Events

Spring 2024 Sciame Lecture Series: Jeffrey Mansfield

From Rights to Justice: Designing Spaces of Cultural Belonging

This lecture will be in person and is part of the Spring 2024 Sciame Lecture Series, titled "Access and Beyond: Architecture and Disability."

Jeffrey Yasuo Mansfield is a principal at MASS Design Group and the director of MASS’s Deaf Space and Disability Justice Lab, which focuses on uplifting the lived experience and cultural memory of Deaf and Disabled communities. Jeffrey is also an inaugural recipient of the Ford and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Disability Futures fellowship and is a John W. Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress. He is a Spring 2023 Bruce Goff Chair of Creative Architecture at the University of Oklahoma and has taught design studios at the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and Harvard Graduate School of Design. Jeffrey co-authored The Architecture of Health, published by Cooper Hewitt and co-edited MASS Design Group's first Monograph, Justice is Beauty. Jeffrey has been deaf since birth.

"From Rights to Justice: Designing Spaces of Cultural Belonging": Our built environment is a reflection of our social values, and decisions made by architects and designers have an outsize impact on who is included and who is alienated. This talk explores lessons from the disability rights movement, the architectural forms and vocabularies of deaf schools, and how architecture can learn from deafness. Through the work of MASS Design Group, this lecture will explore the ways in which deep historical research can inform the design of spaces that promote cultural belonging.

Suggested Readings: Advocating for Disability Justice in Design, ARCHITECT Magazine. Space, Time, and Gesture, TACET. The Architecture of Deafness, Cooper Hewitt Design Journal.

"Access and Beyond: Architecture and Disability" answers the call for disability justice in our time. Architects, designers, and scholars, inspired by critical disability studies, make up the distinguished roster of speakers who situate disability, ability, and access in pointed, specific critiques of design, culture, and power. This series invites practitioners to probe assumptions embedded in universal design, to center belonging in design practice, to critique technology in relation to inclusion, and to apprehend the rich contribution of difference in the sensorial experiences of places.

All lectures are free, open to the public, and held in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture Sciame Auditorium. Live captioning and ASL interpretation will be available upon request. For access requests or questions, please contact ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu. 

See https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/return-campus for current requirements for in-person visitors.

This lecture series is made possible by the Spitzer Architecture Fund and the generous support of Frank Sciame ’74, CEO of Sciame Construction.