to refresh the icon.

Creating an icon that better repre- Building Access: Universal Design and the
sents disability became a global movement that still con- Politics of Disability
tinues today, with the 2010 Accessible Icon Project (AIP)

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depicting the icon of the wheelchair user in motion being Aimi Hamraie, University of Minnesota Press, 2017. 352
the most promising potential replacement of the ISA. pp., 80 b&w illus., cloth, $120.00. ISBN: 9781517901639.

The strength of Designing Disability is the way significant ‘Who counts as everyone and how can we know?’ is the
moments in the history of access and disability are woven ambitious question that author Aimi Hamraie explores
together with society’s perception and the design of a univer- in their original and penetrating book Building Access:
sal icon. Covering an extensive time period, it paints a clear Universal Design and the Politics of Disability, which
picture of disability, society and the extraordinary impact traces the evolution of Universal Design, a late-twenti-
they have on one another. The book is written for multiple eth-century design philosophy developed by a group of
audiences including graphic designers, architects, disability designers and rehabilitation specialists led by disabled
advocates and those interested in how visuals affect ways architect Ronald Mace, as a more flexible alternative to
of thinking. It is an impressively researched and thought-pro- the disabled access code (p. 5). The book opens with
voking text that leaves the reader wanting to closely follow a micro-travel log from four sites that employ various
the shifting social construct as history continues to unfold. interpretations of Universal Design: the Blusson Spinal
Cord Centre in Vancouver, with a ceremonial ramp
doi:10.1093/jdh/epy024 winding around an oblong atrium; the Institute for
Christine Lhowe Human Centered Design in Boston, replete with broadly
Assistant Professor of Art & Design, Seton Hall University, accessible architecture and consumer items; Morgan’s
South Orange, NJ, USA Wonderland, a theme park in Austin, where children
E-mail: [email protected] with disabilities were integral to the design of rides
and spaces; and an annual Society of Disability Studies
conference lecture, featuring American Sign Language
and simultaneous transcription. As the author observes,
‘each space embodies a very different way of under-
standing the concept of disability, whether a medical
category in need of correction, a category of identity
and shared experience, a consumer designation, or an
invaluable aspect of human community, which society
should anticipate and value’ (xiii). How understand-
ings of ‘universal’ reproduce the subject of design is
the analytical thread of this book. The author argues
that the term is slippery, problematic, and historically
produced—entangled with some of the same ideolo-
gies that shape(d) oppressive ways of regulating the
disabled.

Few architects or architectural historians know the his-

tory behind access codes or can distinguish accessibil-
ity from Universal Design. Chronicling the making of
Universal Design fills a scholarly void and, in the pro-
cess, introduces key sites of knowledge-making about
the body: anthropometrics, eugenics, ergonomics,
scientific management, rehabilitation, environmental
design research and human factors. Hamraie deftly
braids together critical disability, race and feminist the-
ory to provide novel interpretations of archival mate-
rial, including drawings and personal papers produced
by leading mid-century design knowledge creators,
like Henry Dreyfuss, of Architectural Graphic Standards

296 Book Reviews

anthropometric figures, as well as less-known records Chapter three, ‘All Americans’, investigates the compel-
of Mace and his colleagues’ work on barrier-free and ling theme of how disability and African-American rights
Universal Design. The subjects are not famous archi- intersect. Hamraie anchors this analysis in the fluctuating

