Elevators (‘Lifts’ in British English)

Walker Publishing Filed to Design · Part of Rethinking “Normal” Design

Barnes Elevator at the Walker Art Center, 2017. Photo by Gene Pittman. Courtesy Walker Art Center.

In addition to our professional biographies, our disabled biographies are as follows: David Gissen is an above-the-knee amputee who walks on artificial limbs and, when not using artificial limbs, uses crutches. Georgina Kleege is blind and walks with a white cane. Jordan Whitewood Neal is a double above-the-knee amputee who uses a wheelchair.

ELEVATOR PHOBIAS

David Gissen

Jordan, when I wrote to you about this series of conversations for the Walker Art Center on artifacts, normality, and disability, you wrote back that you wanted to talk about elevators. Why did you want to talk about elevators?

Jordan Whitewood-Neal

I picked them because, in a very ironic way, I have a very big phobia of using lifts. I hate using lifts, so if I can avoid using them, I do. They’re strange artifacts for me because I have such a strong physical reliance on them. But I also have a strong psychological frustration with them, or a phobia, that I find interesting. I wrote about them a little bit in my research into Andrew Walker, who was a disabled tutor at the Architectural Association [one of the oldest schools of architecture in the UK], in a paper called “Worship the Lift Engineer.” I found an archival record of him saying that the engineer was coming to fix the lift at the Architectural Association one weekend. He was praising this engineer and how important his role was to him. And I thought it was just an interesting sort of interaction between two people who have probably never met and never will meet, but [who] had this interdependence with each other. I found that really interesting as a symbol of breakdown, and how the breakdown of an artifact symbolizes the breakdown of many things, both institutional and infrastructural. So that’s the main reason.

DG

Most people would think that the three of us, as three disabled people, would love using elevators. Most people would think that the ultimate gift of an architect or an engineer is to provide more and more elevators for people like us. Your use of the term “phobia” is so interesting. What’s your phobia of elevators? What are you afraid of?

JWN

I have a phobia of being stuck! I’ve only ever been stuck once or twice. And, fortunately, not for very long. But I do have an intense fear of being stuck, even though the likelihood of being stuck for more than a few hours is very low. But I love glass elevators. My college, which was four or five stories high, had this massive atrium and these two huge glass elevators that went up through it. That, to me, was an amazing experience; I like to be in those. So I think it’s very much that feeling of being closed in, but also that sense of uncertainty or reliance on someone being on the other end of the call button. If you do get stuck, you’re so distanced from whoever that is. And you don’t know whether they’re there, whether they’ve fallen asleep, whether they’re not there at all. Whether the phone’s gonna even work. Yes, so it’s [a] lack of trust, I suppose, on the infrastructure that surrounds the lifts. It‘s not even necessarily about the actual space itself. And I don’t think it’s an unfounded lack of trust either.

Georgina Kleege

Back in the building where I worked at Berkeley, there was an elevator that looked like it had been installed in 1940. It was eventually replaced, but it got stuck all the time. As a result, I never took that elevator, even though it was pretty easy once you were stuck to summon somebody—not necessarily with the call button, but just by yelling—because it was a busy classroom building. There are always people around, not that they necessarily could do anything. But yeah, I would say I’m neutral about elevators. I mean, they’re a ubiquitous form of transportation, particularly now that I’m living in high-rise New York.

JWN

Yeah, it’s strange because I have very few experiences of being stuck in an elevator and being rescued, but I have had many experiences of an elevator breaking down and therefore needing to be fixed by someone. And there’s the strange sort of camaraderie. I spoke about interdependency earlier with Andrew, because the job of a lift engineer relies on my using the elevator, and my using elevators relies on their job, right? And that’s an interesting relationship with someone that you will maybe meet once in your life. But I’d like more of a relationship. I’d like to have a mobile phone full of people whom I can just contact when I’m stuck in there. Just because I think relying on someone else or an institution to do it has never really worked.

DG

Have you read Colson Whitehead’s book The Intuitionist? The hero of the book is an elevator repair person who is a member of a group of repair people called the “Intuitionists.” They don’t use rational engineering methods to analyze broken elevators, but they put their hands on the elevator and feel the vibrations and the kinds of repairs it requires. It’s a really great book in which elevator-repair people keep the city running.

