UNIVERSAL DESIGN.

By Selwyn Goldsmith, Oxford: Architectural Press, 2000. [pound]29.99

At the end of my review of Goldsmith's rewriting of his twice revised earlier book, Designing for the Disabled, I hoped that there would be a third book entitled perhaps Designing for People: The Architecture of Democray. So I looked forward to this new publication, Universal Design, with no 'disabled' in the title. Universal Design is defined as a 'bottom up' approach where 'the building users ... including those with disabilities ... can be treated as normal people'. Disabled people would not 'have their requirements presented as top-down add-ons to unspecified normal provision'.

A key diagram shows a pyramid of user groups with the young and able-bodied at the bottom and the assisted wheelchair user at the top. In between are women, children, people pushing child buggies and ambulant disabled people. Traditionally architecture has served the bottom layers, can with thought provide for two thirds of the pyramid and, with a full Universal Design approach, ideally cope with the great majority.

So far so good, but how to put the philosophy into operation? Here I must confess to some disappointment. The book is in reality another version of Designing for the Disabled with a slightly broader remit, but still subject to the tyranny of the wheelchair. Of the 400 or so diagrams, over half relate to wheelchair access and the quite awful cover illustration shows four wheelchair users constrained in hand-drawn boxes. Universality is restricted to physical design, excluding vital environmental aspects such as lighting, colour and ventilation.

Of course this is a tremendously difficult task to tackle. Buildings are not machines like the ideal universally designed products Goldsmith cites (TV remotes, PCs, microwaves, mobile phones and the standard car) and are usually complex one-off multi-functional affairs with myriad psychological and social connotations.

Goldsmith rightly questions the addition of separate Building Regulations (Part M) for a group of people where prescriptive guidance fails to distinguish between conflicting needs such as the height of washbasins or lift controls. In an ideal world regulations would be revised globally in terms of universal design. But the same might be said for design guides. Ideally guides such as The Metric Handbook, which this publication 'complements', should equally be revised without need for a separate Universal Design handbook. However I may be being a touch unfair. Such a work would be huge (even on disk) and require extensive research and resources beyond the scope of one author.

Selwyn Goldsmith has made a brave stab at the subject and, despite my reservations about design guides, this slim volume is an improvement on its weighty predecessors, ideal for use on the drawing-board or computer console, a necessary crutch for architects who are handicapped by an inability to use their imagination and think for themselves.