Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader

Jos Boys, Jos Boys

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317197164
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Architettura generale

Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader takes a groundbreaking approach to exploring the interconnections between disability, architecture and cities. The contributions come from architecture, geography, anthropology, health studies, English language and literature, rhetoric and composition, art history, disability studies and disability arts and cover personal, theoretical and innovative ideas and work.

Richer approaches to disability – beyond regulation and design guidance – remain fragmented and difficult to find for architectural and built environment students, educators and professionals. By bringing together in one place some seminal texts and projects, as well as newly commissioned writings, readers can engage with disability in unexpected and exciting ways that can vibrantly inform their understandings of architecture and urban design.

Most crucially, Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader opens up not just disability but also ability – dis/ability – as a means of refusing the normalisation of only particular kinds of bodies in the design of built space. It reveals how our everyday social attitudes and practices about people, objects and spaces can be better understood through the lens of disability, and it suggests how thinking differently about dis/ability can enable innovative and new kinds of critical and creative architectural and urban design education and practice.

PART I

Histories/narratives

1
DISABLING THE FLÂNEUR

David Serlin (2006)

Excerpt reprinted from Journal of Visual Culture (2006) 5: 193–206, pp 193–200, 206.

On 29 January 1937, an editor for Le Soir, one of Paris’s many competing daily newspapers, made arrangements to photograph Helen Keller window-shopping on the fashionable avenue des Champs-Élyseés. Keller, the world’s most famous – and, arguably, most photographed – deaf-blind person, visited Paris during a brief tour of Europe before preparing for her historic journey to Japan in the spring. The following morning, on 30 January, Keller and Polly Thomson – Keller’s assistant for over two decades and primary traveling companion after Anne Sullivan’s death just three months earlier in October 1936 – took breakfast at the Hotel Lancaster on the rue de Berri and went out promenading on the avenue, stopping long enough for one of Le Soir’s photographers to preserve the moment for posterity (Figure 1.1). Later that day, Keller recorded the event, with self-conscious delight, in the journal that she kept of her daily activities: ‘Polly and I walked out with [the photographer] and he took pictures of us on the Champs-Élysées beside a shop window resplendent with Paris hats and gowns…Seeing everybody here in the pink of fashion doesn’t tend to lull my feminine vanity’ (Keller 1938, 164).

In the photograph, Keller and Thomson stand side by side in front of a boutique window showcasing a selection of belted and embroidered dresses, patterned chemises with cravats, and form-fitting cloche hats in delicate, light fabrics, suggestive of the coming spring, which stand in enormous contrast to the textured, heavy winter coats worn by the two passers-by. Their apparent delight in and longing for the consumer goods that have captured their attention is marked not only by the message that Keller communicates directly into Thomson’s hand, the paleness of which is centered against the backdrop of their black winter coats, but also by the reflections of both women mirrored in the window’s glass that seem to haunt the shop’s interior and our reception of the event. Indeed, the sumptuous display behind glass serves as a kind of visual analogue for Keller herself, who experiences the clothing in the shop window not through tactile means but through virtual projection as mediated through Thomson’s gaze and subsequent description. Keller, who was fifty-seven when the photograph was taken, clearly had more than a passing interest in clothes, which gave her the space to engage the tactile pleasures of the phenomenological world while simultaneously satisfying her own ‘feminine vanity.’ The day after posing for Le Soir’s photographer, for instance, Keller described in her diary a visit to the atelier of the grande couturieuse Elsa Schiaparelli, who was only too happy to have her material creations linked to the world’s most famous deaf-blind person, a person who wanted to be recognized as disabled but also irreducibly female. ‘I was sorry that [one of Schiaparelli’s dresses] could not be made for me in a day,’ she wrote disappointedly, ‘but my hands were crammed with loveliness as one robe after another appeared’ (Keller 1938, 169).

FIGURE 1.1 Helen Keller (left) and her companion, Polly Thomson, window-shopping on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, Paris. Originally published in Le Soir (Paris), 31 January 1937

Photograph from the collection of the author

One could also argue that, for all of its putative playfulness, the photograph’s two mutually constitutive subjects – the two women on the one hand and the boutique’s goods on the other – are divided practically down the middle, suggesting a symbiosis of theme and form as well as a distinct separation, if not a potential gulf, between its two halves. Such a division is not an insignificant insight into Keller’s own biography. As Kim E. Nielsen has argued, representations of Keller in the popular media during the course of her life tended to embody the dialectic between nineteenth-century gestures of sentimental womanhood and twentieth-century instantiations of the New Woman. Images of Keller equivocate between the ‘publicly pitied deaf and blind young virgin’ and ‘the politically safe, but glorified, superblind saintly spinster’ (Nielsen 2004, 50). Nielsen argues that, trapped within this gendered logic of comprehensibility, Keller frequently tempered her public persona by fulfilling expectations of what the public wanted her to be and, when necessary, taking the appropriate measures to distance herself from other disabled people in order to assert claims to a more normative subjectivity. Keller’s desire to be seen as special and on her terms, however, was not incompatible with the editorial goals of a daily newspaper like Le Soir, which sought to present Keller and Thomson as special yet also infinitely capable of performing the predictable rituals of female conspicuous consumption. Is it not unseemly, then, to ask: for what audience(s) was this photograph intended, and for what purposes? If the photograph is simply a news item lifted from daily life in Paris during the late 1930s, then what, exactly, is newsworthy about it, and what elements of urban culture does it document?