JWN

Yeah, I know it. I don’t know why that archival document at the Architectural Association drew me in so much. I think it was that particular use of the word “worship.” It was just so jarring. That essay was built off this one email Andrew Walker had sent to another staff member about the fact that he couldn’t come into work one day because the lift was broken, but the engineer was coming in on this day. And he spoke about worshiping them, and I thought that you don’t really think about that language in a relationship with an elevator-repair person! So I thought that was really interesting, and it made me think of Shannon Mattern’s writing about maintenance and care, and how we need to strengthen our relationship to not just the infrastructures and the processes of it, but the actual people themselves as a fundamental part of what we do. It’s the same way that I rely on nurses, it’s in a similar vein, because a broken lift—and this has happened a lot recently—can stop me from using the train station, or going into London, or getting into someone’s house, or getting into university. So I don’t think they’re understood as a critical piece of infrastructure, but, in many ways, they are.

GK

This ties into ideas about access intimacy. It’s a development on the idea of interdependence. It’s the idea that we’re not all just free operators. People with disabilities who rely on other human beings for daily care or for access or whatever, when it’s bad, it feels patronizing and obnoxious, but when it’s good, it feels like a mutually beneficial interaction. The elevator-repair person needs to fix the elevator, not for all the walking people who could take the stairs, but for Jordan. So there’s a mutual need and connection and knowledge and familiarity.

ON ELEVATORS AND COMMUNICATION

DG

I’m fascinated by the way Jordan views elevators as sites of interdependence and maintenance. Georgina, are there any specific ways you experience or think about elevators?

GK

For me, as a blind person, the elevator is all about communication; that is to say, how you communicate with the elevator, how you figure out how to press the right button. It’s standard in America now to have Braille labels on the buttons. But I don’t think there’s any standard about the arrangement of buttons, how they’re configured. So every new elevator I go into, there’s a certain trial and error to figure out: Where is the ground-floor button? What’s the grid pattern? Does it go left to right, bottom to top? To scan a panel of buttons with Braille labels takes quite a bit of time. So I’m often grateful when there’s some other human I can just [ask], “Can you press such and such?” There’s even a communication issue when summoning the elevator. In a lot of office buildings in New York, they have high-rise buildings where you don’t just press a button, you have to program in what floor you’re going to. And it’s a touch screen, so it’s completely inaccessible to blind people. Ironically, the American Foundation for the Blind, which is an advocacy organization for blind Americans, used to be in a building [that] had this kind of elevator, and they had a lot of blind people coming to this building who could not summon the elevator by themselves. So they had to hire a staff person. His whole job, his sole reason for being there, was to program the touch screen, to punch in the number for people going into that office.

DG

The return of the elevator operator . . .

GK

But he didn’t enter the elevator. He just was there to touch the touch screen that blind people couldn’t deal with.

DG

I think this idea of the elevator as a communication device is really fascinating. Most architects who have explored elevators, like Rem Koolhaas or the late John Portman, think of it as a spatial device. It was a machine that enabled buildings to expand up and out and to reconfigure floorplans or to make a spectacle out of movement in public space. This idea of the elevator as a communication device, particularly from a disabled perspective, is also fascinating. I don’t think most people think about that. It extends from the telephone that Jordan mentioned, to the buttons, to even finding the elevator. I wonder how that could be elaborated?

JWN

Chris Laing, who runs Deaf Architecture Front, talks about deaf and hard-of-hearing experiences of lifts and how the sole means of communication with someone outside the lift when it breaks down is through a call button. If you’re deaf, how on earth do you communicate with them? You can’t use sign language, and that adds another layer of complexity to communication.

DG

Jordan, when you were stuck in the elevator and picked up the phone, who answered and what was the conversation like? When you pick up the phone, does somebody answer right away and say, “Hello, this is the receiver for elevator number two”?

JWN

It’s been a very long time since it happened so it’s hard to remember. I don’t remember it being a reassuring conversation. I’ve never known whether this is someone who’s literally hired to sit in an office and answer these calls to various different lifts across the country, or someone who maybe works at home or doesn’t have a job but just has the phone in case someone calls in, and then they get it sorted out. I’ve never been sure which one of those options it is. But it always feels very much like a routine when it happens. It’s like there’s no sense of humor or humanity to it sometimes. Which I think is less reassuring, really, because that’s maybe what you need in that situation. I just imagine calling up and, while you’re waiting for the engineers to come, there could be a comedian who sits there for half an hour and entertains you while you’re waiting. We [should] have some sort of entertainment infrastructure built into the lifts.

GK

They could lead meditation, or breathing exercises, because you’re stressed.

DG

They could give you tips to not have the urge to go to the bathroom.

JWN

I don’t know if I’m more scared of being stuck in the lift by myself, or more scared of being stuck in the lift with people I don’t know.

DG

Yeah. Speaking of awkward conversation and communication, has anyone ever had a good conversation with somebody in an elevator? I can’t think of a single one. Georgina and I both live in New York. The first thing people do when they walk in the elevator is complain about something.

