A History of French Disability Architecture and Design, 1750-1975

FAIN: FT-254899-17

Sun-Young Park
George Mason University (Fairfax, VA 22030-4444)

A book-length study on the architecture of disability accommodations in France, 1750-1975.

This project will explore how architectural and urban developments in France accommodated, and at times failed to accommodate, the disabled subject between 1750 and 1975. It will analyze the evolving design of pedagogical institutions for the deaf and the blind, as well as urban reform measures that gradually made cities more legible and navigable, alongside changing medical and cultural constructions of the different kinds of sensory disabilities. In the era when conceptions of disability were shifting from moral to scientific terms, material and spatial interfaces played increasingly formative roles in programs of education, therapy, and integration. By recovering the ways in which the modern built environment shaped, and was shaped by, non-normative human experiences, this project situates disability studies at the heart of humanistic inquiry into the forces—whether cultural, environmental, or political—mediating the relationship between individuals and society.