The Overlooked Experience 01

What happens when a fire breaks out in a building and someone on the 5th floor uses a wheelchair?

The answer is: they often have no choice but to wait for assistance — unless the building was designed to protect and evacuate them safely.

This question says a lot about how we design.

Accessibility is often treated as something that belongs to ordinary days: Can someone enter the building? Can they move through the lobby? Can they reach the elevator?

But real accessibility is not only tested when everything works as expected. It is tested when something goes wrong. When the elevator cannot be used. When the usual route disappears. When speed, fear, smoke, sound, and uncertainty enter the space.

This is where small design decisions become huge human consequences: a door width, a threshold, a turning radius, a table height, a refuge area, a clear evacuation route, a surface material, a handle height.

Each of these details can change how a person experiences a space. A moment of independence or a moment of dependence. A sense of safety or a feeling of being left behind. A space that includes or a space that quietly excludes.

Architecture is never experienced by one "average" user. A building, an interior or a neighbourhood can become completely different depending on who is moving through it, how they move, what they need, and what the space allows them to do.

This is why I believe Experience Architecture should be for every life, at every scale. Not only for how spaces look, but for how they are reached, entered, understood, used, escaped from, and remembered.

Because a space that only works for the standard user does not truly work.

Experience Architecture asks a different question: What does this space become for every life that enters it?