In recent years the field of disability studies has provided some of the most thoroughgoing critiques of modernity. As historians have shown, ableism has intersected with class, gender identity, sexual orientation, and race to structure oppressive regimes of labor, sexuality, and civic participation. To undo such frameworks in art and architectural historiography, scholars such as David Gissen, Aimi Haimraie, and Bess Williamson have shifted the focus from the discipline's conventional visual analyses to questions pertaining to sensory engagements with buildings and objects. [1] David Serlin's latest contribution to the field, Window Shopping with Helen Keller, builds on these approaches to center what he describes as "disabled subjectivities" (13) in modern architecture and design predating the codification of accessibility requirements by the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

The book comprises a methodological introduction outlining new approaches in crip epistemology, queer studies, and disability studies, which form the basis for Serlin's multimodal readings of sensory experiences, buildings, and events. Chapters one and two center personal objects and urban spaces in order to reconstruct the sensory world of Joseph Carey Merrick, pejoratively known as the 'Elephant Man,' and disability activist Helen Keller, respectively. Zooming out from personal experience to public space, Serlin subsequently discusses two architectural designs whose spatial innovations stemmed from a generative engagement with the sensory experience of people with disabilities - namely, Burnham Hoyt's Charles A. Boettcher School for Crippled Children (1940; Denver, Colorado) and Stanley Tigerman's Illinois Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (1978; Chicago, Illinois). These two chapters highlight not only the ways in which design innovations were specifically intended to meet the needs of the buildings' disabled patrons, but also call attention to the marginalization of the very disability-focused design characteristics in the subsequent reception and reuse of these spaces. The last chapter reframes a more familiar event, the passing by US Congress of the Architectural Barriers Act, in relation to the intersectional struggle for political participation in the transformative year of 1968. Altogether, Serlin's monograph serves as a corrective to widespread narratives that have cast disability as an impediment to, rather than a possibility for, sensory engagement and civic participation in modernity.

One of the book's main contributions to art and architectural historiography resides in proposing new sources and scales of analysis. The chapter on Merrick, for instance, effortlessly glides between an embodied history of his immediate environment and a more wide-ranging analysis of the living and working conditions imposed on people with disabilities in Victorian Britain. Engaging in an exemplary critique of long-standing bias, Serlin ends this chapter with a poignant discussion of the objectification of people with disabilities in memorial culture. Similarly effective is the chapter discussing the special schools and associated pedagogical objects commissioned by the Works Progress Administration as part of the New Deal in the United States. The chapter uncovers a virtually forgotten aspect of the much-researched federal program, showing, once again, that the marginalization of such design initiatives and of their patrons is the result of a historiographic lens focused solely on normative embodied experience. One point that could have invited a more critical reading, however, is Serlin's positive appraisal of the New Deal labor-creation program, which not only attached value to disabled subjectivities, as the author points out, but also regimented people with disabilities into the workforce, thus tying once again notions of normative civic participation to productive wage labor.

More generally, by shifting the focus from systemic questions of access and civic participation to the more individual realm of subjectivity, Serlin attempts to chart new methodological ground in disability studies. However, the main question remains - how can scholars invoke or reconstruct the subjectivity of historical actors, given not only temporal distance but also the barriers implied by that often-opaque realm of interiority? Serlin reflects occasionally on this methodological quandary, for instance when he discusses a car advertisement commoditizing Keller's kinetic awareness (79). As Serlin points out, statements ascribed to people with disabilities were at times instrumentalized by various third-party (that is, commercial, philanthropic, and medical) interests, which brings into question their status as reliable historical sources regarding individual experience. Following this problematization, may one not infer also that Merrick's gift of a model of the Mainz Cathedral to his wealthy benefactress is similarly performative in intent, belying power relations that are more problematic than the philanthropic discourse outlined in Chapter one?

Centering research around individual subjectivity also begs the question of what historical sources are available to scholars. For instance, the chapters on architectural design, which Serlin argues offered new freedoms and sensorial possibilities for blind people and for wheelchair users, are based on official WPA publications and interviews with the above mentioned Tigerman published in lavish architecture magazines. If the challenge for historians is to center "disabled subjectivities," (13) as Serlin advocates, this endeavor needs to be underpinned by research infrastructures which foreground sources by people with disabilities themselves. While historical records are always incomplete, Serlin's entreaty may serve as a guideline for archivists and researchers to expand the categories of sources usually associated with the history of architecture and design. Meaning-making, as many have pointed out before, is not the sole prerogative of the creator but rather occurs in the social realm, where buildings are put to the test by their users and by material and environmental factors.

In sum, Window Shopping with Helen Keller opens up insightful paths of architectural and material-culture analysis by proposing a multimedial and multisensory approach which challenges conventional visual methods. In the era before the legislation of design guidelines for accessibility, designing for people with disabilities was not, Serlin demonstrates, a marginal project, although such projects have often been erased from the built environment by the pressures of financial capital and disregarded in architectural historiography. Aside from reframing received knowledge about architectural modernism and postmodernism, Serlin's work also invites further questions pertaining to the established sources, methods, and narratives of art historical research. At its best, the book shows that the fabric of history is more complex not only in terms of sensory dimensions, but also of political ambivalences that structure civic participation, public memory and forgetting.

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[1] See, for instance, Aimi Haimraie: Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability, Minneapolis 2017; Bess Williamson: Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design, New York 2019; David Gissen: The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes Beyond Access, Minneapolis 2022.

Alexandra Masgras