Synopsis: The film shows the embedded nature of everybody’s spatial voice in Taipei, produces a city that feels open, fronting the question: what would happen if disability were not included—embedded within all aspects of architectural practice. Contemporary architectural practice too often reduces disability to the technicalities of access—adding a ramp, a wider doorway, or an accessible restroom. These are gestures of compliance, not acts of imagination. 

Autistic Architectural Approach instead begins in disability—not as a constraint, but as a creative force. It proposes that architectural practice expand its sensory, cognitive, and social dimensions by opening itself to disabled ways of perceiving, organizing, and building space.

—to open the architecture schools to disabled professors, lecturers, and students;

—to open the studios and offices to disabled architects and collaborators;

—to open hearts and minds to the recognition, as Eli Clare reminds us, that we are all, at best, temporarily non-disabled.

Artist bio: Through his lens-based work, writing, and large-scale architectural works, Troels Steenholdt Heiredal (he/him/they) reassembles the world, enabling people to reflect on how they relate to it.

Working highly interdisciplinary, he develops projects from idea, through concept, design, construction, and execution. Always with a keen sense for detail and tactility. His multifaceted background includes turning a key shop into a camera and a warehouse into a concrete workshop.

In 2019, Troels learned that he is Autistic. He has since been examining the differences between explaining and exploring disability, bringing focus to our different ways of perceiving the world. He is developing an Autistic Architectural Approach, enabling all people to understand their impact and rights to the city.

Troels has been an invited guest critic at Columbia GSAPP, Cornell University, RISD, The Cooper Union, and Tamkang University and helped found Arts, Letters, & Numbers. He has worked, exhibited, and lectured in the US, Argentina, Colombia, Aruba, the Dominican Republic, and Denmark, including at Kunsthal Charlottenborg and the Copenhagen Metro. He holds a Master of Arts in Architecture from Aarhus School of Architecture and a Bsc in Architectural Engineering from the Technical University of Denmark.

Troels was born and raised in Toftlund (b. 1984), a Danish village of 3000, and is currently living in Taipei, Taiwan.

Website: www.troelsheiredal.com / IG: @t.heiredal / bluesky: @theiredal.bsky.social‬

The film was first published by Brink Literary Journal.