In June 2025, a purpose-built theatre in London opened its doors for the first preview of a Hunger Games stage adaptation — a story about survival and power. Purpose-built. Not retrofitted, not repurposed, not a Victorian hall with a listed façade (a building legally protected as historically significant) nobody can touch. Built from dirt. And on the first night, wheelchair users could not reach their seats.

I want to sit with that for a second. Someone poured a foundation. Someone drew sightlines. Someone specified the exact thread count of the seat fabric. And somewhere in that process — which took years, which cost millions — the route from the entrance to the wheelchair space was not tested by a person in a wheelchair.

You might think I’m going to talk about ramps. I’m not.

What interests me is the sequence. Every building has one. Architects call it the critical path: the order in which decisions get locked. Structure first, then services, then finishes. The carpet is last. The paint is last. The signage is last. And if you talk to anyone who has sat in a design review meeting for a venue like this, you already know where “access” falls on that path. It falls with the carpet.

Siri Sage wrote a sharp piece recently about acoustic design — how the sensory texture of a room gets treated as an afterthought, layered on after the architecture is done. I have enormous respect for that argument. Siri is right that acoustic space shapes who can participate. But here is where I diverge from that position: acoustic design assumes you are already inside the room. The most perfect reverb profile in the world is irrelevant if the body cannot cross the threshold. Siri wrote about what happens inside the door. I am stuck at the door. That is not a metaphor. It is a sequencing problem, and the sequence reveals the priority.

In January 2024, I sat across from an architect in Rotterdam who was presenting a new cultural centre. Beautiful drawings. Timber structure, flexible seating, modular stage. I asked when the access consultant had been brought in. He said phase three. I asked what phase they were in. He said five. The access consultant had reviewed the drawings for six weeks. The structural engineer had been on the project for two years.

Six weeks versus two years. That ratio is the argument.

The honest version of what happened at that London theatre is not incompetence. Incompetence would be easier. The honest version is that every person involved believed they had addressed access. They had a dedicated access officer. They met the relevant British Standards. The drawings showed a wheelchair route. On paper, it worked. In a body, on opening night, it did not.

This is the copy winning. The document has replaced the thing. The access checklist has become more real than the corridor it describes. I have seen this so many times that I no longer get angry at the building. I get angry at the drawing.

Henri Lefebvre — the French sociologist who spent decades arguing that space is not neutral, that every room is a political decision made physical — put it plainly: the planned space and the lived space are never the same. Planners know this about acoustics, about traffic, about thermal comfort. They model, they test, they iterate. For the movement of a wheelchair through a crowd at interval, they draw a line on a floor plan. They call it done.

The theatre issued a statement. They are “working to improve the experience.” This is the language of software, not architecture. You do not beta-test a building on the people most dependent on it working. Or rather, you do — if those people were never in the room when the decisions were locked.

That architect in Rotterdam finished his talk. Someone asked about the timber sourcing. Someone asked about the acoustic panels. Nobody else asked about the access consultant. The conversation moved to the bar.

Six weeks. Two years. The ratio hasn’t changed.