The ILZRO House in 2022 with new driveway and plantings. Courtesy of Natasha Harrison.
Disability touches us all. Whether it is a person’s own experience with a disability, the caretaking of a loved one, or the process of aging on the body—all humans will interface with disability in one stage of life or another. Despite this absolute fact, the world we inhabit is not designed for people of varying abilities as a baseline. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the designs of domestic spaces, where humans of all abilities rest, play, cook, and clean. Yet even the aspects of this intimate world are generally designed for able bodies, minds, movement, and sight.
When industrial designer and educator Marc Harrison (1936–1998), whose work would be a precursor to the discipline now known as Universal Design, received an Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) diagnosis in 1996 after a lifetime of designing objects that worked in harmony for people with disabilities alongside people without them, “he found the diagnosis ironic,” according to his daughter, Natasha Harrison.1 The progression of the disease would affect Harrison’s motor skills and eventually have Harrison turning to the use of a wheelchair.
Yet this was not the first time in his life that Marc Harrison experienced a disability. A sledding accident at age eleven resulted in a traumatic brain injury that required Harrison, an adventurous New York City child, to relearn how to walk and to speak. This experience, which included spending months in the hospital, profoundly affected the way he saw the world—including the objects in it and the spaces people inhabited. Marc Harrison brought this personal experience from childhood into his interest in design, focusing on products and how they affected everyday life for people of varying abilities. This interest led to a unique experimental home in Foster, Rhode Island, an all-steel house with carefully planned dimensions to accommodate a person in a wheelchair: the ILZRO House, completed in 1972. Since 2021, Natasha Harrison has been the home’s owner, steward, and biggest booster, sensitively preserving the house as a significant example of early Universal Design, a term now ubiquitous that the work of Marc Harrison helped develop. In a 1997 oral history interview, Marc Harrison would describe his design approach to the ILZRO House: “We tried to design it so that when you walked in, there was no sign of evidence that this is designed for, say, a person such as myself in a wheelchair.”2
ILZRO House diagram, 1972. Courtesy of Natasha Harrison.
Nestled in the woods of Foster, Rhode Island, less than three miles from the Connecticut border and twenty miles from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where Marc Harrison taught industrial design for nearly four decades, the ILZRO House is a one-story, 1,100-square-foot home on eight acres. Clad in panels of insulated metal, the home is a cool grey, with rounded windows and doorways made from zinc, clerestory windows, and bubble skylights. Inside, the home’s white metal walls are contrasted by grey posts and beams. Light fixtures and wall hangings are hung via magnets to the metal interior. Much of the furniture is original, designed and built by Marc Harrison and his students at RISD, and lovingly restored by Natasha Harrison and her husband Ben Randall, who have taken great care to remain true to Marc Harrison’s design intentions. Doorhandles are metal and can be operated with a palm or fist, and light switches are low on the wall. The kitchen’s design provides opportunities for a wheelchair user and a non-wheelchair user to cook together, including the height of appliances.
Living area, ILZRO House, 2022. Courtesy of Natasha Harris.
Living area, ILZRO House, 2022. Courtesy of Natasha Harris.
Kitchen and dining area, ILZRO House, 2022. Courtesy of Natasha Harris.
The original windows and door casings are made from curved zinc. The ceiling surround of the bar area is made from one continuous piece of zinc, referred to as “plastic metal” by the design team, ILZRO House. Courtesy of Natasha Harris.
Original door handles still in use. Designed and positioned for accessibility, ILZRO House. Courtesy of Natasha Harris.
The ILZRO House gets its name from the International Lead Zinc Research Organization, which approached Marc Harrison at RISD with a design challenge: how could the metals being produced by the member organizations be used in new, creative ways? Making the determination that metal wasn’t widely used in industrial housing, Marc Harrison and his students embarked on a research project that looked into why. They then applied those lessons from history towards the design of architecture using industrial processes and collaborated with other students at RISD studying architecture and interior design. “We finally came up with an Erector Set system,” shared Marc in 1997.3 Students would build the ILZRO House on land that Marc owned, stashing the building materials in an old barn during construction. Not only an experiment in Universal Design, the ILZRO House experimented with different applications of metals and metal coatings. It also considered how the materials and design would lend themselves to the quick delivery of the ILZRO House as a prototype—a home that required no heaving lifting equipment and minimum training to assemble.
Constructing the ILZRO House, 1972. Courtesy of Natasha Harris.
The original exterior of the ILZRO House, 1973. Courtesy of Natasha Harris.
