May 9, 2007

Ed Roberts Campus Coming to Berkeley 

A groundbreaking institution is about to break ground in Berkeley.  The Ed Roberts Campus, an office and community center designed to serve the needs of people with disabilities, will hopefully begin construction this summer.  When completed, two years from now, it will be the most accessible building in the world.

The campus will be built on land which is now part of the South Berkeley BART Station parking lot.  BART is the Bay Area Rapid Transit system which runs throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.  After reconfiguring the stripes between cars, building the whole campus will involve losing only five parking places. 

The campus will house offices for around a dozen different non-profit organizations serving people with disabilities which are now scattered around downtown Berkeley.  There will also be an art gallery, a café, a child care center, a fitness center and other public amenities.  This will provide one central location in which a person with a disability will be able to access a wide variety of services.

The architect, William Leddy, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York, has designed a swirling wheelchair ramp in the center of the building’s lobby.  The ramp will be seven feet wide, allowing people in wheelchairs to pass one another on the way up or down.  This is an unheard of feature in building design.  The usually hidden-away-in-the-back disabled access feature will become the signature centerpiece of this building, suspended from the ceiling, with translucent banisters, visible through the glass walls to motorists, passersby and BART patrons. 

             Ed Roberts was the first person with a severe disability to attend the University of California at Berkeley.  He had to sue the university to gain admittance.  Little did they know they were unleashing a whirlwind.  Ed and some of the other early disabled students founded the Center for Independent Living, the world’s first such institution.  Ed went on to be Governor Jerry Brown’s first Director of the California Department of Rehabilitation who was actually disabled.  When awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship grant, otherwise known as a “genius” grant, Ed spent the money helping to found the World Institute on disability, of which he was the first director. 

The disability rights movement, spearheaded by Ed and his fellow disabled Cal students transformed American and world-wide consciousness about the capacities and needs of people with disabilities. Their efforts lead directly to widespread curb-cutting, accessibility laws and architecture, eventually to the Americans with disabilities Act, and the integration of people with disabilities into all areas of living.

Ed was born in 1939.  When he died in 1995 the mayor of Berkeley convened a memorial meeting.  The disabled community of
Berkeley proposed establishing a center like the Ed Roberts Campus as the most fitting memorial to Ed’s asperations and ambitions.  After 12 years of fundraising and design review, construction will begin.

Seven major agencies serving the disabled community are the main partners in the Campus.  All will have their offices there.  These are:

Bay Area Outreach and Recreation Program  (BORP) 

Center for Accessible Technology  (CforAT)

Center for Independent Living  (CIL)

Computer Technologies Program  (CTP)

Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund  (DREDF)

Through the Looking Glass  (TLG)

World Institute on Disability  (WID)