Thesis title: Architettura inclusiva, non esclusiva. Come lo spazio ci influenza.
This research investigates the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between architecture, perception, and disability, assuming that the built environment is not a neutral backdrop to human activities but an active agent capable of facilitating or hindering functioning, participation, and overall quality of life. The work stems from the awareness that contemporary architecture-particularly in healthcare, educational, residential, and public settings-often reveals a significant gap between regulations, declared design principles, and the actual experience of vulnerable users. Spaces intended to support or welcome individuals can instead produce disorientation, sensory overload, anxiety, or loss of autonomy. The primary aim is to move beyond a vision of architecture “for disability” understood as a technical or normative response, and instead embrace an inclusive approach grounded in embodied perception, situated cognition, and lived bodily experience.
The theoretical framework is interdisciplinary, integrating contributions from neuroscience, environmental psychology, phenomenology, disability studies, and technical regulation. The WHO’s ICF model is adopted as a key interpretive reference, as it enables disability to be understood as the outcome of a dysfunctional interaction between person and environment, thereby attributing a central role to space in fostering participation and autonomy. At the same time, phenomenological perspectives (Merleau-Ponty, Pallasmaa, Bachelard) reveal the multisensory and corporeal nature of architectural experience, while critical studies on ableism highlight the normative and often exclusionary character of an architecture still designed around a “standard body”.
Building on this foundation, the research introduces a theoretical–methodological model based on four interpretive tools-enclosure, scale, section, and plan-conceived as cognitive and perceptual devices through which the inclusive quality of architecture can be understood. Enclosure elucidates how boundaries organize thresholds, safety, and recognizability; scale measures the relationship between body and environment, modulating intimacy, distance, and orientation; section reveals the atmospheric and luminous dimension of space; plan constructs movement, shapes legibility, and orients spatial memory. Each tool is associated with specific graphic methods designed to translate qualitative aspects of space that are often overlooked by technical standards.
The operational section tests this model through a comparative analysis of twelve international case studies selected according to different forms of fragility: motor, visual, auditory, psychiatric, Alzheimer-related, and autistic-spectrum conditions. Through critical redrawing of projects by Herzog & de Meuron, OMA/Rem Koolhaas, Sou Fujimoto, Mauricio Rocha and others, the research demonstrates how space influences orientation, perceptual stress, action possibilities, and experiential quality. The cross-reading of cases reveals that fragility is not an exception but a privileged lens through which the perceptual qualities essential to everyone become visible.
The findings confirm that inclusive architecture is not equivalent to barrier removal; rather, it lies in the capacity of space to dialogue with the body, modulate perception, support autonomy, and reduce cognitive load. The built environment emerges as a therapeutic and relational mediator-a “practice of care” able to restore dignity to inhabitation. Ultimately, the thesis proposes a vision of architecture as an infrastructure of possibilities, grounded in design responsibility, an ethics of difference, and the centrality of lived experience. This contribution aims to guide architectural practice toward more aware, sensitive, and genuinely inclusive forms.