Promotion of the house by ILZRO was suspended due to a recession in the US in the mid 1970s that caused the metal industry to contract. “The home became almost an instant modern relic,” Marc Harrison assessed in 1997.4
Yet that “instant modern relic” deeply inspired Marc Harrison, and it was within a component of the ILZRO House—and every house—where his approach to design would make the biggest impact: the kitchen. Both in the classrooms at RISD and in his design studio, Marc would understand, and help his students understand, the dilemmas of cooking and cleaning for wheelchair users, people with vision impairments, or those with intellectual disabilities. Through a process of mapping and analyzing the steps required to complete a task, Marc began to design kitchen equipment for Cuisinart that was adjustable, with components that could be adapted by every body. Responsible for all the products Cuisinart designed and manufactured for over a decade, Marc Harrison’s most significant design for Cuisinart is the DLC-X, a food processor that met the needs of the largest possible range of consumers, including those with physical limitations. Harrison’s design featured paddle-like controls for people with limited motor skills; big, visible buttons; and emphasized operational sequence. The design was user friendly, stylish, and timeless; its modern iterations not dissimilar to Marc Harrison’s 1978 design. Other Marc Harrison designs, including turnstiles for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) subway system, as well as medical products influenced by Harrison’s own childhood hospitalization and recovery, remain in production.
Cuisinart DLC-X. Courtesy of Natasha Harris.
In 2025, the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission (RIHPCH), the state agency responsible for the implementation of the National Register of Historic Places program, received funding from the National Park Services’ Underrepresented Communities Grants Program to list the ILZRO House on the National Register of Historic Places. This initiative represents multiple paradigm shifts in preservation. As Marc and his students were assembling the ILZRO House, Foster’s eighteenth-century saltbox houses, expressions of early colonial architecture in the United States, were being codified as some of the nation’s most significant architecture. In the 2020s, the 1970s turned fifty years old, meeting the unofficial threshold for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, making it easier to recognize the significance of the architecture of the 1970s and its associated cultural and social innovations.
The use of the Underrepresented Communities Grant to list a work of architecture that represents disability history on the National Register of Historic Places is a first in the grant program’s history. Other homes designed for accessibility are listed on the National Register, including Hill-Top Cottage in Hyde Park, New York, a vacation retreat designed by architect Henry Toombs in 1938 for then President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was permanently paralyzed from the waist down due to polio, and the Kenneth and Phyllis Laurent House in Rockford, Illinois, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1950 for Kenneth Laurent, who could not use his legs due to a spinal cord tumor. These two homes, however, were commissioned for individuals with the resources to custom design a home to fit their needs, and by well-known architects.
The ILZRO House was designed not for one individual, but for all, and was designed by an individual who had firsthand experience with the lack of accessibility in design. The principles that the ILZRO House would embody, including equitable and flexible use, perceptible information, low physical effort, and size and space for approach and use, are all characteristics of design that would come to be known in the decades following the creation of the ILZRO House as Universal Design.
Natasha Harrison described the house as being “under the radar” until she purchased it. “It does have more than just being the right age to be historically significant,” shares Natasha. “It has such a story behind it, around my dad’s career, and RISD, and the universal design legacy, and also industrialized housing.”5
The oven still has the pull out counter located below the left hinged door for ease of use while in a wheelchair, as demonstrated in 1973 by Marc Harrison’s wife, Diana, ILZRO House. Courtesy of Natasha Harris.
The high counter sink accommodated a wheelchair for ease of use, ILZRO House. Courtesy of Natasha Harris.
The side of the kitchen with lower height counters was designed for accessibility with the under counter space accommodating a wheelchair. The sink here has the plumbing placed at the back of the wall to leave room for knees, ILZRO House. Courtesy of Natasha Harris.
One of the long-term benefits to the preservation of the ILZRO House is that it has only had three owners over its life, and each owner was connected to Marc Harrison or RISD. In 1978 the Harrison family sold the home to Lorraine Howes, head of Apparel Design at RISD, who retained most of the home’s features. “She kept everything like a shrine to my dad, because she loved him so much and respected him. She thought it was perfect,” shares Natasha.6 It was Howes who would sell the home to Natasha Harrison in 2021.
“It’s very complicated for me,” admits Natasha, who lives an hour away from the ILZRO House. “Because it’s not just a house. It’s my dad.” That spiritual and emotional attachment has made possessing the home complicated for Natasha as a steward, who found making decisions like choosing new orange upholstery for the original furniture challenging. Renovating the bathroom offered Natasha Harrison a unique set of choices. The original bathroom had been remodeled in the 1980s, including the removal of the original bent zinc sink and mirror surround. Harrison’s solution was to update the bathroom to modern American Disabilities Act (ADA) standards—an act in the spirit of Marc’s intentions. “Every decision is art; every decision is a conversation with myself, about my memories of him,” says Natasha. But Natasha serves as an important link between the house’s past and the future. “I just knew that if someone else bought it, they wouldn’t know that the watering can is original.”7 Natasha sees her role as one that is intermediary, and that long-term stewardship would be a better fit for an organization that had the resources and time to bring the significance of the ILZRO House forward as a teaching tool.
Marc Harrison died of ALS in 1998, after teaching at RISD for over thirty-eight years, making a conscious decision to take only a few design projects a year in professional practice so he could continue to teach, including through his later years as a wheelchair user. Natasha sees his legacy not only in the products he created, but the students he influenced, showing them the universal nature—and humanity—of good design.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Natasha Harrison and Michael Kubo for their perspectives and assistance.
