Architecture alum honored for thesis examining ADA in the built environment

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Patrick Hickey, a spring 2025 graduate of the professional master of architecture degree program in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School at Penn State, was named the winner of the Department of Architecture’s 2025 Jawaid Haider Award for Design Excellence in Graduate Studies for his thesis that questions how effective the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been in the built environment since its establishment in 1991.

The Pittsburgh native’s work, titled “Prosthetic House,” was inspired by his role as a caretaker for his severely disabled mother, Jacquelyn McCormick Hickey, who was diagnosed with progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML), a rare brain disease that has a life expectancy of six months.

“She has lived 13 years and counting beyond her diagnosis, but PML has left her unable to move her body or speak, all while her mind is still completely intact,” Hickey said. “Being her caretaker over the years showed me how ill-equipped our built world is for the non-able-bodied person, which led me to pursuing architecture and ultimately led to my thesis project.”

Hickey’s initial research for his thesis started in disability studies which led to him researching the wide field of body prosthetics and body horror, a sub-genre that focuses on unnatural transformation, degeneration or destruction of the human body.

“I started off my thesis with the hopes of designing exaggerated prosthetics that would interact with the architecture they inhibit,” he explained.  

Further research led Hickey to study the work of Haus-Rucker-Co, an Austrian architecture group that explored the “performative potential” of architecture through installations and happenings using pneumatic structures or prosthetic devices that altered perceptions of space in the 1960s.

“What interested me in their work was the range of scale in prosthetics, from wearables to furniture-sized stationary ‘prosthetics’ to ‘prosthetics’ that exist more as independent spaces,” Hickey said. “This made me think, ‘What if the house became the prosthetic itself?’”

Despite the decades of activism that led to the creation of the ADA, Hickey said he believes that accessibility in architecture may be too far gone to be solved.

“In the United States alone, we have 250 years of infrastructure developed without consideration for the disabled,” he said.

Hickey does see hope for achieving equity moving forward, he said, with people like David Gissen, a disabled designer and architecture historian, doing work to open more dialogue surrounding the architect’s role in these topics of accessibility.

“My aim with this project is to continue that conversation," he said, referring to accessibility. "I intentionally pushed architectural language and visualization past its intended purpose to overwhelm the viewer, which displays how unavoidable disability is to the people it affects.” 

Hickey said he hopes his thesis conveys that he does not like to be confined to standards in his work.

“I find the perception of ‘the architect builds buildings’ to be limiting,” he said. “Before we even get to the design of buildings, architects should be thinkers first, using our extensive visual training to push boundaries in any and all fields.”

Serving on the Haider Award jury for this year was external reviewer and former Penn State lecturer Ben Vanmuysen, an architectural designer, educator, researcher and maker originally from Belgium, who is a lecturer at School of Architecture at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Architecture faculty members Ute Poerschke, Orsolya Gáspár, Istvan Gyulovics, Yasmine Abbas and Felecia Davis rounded out the jury.

“Patrick’s work exhibited great sensitivity; he combined his unique artistic and technical skills to develop a project that is fresh, brave and still rigorous,” said Gáspár, assistant professor of architecture. “His design is deeply rooted in the rich history of kinetic architecture and his presentation showcased his experiments with various media, all of which he commands with the ease of a mature designer.”

For Hickey, the award serves as recognition of his personal experiences and his growth as a designer that led to the culmination of his graduate studies.

“Winning the Haider Award for Design Excellence means more to me than I can even begin to explain,” Hickey said. “It has been a long, hard journey navigating my mother’s diagnosis, which at many times made me want to give up. But winning this award proves to me that I can turn those hardships into something positive, something beautiful. Her disease can never be cured, but hopefully I can take what I’ve learned from her and contribute to the wider push for equity and inclusion for disabled people.”

Now in its sixth year, the Haider Award for Design Excellence recognizes the most deserving master of architecture student for excellence in design, based on their culminating project/thesis. The award recipient is chosen by the head of the Department of Architecture upon recommendation by the faculty and the jury. The award was established in honor of the late Jawaid Haider, a long-time architecture professor at Penn State who died in 2018, with support from his family, friends and colleagues.