Perhaps the photograph’s explicit commercial power and unapologetic consumerism – both the convention of window-shopping and the adaptation of Keller and Thomson within it – capture the imagination precisely because they confirm the promise of a certain kind of normative subject position that under the right circumstances the disabled person, for whom Keller serves metonymically, might perform in public. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has written, ‘Realist disability photography is the rhetoric of equality, most often turned utilitarian…Realism domesticates disability’ (Garland-Thomson 2002, 69). Unlike photographs of disabled figures in the urban milieu such as Paul Strand’s famous Blind Woman (1917), for instance, a watershed moment in a genealogy of ‘high’ modern figurations of disability, the image of Keller and Thomson might have functioned somewhat differently within early-twentieth-century French popular media (Mirzoeff 1995, 51–53). The blind figure in traditional eighteenth and nineteenth-century French art, as Nicholas Mirzoeff has argued, was almost always gendered male, though exceptions – as in the case of the female ‘blind justice’ – conceded more to mythological tropes than to social realities. A categorical icon in the pantheon of Western cultural fantasies, from Tiresias onward, of the blind person whose judicious inner eye can ‘see’ beyond the superficial distractions of the external world, such figures were used in the political iconography of the early republic to demonstrate the Enlightenment triumph of humanist reason in order to build a new egalitarian society that would replace old aristocratic corruption. Well into the twentieth century, however, the blind were far more accustomed either to social isolation in institutions far from the public view or, in more dire circumstances, survival through street begging, than the metaphorical insight endowed upon them by artists and philosophers. Indeed, if there is common thread within disability history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is not that people with physical and cognitive impairments went traipsing down the Champs-Élysées but instead were deliberately segregated from their fellow citizens, occupying domestic or rehabilitative or institutional spaces where they might be cared for (if they were cared for at all), and routinely excluded and often prohibited from public spaces. The vaunted promises of French republican values, in other words, rang hollow for the disabled and instead barred them from cultural recognition and political participation except, perhaps, for those whose wealth or status effectively neutralized the reductive equation of bodily difference with social incompatibility.

The most obvious, and most regularly sustained, exception to this disparity between the promise of republican values and the exclusion of the disabled was provided by photographic representations of les mutilés de guerre (disabled war veterans), the wholesale bombardment of which French newspaper readers and newsreel viewers had become accustomed to in the interwar years (Figure 1.2). One news photograph, taken approximately two years earlier in December 1934, depicts a demonstration by disabled veterans of the First World War who are marching down the sidewalk of the Champs-Élyseés and waving French flags to attract the attention of pedestrians and automobile drivers. The powerful iconographic value of this procession of middle-aged veterans moving slowly across cold, wet pavement on canes and crutches, many sporting berets and decorations in deference to their military service as well as mustaches often cultivated to conceal battle scars, makes a dramatic visual contrast with the elegant, beaux arts shapes of the storefront façades, apartment buildings, and shiny sedans that seem to be moving, as if with teleological certainty, in an entirely different direction. This is a markedly different strategy for representing disability than that used in the photograph of Keller and Thomson. In early-twentieth-century France, wounded veterans were seen as symbols of enormous personal sacrifice to the nation-state, and as such occupied an esteemed position in the social hierarchy of disability since their bodily difference was equated with tropes of patriotic citizenship and domestic care giving (Panchasi 1995; Sherman 1999). Furthermore, French war veterans with disabilities – the image of which is crystallized by the amputee in the foreground perched resignedly on crutches – were at the forefront of what might be called anachronistically a disability rights movement, forming extensive networks of military fraternities and mutual aid societies, demanding improved pension and health benefits from the French government, and organizing protest marches on symbolic (and tourist-heavy) thoroughfares like the Champs-Élyseés (Prost 1992).

FIGURE 1.2 Disabled veterans of the First World War demonstrating for increased pensions and benefits on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, Paris. Photograph taken ca. December 1934

Photograph from the collection of the author.

