access,2 disability
simulations,3 identity politics,4 and of the social model of disability.5 Much of this discussion
has promoted the idea that social spaces are produced by ideological circumstances that
reflect social structures and prejudices, and that these spaces define the normative and
non-normative body. As Kathleen Kirby acknowledges, belonging to particular social
identities may appear to be part of a "conceptual space," in that these identities depend on
some initial conceptualization, but these identities nevertheless "operate materially,
structuring physical spaces (think of the slave quarters and the master's house…)" (13).
More accurately, these identities participate in the structuring of physical spaces. While
these discussions do not often conceptualize the politics of space in terms of a language,
some Disability Studies scholars hint at this. Petra Kuppers, for instance, examines "the
rhetorical use of the wheelchair" in film, demonstrating "how wheelchairs become icons and
communicative symbols in nondisabled performances" (81). Kuppers is more concerned with
the meaning of the wheelchair motif than with its relationship to constructed space, but her
article is one of the few in which the language of architecture is evoked.6
Architectural expression as a defining aspect of disability has not been part of the discussion
of architectural semantics. Umberto Eco, for example, identifies the staircase as "sign
vehicle whose denoted meaning is the function it makes possible" (Eco 176). He considers
his own role as a receiver of the communication that a staircase indicates the "possibility of
going up" by virtue of its physical arrangement (176). But the cultural connotations of the
disabling staircase do not interest him: the staircase does not seem to define him as walker
or observer; it merely offers him a choice. The disabled body interrupts this communication:
for someone with a mobility impairment, the staircase does not indicate the possibility of
going up or down; it indicates quite the reverse. Eco's staircase communicates to him, as an
able-bodied person, that he has a choice about whether to go up or down; he is less
cognizant that society presents him with that choice and that it may be a choice that disables
others.