GK

In my building, there’s a lot of talk about weather. A typical New York complaint is that the weather may be very nice at the moment, but if it’s this warm now, how hot is it going to be in, you know, April? I’ve had this conversation three times in the elevators in my building.

DG

Jordan, do people complain in elevators in the U.K.?

JWN

There’s a general British formality inside elevators that you just don’t talk to each other. It’s a very uncommunicative space. There’s an awkwardness, but also a shared understanding that you’re just gonna get in, you’re gonna go to the floor, then you’re gonna leave again.

DG

The last time I got into an elevator with a group of people, I was with my wife, and someone started giving us unsolicited marital advice. In New York, people are not shy about talking to each other when they want to.

GK

Since I’m a blind person, and I have a white cane, if there is somebody in the elevator, I’ll say, “Can you press my floor?” That prompts some dialogue, so that we can talk about the weather or whatever else there is to complain about.

DG

In my building we complain about the elevators in the elevators. There’s four elevators in my building. There’s 330 apartments in my building. There’s only a few days of the year when all four are working properly. I’ve heard that in many New York City Housing Authority buildings, something like only 50 percent of the elevators are working at any given time, which is extraordinary.

JWN

This is why I always refuse to live above ground floor. Because I’ve always been worried of either being trapped outside your home or trapped inside. But there’s a big issue here, for example, with not only elevators breaking, but elevators breaking and not being able to be repaired because they’re too old there’s no parts anymore. They literally had to replace the entire lift in my university’s building when it broke down because they couldn’t get a part. So, yeah, I couldn’t even imagine living on the 30th or something floor in New York.

DG

Speaking of communication, Georgina, you mentioned the button panel earlier. It seems very uninspiring. Why are all the buttons the same size? I live in a tall building, and sometimes someone inside the elevator graciously says, “What floor are you going to?” and I say “Nine,” and it takes them 30 seconds to find the button for my floor because there are so many numbers on the panel. So I wonder if there’s a way to organize the numbers or change the buttons so it’d be easier to find. You can rearrange them vertically with different kinds of shapes that people would recognize or something: “I’m on Star 9.”

GK

What if they had a voice-activated panel? You could come in and say, “Nine.”

DG

There’s a Woody Allen comedy skit where he is inside a voice-controlled elevator in a city outside New York. He has to tell the elevator which floor he wants to go to, and he doesn’t think it will understand his thick New York accent. He says something like “I wanna guhta flah fah,” and the elevator responds with some antisemitic remark after he gets off of it. In any large city, the elevator will have to understand and have patience with a lot of variations of terms, accents, and different languages.

JWN

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this online, but there was a thing online a few years ago where they would ask programmers to design the most annoying user interface. For trying to move your cursor, you had to put in some code, or it had the effects of gravity on it or something. It was it was quite funny. I just love the idea of having to use a pinball machine to try and get the floor you want.

GK

Or even like a roulette wheel.

JWN

I even love the idea of a housing block where the number you get is the floor that you’re going to live on that day. You have no fixed destination. You just live wherever the elevator takes you.

THE ELEVATOR AS A CULTURAL SPACE

DG

I kept thinking of some things that I used to experience in elevators as a kid that I don’t experience anymore. What do you think about bringing back elevator operators or elevator music? Remember elevator music? That was an entire genre of music.

JWN

Why can’t an elevator be a cultural space?

DG

What do you mean by that?

JWN

There could be a comedian doing a tight-five routine when you’re waiting for the elevator to arrive, especially when you’re in New York, right? Where you’re scared of your elevator going up 10–20 stories? Or in the U.K., when you’re in it for a minute or two, you can listen to a song, listen to a podcast.

GK

Elevators in museums often have posters or things about what’s on display. Or they’ll have the poster of the big exhibit so you have something to look at. But I do like the idea of audio in the elevator. You could just have the weather forecast.

JWN

I do love the idea of some sort of audio-visual light installation inside a lift. I think that’s been done, using light and sounds to sort of intervene. But, yeah, that could be fun.

DG

In thinking about transforming elevators into a place where something happens, I have a question just to flip things around a bit: Are people who use wheelchairs the only people that ever get to sit in an elevator? I’ve only been in an elevator once that had seats, and it was in the Vatican. So I thought maybe priests get more tired in elevators than the rest of us.

JWN

There’s an amazing lift at the Turner Gallery Eastbourne in the southeast of England. It’s a huge lift, about the size of a bedroom. And it has a proper set of seating and this massive window that looks outside of the building. It’s an incredible space. But that’s the only one I know of.

