Fitzsimons's analysis of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe foregrounds the question of how prioritizing vision as a sense and upright walking as a form of mobilization limits out understanding and design of architectural experience. This limitation ends up restricting our understanding of “access” as implementing compensatory measures for disabled people (i.e. wheelchair users, clutch users, blind people in the case of the Memorial) to navigate the space as equally to their non-disabled peers as possible. To propose a way of going beyond being reactionary and compensatory, Fitzsimon reads the design of the Memorial’s inaccessible pathways as turning the disorienting routes to be the sensorial embodiment of the loss and somberness caused by death. While many disabled people found the pathways difficult to navigate, the design draws attention to sensory stimuli that is commonly overlooked in spatial navigation, such as air pressure and temperature changes from direct sunlight. This exploration to interact with space without being bounded by vision and upright mobility offers new ways to understand and think about the world, as Fitzsimon elegantly puts it: “A design process nourished by the ways that bodies with different sensory and mobility capabilities develop impressions of architecture could result in environments where we see otherwise through touch, feel otherwise through sounds, hear otherwise through vision” (95). This analysis shows how our society has become hyper-focused on vision and upright mobility as necessary survival traits. This is in part driven by the industrialist capitalistic emphasis on efficiency and productivity, reducing human labor to components of a larger machine. Therefore, Fitzsimon’s proposal also brings up the needs to re-evaluate what productivity means in an accessible and inclusive workforce.
While I do think Fitzsimon makes a valuable argument in de-constructing the binarism of accessible vs. inaccessible, I wonder to what extent proposing alternative ways to sense the environment can serve to destigmatize disability. For example, seeing through touch and feeling through sound can have different connotations for non-disabled people vs. disabled people who experience sensory or mobility loss (e.g. blind people, deaf people, amputees, people who are paralyzed, etc.). For the non-disabled, seeing through touch and feeling through sound serve as supplement or substitute to their other sensory modals for introspective or recreational purposes. Yet for the latter, these “alternative” sensory channels are what they depend on to survive. Therefore, I wonder how comprehensively does shifting sensory perspective reveal and address the disabling experience that poses barriers to people.