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It is so encouraging to see experts springing up in the blogosphere on Universal Design after decades of indifference.
With the sustained promotion of UD as aging-in-place by AARP and the work of Mary Furlong to highlight Boomers as market those who specialize in UD for kitchen, bathroom, home design, or travel have had the advantage of an overarching narrative occasionally appearing in the media. Here is a bit of conversation going on below the radar starting with a look by Louis Tenenbaum:
Iwas catching up on some of my colleague's writing today starting with Laurie Orlov's blog Aging in Place Technology Watch about Aging in Place as a Crisis of Opportunity for CCRCs . Laurie referred to a piece by MIT Age Lab's Joe Coughlin in his blog, Disruptive Demographics, called Should I Stay or Should I Go? These are both great pieces, sucking me right in the way the web does, 'helping' whole days to slip away unnoticed. This is time well spent.
In another review of trends Chuck Nyren navigates, and thankfully breaks no bones doing so, one of the wackier limpets hanging onto Universal Design's mainstreaming success -- Arakawas' resurrection of "architecture-as-salvation." Our local manifestation is the Winchester Mystery House where the widow inheritor of the Winchester gun fortune stimulated her mind (and obsessions) through constant construction of her home. In the current fanciful inversion of Universal Design into "Undulating Danger" we get the following manifesto of "In-visitability":
Read more from Chuck at:Do you want to live in an apartment or house that can help you determine the nature and extent of interactions between you and the universe? What lengths would you be willing to go to, or how much inconvenience would you be willing to put up with, in order to counteract the usual human destiny of having to die?
Procedural architecture is an architecture of precision and unending invention.