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tectural auteurs but people who produced the episte- meaning of the words ‘all’ and ‘everyone’ in the affor-
mological ground upon which designers unremarkably dance of accessible space. White privilege, they argue,
construct their thinking. Inflected by science and tech- permeated early access discourse in the focus on mid-
nology studies, the author examines the inscriptions, dle-class disabled citizens in the development of ANSI
techniques and artifacts that shaped the production, A117.1, the first access standard. Proponents of ANSI
legibility and mobility of ideas about the body.1 For A117.1 suggested that its implementation opened up
example, the author shows that the ‘andrometer’, an space to all Americans ‘regardless of race, creed, color
instrument used to measure Civil War soldiers’ bodies, or physical handicap’, even though the USA was largely
assumed an upright military posture (p. 47) and how segregated at this time (p. 87). Hamraie argues that,
the meaning of ‘all’ differed when based on propor- ‘in the civil rights era, the growing political legibility of
tionate sampling versus ‘oversampling’ of marginal, particular non-normate users was contingent upon their
underrepresented bodies (p. 158). scientific legibility as productive white spatial citizens’
(p. 66). A decade later, the disability rights movement
The book is organized into seven chapters chronicling appropriated the success of black civil rights. Although
the evolution of what the author calls ‘access-knowl- ‘it was within a post-racial framework that it became
edge’, an epistemological project aimed at ‘designing possible to use racial segregation as a parallel case or
a more inclusive world for everyone’ (p. 5). The first metaphor for disability exclusion’, the author notes that
two chapters, ‘The Normate Template’ and ‘Flexible the appropriation rarely acknowledged the ongoing prej-
Users’, give an account of the dominant subject of udice that created uneven spatial arrangements based
architecture, from the idealized white male of the on race (p. 87).
Vitruvian Man to the modern flexible subject absorbed
into architecture through building standards, produced Chapters four and five, ‘Sloped Technoscience’ and
by nineteenth- and twentieth-century demographics ‘Epistemic Activism’, recount the beginnings of disabil-
and anthropometry (p. 23). The flexible user, Hamraie ity rights activism and ‘crip technoscience’, a term coined
notes, becomes the object of rehabilitation regimes, by the author for the experimental, iterative expertise
medical and administrative systems designed to com- developed by people with disabilities. This prefigures
pensate for the body’s deficiencies—and also the origin the eventual opposition between rehabilitation-based
of access-knowledge. approaches, such as code compliance-thinking (p. 153)
and the freer Universal Design. Even as Hamraie sets up
The evolution of access-knowledge provides a critical this dualism, however, their account of the overlapping
history of the user in design, contributing the important modes through which Ron Mace and others worked to
dimension of disability to this interdisciplinary area, which develop both building codes and Universal Design com-
architectural historian Kenny Cupers calls an ‘alternative plicates this opposition.
history of architecture’.2 Hamraie asks: through what
forms of knowledge making do atypical users become leg- The last two chapters, ‘Barrier Work’ and ‘Engangled
ible to researchers and designers? The failure to consider Principles’, analyse Universal Design’s evolution and how
human complexity spurred, in the post-war years, inter- it was understood within and outside epistemic activ-
nal critiques of architectural high modernism. The remedy ist communities after the 1990 passage of the ADA.
was architecture’s alliance with empirical human research Compared with disabled access standards, Universal
in the social sciences.3 Until Building Access, disability had Design lacks specific rules and means for assessing out-
been missing from this scholarship. Hamraie shows that comes. The 1990s saw Universal Design take shape
barrier-free (precursor to Universal Design), in turn, offered through the proliferation in institutional settings, like
a critique of user research, demonstrating that disabled architectural education, leading to its codification into
access standards ‘led to a wholescale diversification in the seven ‘Principles’. Hamraie’s close reading of their devel-
Graphic Standards of the figures of the architectural inhab- opment between 1995 and 1997 reveals the logics inher-
itant, an expansion of gender representation, as well as ent in the adoption and omission of specific language,
disability inclusion’ (p. 38). That is to say, considering dis- offering ‘a key for deciphering the historical map of
ability opened architecture to many more bodies. access-knowledge’ (p. 248).

Book Reviews 297

‘Entangled Principles’ reiterates one of Building
Access’s motifs: the continual struggle to keep forms
of access-knowledge from being captured by non-

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progressive regimes of productive citizenship or,
with Universal Design, neoliberal ideologies. Hamraie
argues that efforts to differentiate Universal Design
from barrier-free approaches depoliticized Universal
Design Particularly, Mace’s strategy for its dissemina-
tion into mainstream design culture as a marketing
strategy as a way to overcome architects’ resistance to
accessibility compliance, transformed Universal Design
into a feature that added convenience for normate
bodies instead of an essential accommodation for
non-normate users. This flattening of difference erro-
neously presumed that, in the post-ADA era, accessi-
bility had been achieved, taking focus off the disabled
subject.

This last section reveals the book’s main shortcoming,

namely that its discursive and political emphasis omits a
study of architectural practice and form. Although the
profession’s reluctance to take disability seriously ani-
mates Hamraie’s project, the book does not really address
architects, who could most benefit from its lessons. How
architects implement Universal Design as a method and
its material outcomes—particularly vis-à-vis code compli-
ance—is not discussed. We hardly encounter buildings
after the introductory guided tour. Nonetheless, Hamraie’s
skill in detailing the struggle, triumphs and ironies of this
history makes this book a valuable addition to any critical
architecture reading list.

doi:10.1093/jdh/epy023
The Optimum Imperative: Czech Architecture
Wanda Liebermann for the Socialist Lifestyle, 1938–1968
Assistant Professor of Architecture, Florida Atlantic
University, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA Ana Miljacki, Routledge, 2017. 310 pp., cloth, $120.00.
E-mail: [email protected] ISBN: 9781138208179.

Unlike other recent publications about Eastern European

Notes architecture from the postwar period, which predomi-
nantly focus on the production of architecture and its
1 B. Latour. ‘Drawing Things Together’, in Representations
interconnection with state policies, Ana Miljački’s first
in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael and Steve Woolgar Lynch
book engages with less material aspects of the archi-
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 19–68.
tectural culture.1 The Optimum Imperative: Czech
2 K. Cupers, ed. Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture for the Socialist Lifestyle, 1938–1968 analy-
Architecture. London & New York: Routledge, 2013. ses architectural theories and national debates, as well as
3 J. Knoblauch, “Going Soft: Architecture and the Human their problematic legacies in these three decades with a
Sciences in Search of New Institutional Forms (1963–1974)” short glimpse into the first few years of the twenty-first
(unpublished diss., Princeton University, 2012). century.

298 Book Reviews