81 Review The Architecture of Disability: Buildings,

David Gissen | University of Minnesota Press | $24.95 paradoxes,” he continues, with emphasis. For Gissen, “a disability critique of the city must also address other forms of circulation and exchange” beyond functionalist upgrades, “particularly the dynamics of property and real estate,” he writes, as well as “sound housing, guaranteed access to food, and the demilitarization of urban space.”

Vitriolic disdain for human bodies and minds that deviate from heteronormative European beauty maxims and Protestant work-ethic standards permeates architectural discourse. Gissen’s work directly confronts this trajectory. He notes that in the 1920s the German art critic Paul Schultze-Naumburg associated Cubism with “human maladies” because of the way in which it rejected the ideal physique in its rendering of human beings—an idea about bodies later championed by Leon Krier in his own attacks on modernism. Though Gissen doesn’t mention it, the prior examples recall the instance when Dutch modernist Aldo Van Eyck derided postmodern buildings as “transvestite architecture” in the 1970s.

industrialization, thereby rejecting “the belief that norms and averages should define the character of an environment within which people are immersed.”

At its best, critical theory does more than interpret the world around us. It can also confront us with our own unconscious biases and unchecked assumptions, which alters our subjectivity and the way we navigate the world. The result can be a vision of what a better, alternative world may look like. In a clear and succinct manner, Gissen’s The Architecture of Disability achieves the former goals while not elaborating on the latter imagination. Articulating precisely how this awareness could be applied in practice is not the main intent of the volume; perhaps that will arrive in a forthcoming offering.

continued from cover Part manifesto and part memoir, Gissen’s book upends centuries’ worth of dogmatic thinking in architecture by inserting “impaired” and “disabled” bodies into focus, an overdue act, as they have been excluded by the Western canon with very few exceptions to date. The Architecture of Disability takes on some of architecture theory’s most widely read (meaning white, able-bodied, male) intellectuals, such as Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Pierre Patte, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Leon Battista Alberti, Heinrich Wölfflin, Marc-Antoine Laugier, Gottfried Semper, Charles Baudelaire, Henri Lefebvre, and Vincent Scully. Gissen’s scholarship reveals how deeply entrenched ableism is within Enlightenment and modernist thought.

Upending the Canon Gissen’s thesis is in part that disability has historically been rendered largely invisible in famous architectural critiques about the city, race, gender, and class. In doing so, prior arguments alienate those who aren’t physically capable of rising “above the boulevard” and climbing “to the rooftops of Paris,” as Guy Debord and Jacques Fillon once called for in the revolutionary summer of 1968. Or, in Gissen’s own words: “As with race and gender, the integration of a disability perspective reveals key problems with the original premises of this critical tradition.” For instance, in his critique of the flâneur and Situationism—two hallmarks of urbanism postulated by Walter Benjamin in the 1920s and Guy Debord in the 1960s, respectively—Gissen reminds us that “only certain people can simply wander within a city in such a dramatic fashion to engage in this critical act of disobedience (which may not really be that critical at all).”

But Gissen’s ruminations go far beyond close readings of prolific thinkers. He launches epistemic critiques of how monuments, preservation, nature, cities, architectural form, physiology, anthropomorphism, the sublime, aesthetics, functionalism, environmentalism, and history itself have been theorized since Immanuel Kant, tracing these subjects back to their ontological roots in order to cast a spotlight on how ableism is deeply nestled within these lineages. Moreover, Gissen does justice to contemporary antiracist, postcolonial, postmonumental, and critical museum studies scholars, showing the interconnectivity between disability activism and broader struggles being faced down today. References to theorists of disability such as Jos Boys, Aimi Hamraie, Raymond Lifchez, Joel Sanders, and David Serlin are placed alongside contemporary figures like Nikhil Anand, Irene Chang, Julien Chapuis, Maurice Chebab, Charles Davis, Hassan Fathy, Mario Gooden, Georgina Kleege, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Tobin Siebers, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, and Mabel O. Wilson, to collect some of Gissen’s erudite references.

Perhaps what’s most remarkable about Gissen’s work is how much ground he covers in just 142 pages, not counting the introduction, acknowledgments, or endnotes. According to Gissen, however, this wider political and philosophical purview is essential, which is arguably what bifurcates his text from those of previous disability scholars. Or, to put it simply: It is not enough to advocate for more curb cuts on sidewalks, although the author certainly pays his respects to groups like the “disability liberation activists” of Berkeley, California, in the 1970s, who have historically struggled to make the built and natural environments more accessible.

