Vale Wendy Lovelace, 1963–2022

Wendy Lovelace was a woman who experienced life richly and loved living in her own home surrounded by all that brought her joy. Passionate about architecture’s power to transform the world we inhabit, she insisted that an enhanced experience of our world should be accessible and inclusive for all.

When Wendy was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the 1990s, she was a recent architectural graduate enjoying a rich working, social and cultural life. Living in Brisbane and practising in public and residential architecture, she now faced a future using a wheelchair. This gave her a heightened personal awareness of the failures in the design of her home, local community and city. Her life took on a dramatic new purpose: to ensure that she and others could continue to live the life they loved. Through her resolute pursuit of this goal, Wendy inspired, educated and influenced.

In her professional life, Wendy combined her contributing to a long list of organizations and projects. In her personal life, she directed her skills to finding an accessible and inclusive home – a formidable task in the early 2000s. However, in 2005, Wendy found her home: an ordinary two-bedroom ground-floor unit that she could modify to suit her needs, a short walk from Bulimba’s village-like main street and its safe pathway to the Bulimba ferry and accessible ferry network.

As Wendy lived her busy life in Bulimba and beyond, she gently educated everyone she encountered about what it meant to be truly equitable and inclusive – in cafes, businesses and public spaces, and on public transport. She won over many with her practical solutions, powers of persuasion and considerable charm. She joined the book club at the new accessible bookshop. Here, through her passion for books and the power of words, Wendy formed friendships with women from many different paths of life, including me.

I discovered that Wendy was a fountain of knowledge about accessible design. She had advocated for the Livable Housing Design Guidelines, which informed the newly established National Disability Insurance Scheme’s (NDIS) design standard for Specialist Disability Accommodation (SDA), and served on the National Disability Insurance Agency’s SDA reference panel. For a residential architect like me, the guidelines were invaluable. However, they lacked regulatory clout. Over the next decade, I watched on in awe as Wendy, alongside her colleagues at Queensland Action for Universal Housing Design, Australian Network for Universal Housing Design, MS Queensland and Queenslanders with Disability Network, tirelessly advocated for the incorporation of these guidelines into the National Construction Code (NCC) – a long and arduous political process. I have never seen Wendy so excited as the day she announced that the Queensland government had agreed to support the inclusion of Livable Housing Design in the NCC 2022. A week after her death, the Australian Building Codes Board released the NCC 2022 preview, including requirements based on the Livable Housing Design Guidelines.

Wendy around friends on her 58th birthday lunch.

Wendy around friends on her 58th birthday lunch.

Image: Jenni Gunger

When Bulimba’s accessible bookshop closed, Wendy welcomed our bookclub into her home. A reflection of Wendy, her unit was delightfully welcoming – full of books, art and curios, along with many modifications to accommodate her needs. We were all shocked when, in 2013, while Wendy continued to advocate for accessible inclusive housing for all, her deteriorating health compelled her to move out of her beloved home.

Although the high-care housing development she moved to provided safe accommodation in a well-designed unit with communal areas, it was located in an outer suburb designed around car usage. For Wendy, staying connected to her wider community of work, family, friends and the cultural life of the city became significantly more difficult, as she had to rely on expensive taxis and her devoted elderly parents for transport. Nevertheless, she continued her advocacy, playing a major role in the successful public campaign to hold the Queensland government to account for the procurement of a new fleet of inaccessible trains. Ultimately, the government accepted responsibility for making the trains accessible, and Wendy switched from antagonist to protagonist, working as an advisor with the government on a retrofit project to ensure that these trains were not only technically compliant with accessibility legislation, but functionally accessible for as many people as possible. Wendy continued to advise the government across various transport projects, improving accessibility outcomes for all users.

Wendy persisted in living her busy life of work, cultural pursuits and socializing. As we sought a suitable venue for book club, we all became intensely aware that the only accessible parts of our homes were either accessed through our garages, or our garages themselves. The irony that far greater expense had been made to accommodate our cars than our friend was not lost on us. This, along with our need to consider the accessibility of every restaurant and event we attended, educated us all about inclusive design.

In 2020, as a result of Wendy’s determination, the NDIS and the availability of new housing types (significantly informed by the Livable Housing Design Guidelines), Wendy was finally able to move into a home of her own choosing and surround herself with all that brought her joy. Her new home was one of several apartments peppered throughout a large private residential complex in inner-city Woollongabba. Each apartment was designed to meet platinum requirements under the Livable Housing Design Guidelines and to meet the NDIS high physical support SDA design standard. No longer isolated from the life of the city she loved, Wendy could hang out at her local gin bar, host book club on the roof terrace, travel easily to Brisbane’s cultural precincts and enjoy her balcony view of the city below, spectacular skies and the moon rising in the east.

Wendy worked tirelessly to educate us all so that everyone could have the joy of living in their own home. Although her life was cut short, I am so happy that at the end of it, she had achieved this joy for herself as well. In her decades of hard work and advocacy, Wendy never lost sight of architecture’s potential for poetry; as she said recently to a group of students, our role as architects is to “create a path of delight for all.”

— Katherine Gifford is principal of Katherine Gifford Architecture and senior architect at Jeremy Salmon Architect in Brisbane.

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