Selwyn Goldsmith (11 December 1932 – 3 April 2011) was an architect, town planner, writer and disabilities advocate who was instrumental in the development of the universal approach to design.
He contracted polio in that same year and was paralysed down the right hand side of his body for the rest of his life.
[1] While working in Norwich in 1967, he interviewed wheelchair users, research that led to the concept of the idea of the dropped kerb.
Goldsmith worked with Gordon Ricketts, the secretary of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
The architect does not start with the presumption that people with disabilities are abnormal, are peculiar and different, and that, in order to make buildings accessible to them, they should be packaged together and then, with a set of special-for-the-disabled accessibility standards, have their requirements presented in topdown mode as add-ons to unspecified normal provision.