Isabel has lived in the same walk-up building in Barcelona since the 60s. She’s 71 now. Her husband can no longer go down the stairs. So Isabel does it all: she shops, climbs back up, and keeps trying to install an elevator. For years, she’s been navigating a maze of co-ownership, rigid regulation and inaccessible subsidies. Sometimes she thinks about leaving. But where?
Thousands of kilometers away, in Tbilisi, Dodo hauls her groceries up with a rope from the balcony. She’s 87 and lives on the fifth floor of a Khrushchovka. In the 90s, during the unregulated post-Soviet period, she led the extension of her apartment. They could have added a lift, but couldn’t afford it. In her building, transformation came from within, but without structural support.
Hyperregulation or radical informality—same result. Both inhabit similar five-storey buildings, where older bodies age in homes that no longer fit them. Accessibility is not a right. It becomes a class privilege.
Might she come down today? builds on these experiences, and on previous work such as mi/SHENEBA, a film-in-progress in Tbilisi, and 67 steps, a Barcelona-based documentary project and explorations that will unfold in Bordeaux.
This project forms part of the Ad Hoc Residencies programme organised in collaboration with LINA European Architecture Platform.
Nami Gradolí Giner is an architect and researcher based between Valencia and Barcelona. Her work explores how older housing typologies — particularly post-war housing and mass housing — respond to contemporary vulnerabilities such as ageing, inaccessibility and climate risks. She approaches architecture as a practice that is both spatial and political, combining visual ethnography, technical analysis and participatory formats to document lived experience and open up debates rooted in everyday life. She frequently works with film as a research tool and as a means of facilitating collective conversations around housing.
Nami is currently working as an architect at the firm Gradolí & Sanz Arquitectes and is about to begin her PhD at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, focusing on collective strategies for adapting housing to address accessibility issues and other vulnerabilities in Southern Europe.