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

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.

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

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.

Review :
"[Serlin] casts intriguing new light on the Works Progress Administrationʼs 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. . . and that it was Cold War–era design that actually swept away disability-accommodating features." “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.’”   “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.” “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.” “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.”