Cité Miroir. Reflections on the Experience of Disabled Persons

Social and demographic changes in the 21st century turn an inclusive approach to built heritage into a necessity. Awareness is growing that human abilities and conditions are diverse, across both people and the lifespan, while disability is increasingly understood as resulting from interaction with the designed environment. Acknowledging the challenges involved in reconnecting modern heritage with this contemporary reality, this paper focuses on the transformation of la Sauvenière, former public swimming pool and thermal baths, into Cité Miroir, a cultural space focusing on citizenship, memory, and dialogue. Located in the centre of Liège and registered as monument in Wallonia (Belgium), it is one of the sites featured in DOCOMOMO’s virtual exhibition of 19 “MoMo masterpieces” in Belgium. This building has been considered as one of the most important constructions of the interbellum modernist style and referred to as the “cathedral” of sports architecture in Wallonia. Designed in the Bauhaus style and inaugurated during the German occupation in 1942, it served as a public sports centre until being abandoned in 2000 due to non-compliance with safety standards. In 2014, after an extensive rehabilitation project, Cité Miroir was opened to public. Through conducting site visits with people living with diverse abilities and/or conditions, we build upon their unique expertise-by-experience to highlight spatial qualities that typically remain unobserved. By reporting on the preliminary findings of these field studies, we shift attention from the standardized human body as the source of proportion and measures for architecture to the human experience of space.