Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) 2025, Liverpool, İngiltere, 22 - 24 Kasım 2025, ss.83, (Özet Bildiri)
The visual field is not neutral. For individuals with sensory disabilities such as migraine, certain environments can be disabling. Despite growing awareness of spatial injustice, the relationship between the built environment and visual triggers of migraine remains understudied in architectural discourse. This paper addresses this critical gap by rethinking modern architecture through the lens of sensory disability, focusing on how the visual complexity encoded in architectural forms, particularly through high contrast, repetition, and light-shadow distribution, can produce overstimulating environments for people with sensory disabilities, such as those with migraine. Despite advancements in inclusive design, the relationship between built environment and visual triggers of migraine remains underexplored. This neglect reflects two primary gaps: the confinement of migraine research within neurology and pain studies and the methodological difficulty of translating sensory experience into spatial criteria.
Drawing on neurology, psychology, and architecture, the study examines how modernist visual culture and design principles, through photographs as fragments of evidence, may serve as an environmental trigger and debilitating condition for a disadvantageous community. An assessment model is employed to evaluate selected modern architectural photographs for visual complexity, highlighting overstimulating spatial features.
Framed through Critical Disability Theory and advocacy research methodology (Creswell, 2007), the study argues for a shift from a medicalized view of migraine toward an environmental and architectural understanding. As both a photographer and an architectural educator living with migraine, the author develops a unique methodology by grounding her work in lived experience and evidence-based data, utilizing photography to identify potentially stimulating visual environments and raise awareness of both sensory and neurological disability.
Responding to the inquiry posed by the call “How does architecture imagine disability?”, this research situates migraine within a broader conversation about spatial justice and neurodiversity, questioning the visual norms of production and the environments of high modernism as exclusionary. It challenges canonical aesthetic values and calls for design strategies that address sensory variation, ultimately advocating for considerate environments and design processes that account for invisible disabilities. Calling for multisensory equity in the built environment, the paper contributes to architectural theory and disability studies by rereading architecture’s histories.