“Disabled people and their architectural advocates have often wrestled with this functionalist legacy,” Gissen writes. “Treating access as the sole form of disability representation and activism in architecture is the source of innumerable limits and

Today, architects such as Thomas Heatherwick and Steven Holl design buildings like the Vessel in Hudson Yards and Hunters Point Library in Queens, respectively, that “express their inaccessible elements as central aspects of their formal meaning,” Gissen states. The lack of access is a slap in the face to anyone who isn’t physically capable of ascending these buildings’ highest peaks. Moreover, many professors and practitioners continue to stress the notion that to make good architecture, students must “suffer” by putting their bodies and minds through Promethean ordeals before they complete a design to the level of desired aesthetic or conceptual satisfaction, an expectation riddled with ableism and other problematics related to class, race, and gender.

In short, Gissen’s informed prose attacks this chauvinistic legacy. Citing historian Sarah Rose, Gissen notes that “disability” itself is a relatively new concept dating back only to the 19th century, a time when industrialization was taking hold in cities throughout Europe and the U.S. “To put this more simply, a blind person, an amputee, and a traumatized veteran do not necessarily have anything in common with one another,” he writes. “But such people, with an array of impairments, began to coalesce into an identity as governments and industries evaluated such people’s capacities or incapacities to work.” Against these protofascist regimes of usefulness, Gissen’s book highlights the narrow interpretations of being human that emerged during

Gissen anticipates and responds to the question of good examples to emulate by highlighting a few precious moments in architecture’s history as inspiration for those of us in the present. He gives kudos to Stanley Tigerman’s Illinois Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (1978) for employing a “postmodern” and “postfunctional” architectural approach “that subverted and in some cases ridiculed the literalness of anthropomorphic and functionalist aesthetics.” Gissen also points readers toward Austria’s “Red Vienna” period in the 1920s, during which impaired war veterans and widows built semiautonomous communes on the Austrian capital city’s outskirts after World War I, creating new innovative buildings and construction methods along the way.

The Architecture of Disability is an open invitation for us to collectively imagine what a new, better world could look like while at the same time offering readers a chance at their own introspection. Within minutes of opening the book, I was thinking about my own shortcomings as a critic and, specifically, instances in which I reviewed a new building or park and accessibility wasn’t on my radar. Like with other liberatory struggles, whether it is for greater racial, gender, or LGBTQ+ equity, Gissen reminds us that the most effective way to right these wrongs is by having impaired people at the vanguard of fixing the broken world they occupy. In his impassioned coda, he notes that the task at hand requires a group effort and communal creativity: “How can we (you and I) reimagine practice to relate it to those marginalized by it?”

Dan Jonas-Roche is a lecturer at Kean University School of Public Architecture. He lives in New York City.

Ahead of the opening of the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, AN speaks with the curators of the next American Pavilion.

Lauren Yeager, a sculptor based in Cleveland, has been creating assemblages of plastic refuse using Midwestern Americana like Coleman coolers and Little Tikes play sets that embody another aspect of our relationship to plastics: There is a veneer of nostalgia with a cynical undertone. You see that these objects were waste, and now they are being repurposed into sculptural assemblage. It raises questions about waste, value, and production streams.

AN: How will these works be arranged in the pavilion? What will the exhibition look like?

lifesaving medical devices and there are gender-affirming and body-affirming uses. Aguirre’s work will address the relationship between queer futures and plastics. How do we critique the topic through a lens that is not dismissive or derisive of these experiences and ways of being? We’re working through this multiplicity of narratives. One of the authors included in Sketches on Everlasting Plastics talks about giving birth in a hospital and how much plastic is involved in that. Another considers the nostalgia for the shape of a bottle that used to be made out of glass.

us, so we get to be more experimental, bold, and daring in our ways of thinking and get to define what things are in ways that more visible parts of the country don’t get to. There’s space for experimentation and interrogating what it means to bring together art, architecture, and design.

These four pavilions—from The Architectural Imagination in 2016 to Dimensions of Citizenship in 2018 to American Framing in 2021—all work with a heartland mentality that this region is the most American America gets. How do we engage with that? How do we start to exploit that and expand its definition?

Last fall, Tizziana Baldenebro (left) and Lauren Leving (right) were announced as the curators of the next iteration of the United States’ contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale. Their proposal offers a close look at the material possibilities of plastic for architects, designers, and artists. In the midst of finalizing the pavilion’s offerings, Baldenebro and Leving spoke with AN’s executive editor Jack Murphy about their efforts.

AN: Why plastic?

Tizziana Baldenebro (TB): We live in Ohio and are surrounded by plastic. Petrochemical polymers are one of the state’s leading industries. Especially after events like the Norfolk Southern derailment, the presence of plastics is something that everyone understands. The ideas for Everlasting Plastics started to develop from living in this region. A lot of artists connect plastics to systems of waste and waste production and are interested in thinking deeply about this region’s relationship with the material.

