Selwyn Goldsmith

Selwyn Goldsmith (11 December 1932 – 3 April 2011) was an architect, town planner, writer and disabilities advocate who was instrumental in the development of the universal approach to design. He wrote numerous books which became standard texts for designers and architects.

Biography Goldsmith was born in Newark, Nottinghamshire on 11 December 1932. He was educated at Abbotsholme school, Staffordshire, and read architecture at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, completing his qualification at the Bartlett School, University College London, in 1956. He contracted polio in that same year and was paralysed down the right hand side of his body for the rest of his life. which is an architectural planning manual on access for disabled people to facilities and buildings. In his later life he further developed the idea of Universal Design in a book of the same title. This work considered that having "different" or "extreme" needs is not unusual, but in fact "normal". That urban design, architecture and digital content should be design for all as a standard and not be considering a certain group as special. The architect who takes the bottom-up route to universal design works on the premise that the building users he or she is serving, including those with disabilities, are all people who can be treated as normal people. The architect does not start with the presumption that people with disabilities are abnormal, are peculiar and different, and that, in order to make buildings accessible to them, they should be packaged together and then, with a set of special-for-the-disabled accessibility standards, have their requirements presented in topdown mode as add-ons to unspecified normal provision.