I knew, before Easter break, that I was interested in looking at certain of Henri Matisse’s paintings as texts for my final paper. In the hope of clarifying my project, I decided to try to see as many of Matisse’s cutouts as possible over the break, which I spent in Paris with the Art History department. I tried to be attentive to the issues of accessibility and disability rights throughout my stay in Paris, but on my way into the Centre Pompidou, the modern and contemporary art museum that houses many of Matisse’s works, my mind was particularly focused on disability. The fact that I was looking forward to examining the work of a disabled artist in person, and therefore had already been thinking of the Pompidou as the implicit home of a number of examples of works of disability aesthetics, perhaps explains my difficulty with the museum’s architecture and accessibility – elements that remained distinct in the building and its layout, preventing it, in my view, from truly becoming a “home” of the art of disabled artists. I was interested in attempting to examine the role of architecture not only in our perception of disability or disability aesthetics, but in the very range of our thought about embodied experience.
For those who don’t know the Centre Pompidou, it helps to understand that it functions not only as one of the world’s foremost modern and contemporary art museums, but also as a major landmark in Paris’ landscape, both physical and symbolic. The Pompidou’s architects were awarded the Pritzker Prize for their design, which is based on the principle of maximizing flexible interior space for the display of works. As a result, all of the functional organs of the building – water pipes, air ducts, electrical wiring, and, notably, transportation of people – were moved to its exterior, giving the façade its distinctive “high-tech” look (see the picture below). In many ways, in fact the architecture of the Pompidou transcends its art collection – the Centre Pompidou is, in fact, not only a museum, but a library and cultural center as well. For many of those who visit the Pompidou, the experience of traveling though the building – entering its belly on the ground floor, ascending the escalators encased in translucent glass, rising over the city’s landscape on the building’s exterior – is equally, if not more, important than the art at the end of the journey.
While I do not necessarily agree, I do think that the Pompidou provides an example of the way architecture can act as both a kind of spatial enactor or reinforcer of social assumptions regarding ability, and as a potentially unnoticed, but powerful, shaper of our thinking and embodiment. As Walter Benjamin argues, the tactile reception of architecture, which comes about “not so much by way of attention as by way of habit,” has the ability, surreptitiously, to mold the way we view art and the world (Benjamin goes as far as to argue that “this form of reception shaped by architecture [has] canonical value) (Benjamin 1069). For a building, like the Pompidou, that is intended to give unbiased shelter to a multiplicity of viewpoints and perceptions, this potentially corrupting force is particularly important. While the elevators are integrated into the façade, they are less easy to navigate as they appear (separate sets link different floors), and the clear “path” of the building privileges the escalators. Beyond the “added-on” feeling that this gives the building’s accessibility, it also excludes visitors with mobility disabilities from the “full” or “true” experience of the building. The implication of such design, moreover, is not limited to issues of physical accessibility; although disabled visitors are technically able to access the Pompidou’s collection, their exclusion from the building’s aesthetic and spatial design implies a larger lack of consideration of disability as a viable framework or component of art.
Do the architecture and accessibility of museums signify more meaningfully than those of other buildings for disability and disability aesthetics? How can existing architecture be “adapted” to not only provide access to disabled people, but include their perspectives in aesthetic design?
Works Cited
Walter Benjamin. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in The
Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, Inc., 2010.
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