Perhaps this is why, in the end, the photograph of Keller and Thomson remains so striking. It presents a gendered alternative to displays of bodily difference by forging connections between the public representation of disability and its heretofore-unrealized corollaries in the realms of paparazzi, fashion, and documentary photography that so characterized visual culture in Paris during the 1930s. The image of Keller and Thomson challenges the male-defined public culture of disability by invoking the kind of gendered images of consumption and urban pleasure with which the French public was well acquainted during the interwar years including the New Woman, the androgynous garçonne, and the single working girl (Roberts 1994; Stewart 2001; Chadwick and Ladimer 2003). Yet the photograph’s deliberate blurring of the visual codes of window-shopping with the visual codes of public disability also has the effect, intentional or otherwise, of distinguishing Keller not only from disabled veterans but also from images of women that, historically, saturated the French popular imagination. Indeed, the photograph depicting a deaf-blind woman window-shopping may have been a point of ironic juxtaposition with the complex public iconography of the Parisienne, the single girl-about-town who inhabited fin-de-siècle urban culture as memorialized in the graphic poster art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, which combined coquettish playfulness and robust sexuality two decades before the emergence of the New Woman (Nesbit 1992).

Rather than codifying – and, to some degree, essentializing – the differences between the masculine terrain traversed by protesting veterans and the feminine terrain traversed by Keller and Thomson, perhaps it would be more productive to see the two women and the parade of men as independent but dialectically linked actors within the complex and highly contested epistemological terrain of urban modernity. In other words, how might we make space for Helen Keller, veterans, and other disabled urbanites in the voluminous literature on the flâneur?

Scholarship devoted to the enduring significance of flânerie, from its historical origins in early-nineteenth-century Paris to its most well-known iterations by Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and a host of writers and critics throughout the twentieth century, is something of a cottage industry in contemporary visual and cultural studies as well as within historical studies of modern and postmodern urban cultures (Baudelaire 1972; Benjamin 1978; Buck-Morss 1991; Tester 1994; White 2001). Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, for instance, has argued that the flâneur is not a singular urban type but a multivalent urban icon, developing from the lazy, unproductive figure of the 1830s to the mid-century mock-artist to the famously perambulating gadfly-about-town of the 1870s to the anachronistic figure of urban modernity whose primary association with enclosed shopping arcades Benjamin so lovingly delineated in writings that overlapped chronologically with Keller’s appearance on the streets of Paris (Ferguson 1994). Such shifting tides of meaning across a century and a half track a constant recalibration of the flâneur from aloof observation to conspicuous consumption. The phenomenological inspiration derived from flânerie has played a central component in genealogies of modern experience that can be traced to late-nineteenth-century urban visual spectacles such as window displays, wax museums, and early cinema (Crary 2001; Charney and Schwartz 1996; Friedberg 1994; Schwartz 1999). In all of these scholarly explorations, however, there is a constant and, arguably, almost tacit commitment to the normative elements of the flâneur’s physical experience – betrayed implicitly by what some critics have rightly insisted as modernism’s tendency toward ocularcentrism or the ‘hegemony of vision’ – that is not factored into discussions of flânerie nor, for that matter, the codes of urban modernity that are assumed to crystallize around certain kinds of acts (observing, shopping, collecting) or sensorial experiences (listening, moving, gazing) associated with the flâneur’s body (Levin 1993). Despite its adoption within a range of academic disciplines and theoretical approaches, scholars continue to preserve the notion of the flâneur as a paradigmatic example of the modern subject who takes the functions of his or her body for granted.

Certainly, there are more nuanced exceptions to this paradigmatic approach to flânerie. As early as 1841, for example, Louis Hart’s Le Physiologie du flâneur implied that the flâneur’s foppish caprice carried all of the sexual (and, often, homosexual) connotations of physical and social difference found in nineteenth-century pseudoscientific tracts on physiognomy and phrenology (Ferguson 1994, 26). A century and a half later, in the 1980s and 1990s, feminist scholars in urban studies and visual culture studies carved out space for the flâneuse in order to problematize the male privilege implicit in discussions of flânerie and inscribe women’s place in the social etiologies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban modernity (Parsons 2000; Pollock 1988; Wilson 2001; Wolff 1985). Yet even within such groundbreaking studies, making claims for the flâneur or the flâneuse as agents of modern experience already presumes that the codes of urban modernity – what really counts as urban and/or modern – are organized around narratives of normative able-bodiedness. The shopping adventures of Keller and Thomson and the protest activities of disabled veterans on the streets of Paris in the mid-1930s may point to the different semiotic registers in which public definitions of disability were communicated and understood in the popular imagination, but they also point to the reasons why the liberal, autonomous subject of modernity must be able-bodied for canonical understandings of flânerie to survive (Breckenridge and Vogler 2001). If we define modernity only through a recognizable set of compulsory able-bodied acts such as walking, looking, and hearing, then we exclude a sizeable proportion of the population, both in historical perspective as well as in contemporary experience. In the literature on urban modernity, disabled people – regarded by dominant discourses as tragic and dependent upon paternalistic forms of care and attention – hardly ever get to drink absinthe, let alone relish the opportunity to hold the crystal goblet.

Such limited interpretations of the urban subject clearly had little or no lasting effect on Keller...