GK

I think the only time I’ve ever been aware of a seat in an elevator was an elevator that clearly had been designed for an elevator operator. There’s just a little stool that’s made for one person near the panel of buttons. It’s like the Checker Taxis that have those fold-down seats.

DG

I don’t enjoy being in elevators for many of the reasons that you both mentioned earlier. However, I do think that elevators in museums, like the one you mentioned, Jordan, can be fantastic. I like the ones in museums that are designed to carry gigantic canvases and other large artworks. There’s something so exciting about those large elevators when you’re in them. Maybe they can put some furniture in them so that people can sit down.

JWN

I do enjoy them. The ones I’ve really enjoyed are the ones in galleries because they’re amazing. I don’t know whether it speaks to the value that’s put on art, and having to be able to safely and reliably move [objects] around. But they’re fantastic. There are also massive lifts in hospitals for moving people in hospital beds. That’s a completely different feel to me. They don’t feel as nice as the ones in galleries do; they’re obviously designed for completely different spaces. But it’s interesting how the feeling of scale is more defined by the type of building than the fact that it is just big.

ON ELEVATOR GUILT

DG

Finally, for all the non-disabled people out there, let’s talk about elevator guilt. I describe that as people who probably feel that they don’t “need” to use an elevator but want to. The only time I see elevator guilt in New York is in the subway. First of all, there are so few elevators in the subway system in New York that everyone feels fortunate to use them. And when people get on, there’s this very subtle way in which people announce their impairments. Somebody will gesture to their ankles, and I’ll gesture to my artificial limb. Parents with a stroller get a pass, and somebody with a wheelchair obviously doesn’t have to explain themselves. But it’s a funny thing people will do. You have a small performance inside the elevators as people get on.

JWN

I think there’s a really weird social dynamic between people and these sorts of spaces. Like, you’re even trying to convince them that you should be there. Some people don’t care. Some people were just like, “Yeah, I’m using the lift.”

DG

On college campuses I’ve seen signs that say, “If you’re able to use the stairs, it’s better for your health.” I know a lot of people have written about how offensive those signs are. But have you guys thought about that?

GK

I remember those controversies: If you want to be healthy, you should take the stairs. But it’s an assumption that disabled people are unhealthy. And they’re problematic for being unhealthy. Also, there’s a mindset on university campuses that they’re shaping youth, and that they should be healthy, and they shouldn’t be lazy. They should be climbing the stairs. Yeah. Healthy, healthy body, healthy mind.▪︎

David Gissen is an author, designer, and educator. His books include The Architecture of Disability (Minnesota, 2023), Subnature (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), and Manhattan Atmospheres (Minnesota, 2013). His essays have been published in Artforum, Art in America, Domus, Abitare, Eflux, Greyroom, et al. His architectural and urban design work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2016 & 2021), the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and the Centre for Architecture in New York, among other venues. He is currently Professor of Architecture and Urban History at the Parsons School of Design/New School University.

Georgina Kleege is Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught creative writing and disability studies. Her collection of personal essays, Sight Unseen (1999), is a classic in the field of disability studies. Essays include an autobiographical account of Kleege’s own blindness and a cultural critique of depictions of blindness in literature, film, and language. Many of these essays are required reading for students in disability studies, as well as visual culture, education, public health, psychology, philosophy, and ophthalmology. Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller (2006) transcends the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction to re-imagine the life and legacy of this celebrated disability icon. Kleege’s latest book, More than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art (2018), is concerned with blindness and visual art: how blindness is represented in art, how blindness affects the lives of visual artists, how museums can make visual art accessible to people who are blind and visually impaired. She has lectured and served as a consultant to art institutions around the world. She now lives in New York City.

Jordan Whitewood-Neal is an architectural researcher, designer, and educator working at the intersections of architectural history, design pedagogy, critical disability studies, and spatial justice. His research has focused on disabled history at the Architectural Association, exploring the rhetoric of home and reliability and critiquing the place of disability, care, and domesticity within architectural education. His wider work explores the concept of reliability and the production of space through the lenses of crip theory, moral philosophy, and pedagogy.

Jordan works as a Researcher at the Quality of Life Foundation and currently co-leads a Design Think Tank at the London School of Architecture revolving around night time community infrastructure and disability in London. He has also taught and acted as a Guest Critic at ETH Zurich, Bartlett School of Architecture, Central Saint Martins, and the University of Brighton. In 2022 he co-founded the disability-led research collective Dis with James Zatka-Haas, exploring disability, crip storytelling, and the built environment.

Explore more conversations and articles that what everyday design could be if freed from concepts of a “normal body" in the series Rethinking "Normal" Design presented as part of Insights 2024 Design Lecture Series.