Window Shopping with Helen Keller: Architecture and Disability in Modern Culture

In this meandering history of disability and design, Serlin (Imagining Illness), a professor of communication and science studies at UC San Diego, explores how people with disabilities interacted with architecture and public space before wheelchair ramps, curb cuts, and other such accomodations became standard practice. Serlin focuses on well-known figures like deaf-blind activist and “urban flaneuse” Helen Keller, whose penchant for long, wandering walks on city streets Serlin attempts to recreate from her unique sensory perspective, and Joseph Merrick, the “Elephant Man,” whose physical experience of the world Serlin explains was mediated by the institutional dictates of the 19th-century workhouse and the hospital, which defined him as either able-bodied or infirm, with no allowance made for an alternate state of disability. He also casts intriguing new light on the Works Progress Administration’s relationships with disability. As the New Deal institution responsible for so much of the modern built environment, other scholars have pegged the WPA as deeply under the sway of eugenics, incorporating little accommodation for the elderly, infirm, or disabled, but Serlin surfaces evidence that in fact it contained fairly advanced thinking on disability (he especially focuses on architectural and design projects meant to accommodate children suffering from polio-induced paralysis), and that it was Cold War–era design that actually swept away disability-accommodating features. It makes for an intriguing, if slightly theory-heavy, meditation on disability and modernity. (Feb.)