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

by David Serlin

Overview

A particular history of how encounters between architects and people with disabilities transformed modern culture.
 
Window Shopping with Helen Keller recovers a series of influential moments when architects and designers engaged the embodied experiences of people with disabilities. David Serlin reveals how people with sensory and physical impairments navigated urban spaces and helped to shape modern culture. Through four case studies—the lives of Joseph Merrick (aka “The Elephant Man”) and Helen Keller, the projects of the Works Progress Administration, and the design of the Illinois Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped—Serlin offers a new history of modernity’s entanglements with disability.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226748979
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	01/16/2025
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

David Serlin is professor of communication and science studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is author or editor of numerous books, including Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America,also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter One: The Church of the Elephant Man
Chapter Two: Helen Keller and the Urban Archive
Chapter Three: Disabling the WPA
Chapter Four: Overdue at the Library
Epilogue: 1968

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

02/10/2025

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.)

Publishers Weekly

An interdisciplinary tour de force, Window Shopping with Helen Keller weaves together a remarkably diverse range of biographies, sites, and concepts. Serlin demonstrates that the disabled reimagining of buildings and cities extends far beyond, and well before, the arrival of ‘accessible architecture.’”
 

David Gissen

Rather than seeing architecture-before-accessibility solely in terms of its failures for people with disabilities, Serlin finds a version of modernism with more varied sensory, tactile, and mobility options than most historians have acknowledged. The book flows with poetic insight on how bodies, in all their variations, make space.

Bess Williamson

Serlin is the best kind of historian—alive to the irreducible complexity of the past. The stories in this book are paradoxical yet formative in the history of architecture, and this richly generative book helps us to better understand disability throughout that history, beyond our contemporary questions of mere access.

Sara Hendren

Much anticipated, Window Shopping with Helen Keller makes the illuminating argument that the contributions of people with disabilities to architectural design precede the disability rights movement. This book is an essential text for the emerging field of critical access studies and architectural studies of disability more broadly.

Aimi Hamraie