Yale Architecture Forum
David Serlin
Window Shopping with Helen Keller: Architecture and Disability in Modern Culture
David Serlin will present his new book, Window Shopping with Helen Keller, which recounts a series of influential historical moments when architects and designers engaged the embodied experiences of disabled people. In this talk, Serlin provides an overview of these influential moments, including the lives of Joseph Merrick (aka “The Elephant Man”) in Victorian London and Helen Keller in New York City and Paris, the design projects of the Works Progress Administration made by and for disabled users during the late 1930s, and the Illinois Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, designed in the 1970s by architect Stanley Tigerman. By putting disabled people and their experiences of architecture and space at the generative center of modern culture, long before the emergence of the disability rights movement of the late 1960s or the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, these case studies challenge conventional definitions for what it has meant to be “urban” and “modern” in both historical perspective and in the contemporary world.
David Serlin is a Professor of Communication and Science Studies at UC San Diego. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, where he was awarded the Rome Prize in Architecture. He is the author or editor of many books, including Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America, and Keywords for Disability Studies. A founding editor of the online journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, he is also the author of the New York Times- bestselling beginning reader Baby Monkey, Private Eye, illustrated by his husband, Brian Selznick.
Architecture Forum is a PhD-led symposium jointly organized by the Departments of Architecture and History of Art, providing an inclusive platform for scholars to present and debate new research on the history of the built environment.