Monday, January 20, 2025

"Window Shopping with Helen Keller"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Window Shopping with Helen Keller: Architecture and Disability in Modern Culture by David Serlin.

About the book, from the publisher:

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.
--Marshal Zeringue