AN: What can you share about the exhibitors who will show their work as part of the pavilion?

TB: The pavilion’s five participants all bridge architecture, design, and art.

Simon Anton is a Detroit-based designer who has been working with plastic waste and makes works with locally sourced material.

Xavi L. Aguirre, who is an architecture professor at MIT, has been thinking about larger metaphors of plasticity in relationship to aesthetics, reproduction, and modular systems.

Ang Li is an architecture professor at Northeastern who has been working with waste systems, extrapolating from the scale of bales of waste into conversations about materials like EPS foam, which often isn’t perceived as being plastic.

Norman Teague, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is working with the idea of creating sustainable workforces, which is a big conversation in the Midwest. We wanted to exhibit someone who hadn’t worked with plastic, so we are challenging him to research and learn new skills and methods and apply them to his existing working methods.

Lauren Leving (LL): We‘ve been working with two exhibition designers who are drawing from factory aesthetics inspired by sites of industrial production to support the flow of the exhibition. We will be opening the doors of the rotunda, which haven’t been used as an entrance in quite some time, to think about a circulatory system that parallels industrial versus individual waste streams. People will be able to navigate in their own ways, but each artist or architect has their own moment for visitors to engage with the work.

AN: How will you share these efforts with wider publics beyond the attendees in Venice?

TB: We are at work on a book project undertaken with Columbia Books on Architecture and the City titled Sketches on Everlasting Plastics. For the first iteration, we invited 20 or so writers to write texts in response to the themes of the exhibition. There are poems, heartfelt letters and conversations, critical thought—it’s a robust way of expanding ways of thinking and ensuring the dialogue doesn’t end with the five featured exhibitors. We plan to have a first run of this publication available when the Biennale opens and then it will be more widely available alongside a catalogue. We will also add these texts to the website so everyone can read them.

AN: What kind of feedback have you received in Cleveland about the project?

LL: We’ve received a lot of positive feedback, and everybody is excited. We’re working with an art history professor at Case Western Reserve University and her upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, who are reading and conducting research about environmental practices in arts and plastic. The students are helping to develop programs alongside Everlasting Plastics in Cleveland to engage local audiences who are unable to travel to Venice. Petrochemical plastic polymers are the largest industry here, so we’re situating a critical discourse here, even though the artworks won’t be present. These conversations are now rippling beyond our work into local design schools and architecture programs, which have huge influence on the city and the state’s architecture culture.

AN: When working on waste and the Rust Belt, where do you locate hope and strength?

TB: It’s important to think about altered relationships to plastic, even positive ones: There are applications that are

LL: We’re talking about the sustainability of jobs here too, as plastics producers are the leading employer in the region. As we’re thinking of uses and reuse for material and waste streams, we’re also considering the resources that plastic manufacturing offers to workers. There are dire downsides, but at the same time it is employing many people and supporting their families.

AN: The last four American pavilions have been led by Midwest-based curators. Why is that? Have you been mentored by past curators for this project?

TB: The mentorship has been tremendous. We spoke early on with Ana Miljački, Ann Lui, Mimi Zeiger, Iker Gil, Paul Andersen, and Paul Preissner. There has been an outpouring of support, and it is special to receive that “whatever you need, just text away” response.

The region offers an expansive place to think about architecture and design. There’s so much industrial design going on, and there’s a strong connection to postindustrial landscapes. There’s this flyover mentality, which imagines that people aren’t watching and present

AN: What else should readers know about the upcoming American Pavilion?

TB: We’re trying to establish the ability to extrapolate from plastics our expectations for other materials. Plastic creates expectations for other materials, and these ideas can change over time. How do we go back to the genesis of the word plastic as a good way of being, a flexible and adaptable way of being?

We’re also trying to make a connection between our region and Venice. We’re connecting with Venice Lagoon Plastic Free, an organization that collects plastic waste in the Venetian lagoons. We’re working on partnerships that start to resist the typical biennial/triennial mindset and instead build longer relationships that impact ways of operating and thinking. Hopefully, these become institutional and infrastructural changes.

May 18, 2023

Symposium 5:30–6:30 | Aperitifs 6:30–9:00

Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice

RSVP for drinks in the garden preceded by an insightful conversation. Invited critics include Oliver Wainwright of The Guardian; Inga Saffron of the Philadelphia Inquirer; Davide Tomaso Ferrando of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano; Mohamed Elshahed of Cairobserver; and Erandi de Silva of Loké Journal.

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