A shock of recognition comes early in The Architecture of Disability. Author David Gissen argues in his introduction that while providing adequate access for disabled people is necessary, making it the dominant principle by which architecture responds to impairment not only is insufficient but also reinforces alienating functionalist narratives. And then, toward the end of this initial essay, he turns the mirror on the discipline itself—to the hustles of studio, site visits, and archival work that compose common design and research practices. In short, the ways that architecture cultivates an unwritten doctrine of, as Elon Musk might put it, hard core.

Grind culture has come under fire as symptomatic of labor exploitation, but Gissen, a disabled designer and historian, expands and redirects the critique. He asks that we consider activities through the lens of disability. “Too often scholars and designers center their physical prowess as a de facto quality of insightful architectural research and knowledge,” writes Gissen. “This attitude becomes embedded in architectural writing directly and indirectly—through the ways authors position the intensity of their archival work or their physical interactions with buildings or landscapes.”

His observation leaves me breathless for a moment, as if eyes opened on the typeset page and stared right at the impairment I’ve masked for a decade. Generally, I cringe at essays that employ the first-person singular. Even (especially) my own. Solipsistic beginnings create dark holes that suck all subjects, all arguments, into self-centered narratives. Gissen’s words, however, resonate profoundly with my own experience of trying to operate as a capable cultural producer within architecture while dealing with deteriorating hearing in one ear and deafness in another. To his list of difficult or alienating activities that are meant to be tirelessly performed—studio culture, archival research, site visits—I would add panel discussions, cocktail parties, and design juries.

Architecture demands that I operate without the appearance of disability (just as it requires a wardrobe of economic signifiers), and thus I exhaust myself straining to hear small talk over gallery-opening din or field a Q&A in a badly mic-ed lecture hall. But lest I make this all about me, centering my deafness is not meant to evoke a “good for you” golf clap in the face of adversity. What’s at stake here is broader than any one individual, mutual without being universalist. As Gissen writes, “If this book excites you, the question should not be how does this book relate to practice, but how can we (you and I) reimagine practice to relate it to those marginalized by it?”

The Architecture of Disability argues that the very human conditions of “weakness, frailty, and incapacity” are already embedded in architectural history but eclipsed by narratives privileging function and betterment. But Gissen departs from the Vitruvian bedrock of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas. His expanded histories stretch across six chapters, each dedicated to a specific thematic focus: preservation, landscape, urbanism, form, environment, and construction. For example, the chapter “The Construction of Disability” considers how incapacities of both designers and builders might alter our understanding of the labor that goes into making architecture. A lengthy section unpacks Adolf Loos’s scheme for housing for wounded veterans in Vienna. Almost completely deaf, Loos was no stranger to impairment. For the House with One Wall (1921), he developed a simple construction system that worked with the veterans’ physical capabilities to build their own homes by minimizing foundation digging and heavy masonry.

Gissen, however, begins at the Acropolis. Where else to start but at the umbilicus of architectural form? Present-day visitors to the Acropolis make their final ascent via a narrow path designed by Greek architect Dimitris Pikionis in 1957. Marble steps snake through a romantically ruinous landscape, leading visitors in a single-file pilgrimage to the temple. For those who can’t navigate the journey, there’s a rickety elevator that climbs the north face of the cliff. It’s an accessibility nightmare.

The two routes are not simply unequal. So, rectifying access doesn’t mean adding more lifts. An emphasis on the designed path privileges the notion that such sites must be undertaken in a thrall of heroic exertion. Gissen categorizes such individual experiences as “a type of fetishization, transforming a beholder into a conduit through which natural, nonhuman elements and forces are turned into knowledge.” Fitness as certitude is much as true for a young Corb, carnet in hand, as it is for athleisure-clad social media influencers posing in front of the Parthenon.

As counterargument, Gissen recounts the wide series of ramps that once rose from the Agora below to the top of the Acropolis. Made from packed earth and masonry blocks, the ramps, which dated from the fifth century BCE, were each several hundred feet long and wide enough to accommodate many groups of people at a time, in contrast to the solitary procession of the contemporary path. Gissen references archaeologist Deborah Sneed, whose research suggests that “veterans, pregnant women, and impaired worshippers,” “elderly figures using canes and crutches,” and people with blindness and other impairments visited ancient Greek sites. Indeed, Gissen’s exhibition project An Archaeology of Disability, developed in collaboration with Jennifer Stager and Mantha Zarmakoupi, was shown at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale and featured, among other interpretive objects, a stone seat described by an ancient pilgrim as a welcome place to rest. A broader notion of the visitors to the site, then, refutes the intrepid ideal popularized by the Grand Tour and continued in study-abroad pilgrimages to commune with buildings of import. Importantly, it demonstrates an architecture of collectivity that helps to destabilize singular narratives of monumentality.

The Architecture of Disability uses the lens of disability to reevaluate received architectural histories and speculate on a more inclusive architectural environment, one divested from the inherited biases around function and form. “Enabling disability to more fully dismantle the temporality of architectural monuments and national patrimony would be a way to reimagine monuments as places that have often sublimated weakness and vulnerability as cultural values,” he writes regarding preservation; variations on how disability might modify architecture echo in nearly every chapter. Discussing an “urbanism of impairment,” Gissen notes that disability perspectives allow for another idea of the city by challenging it as “a space of flows, property exchange, monumental aesthetics, and narrow concepts of human health.”

Gissen departs from the strictures of the ADA and even some principles of disability activism to argue that impairment is not something to be prosaically “solved.” In the chapter “Of a Weaker Nature,” he uses the example of an allée of pine trees designed by West 8 Landscape Architecture to illustrate how disability might inspire new aesthetics in landscape and urban design. At the Salon de Pinos in Madrid, metal crutches support gnarled and leaning limbs, demonstrating “a nature open to the aesthetics of infirmity.”

The book’s standout chapter, “The Urbanization of Disability,” offers an incisive critique of the modernized city. Gissen takes aim at the conceit of the cosmopolitan ideal of urban flow: transportation, infrastructure, capital. He deftly bursts our received beliefs that the metropolis is defined by circulation. The churn and bustling we celebrate, the wide boulevards and efficient sewer systems—they are all part of a so-called healthy city. But these values that manifest into supposedly salubrious spatial conditions were largely born from European models in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and reflect a narrowing of ways to occupy public space. “The space of the street that is so often critiqued by disability activists is a relatively recent intervention in the history of cities,” writes Gissen, noting that Paris didn’t have elements like sidewalks, curbs, or gutters until 1830, much less the curb cuts, audio traffic signals, and other forms of barrier-free accessibility that were hard won through protest and policy changes in the twentieth century.

Gissen inserts (or reinserts) into our urbanist imaginary a series of eighteenth-century drawings of Rome by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Far from depicting the city as a rational, interconnected system of streets, buildings, and infrastructure, as we might find in modern planning schemes, the etchings show muddy roads, ancient ruins, and undefined spaces between and around buildings. The Architecture of Disability zeroes in on the human figures. There are the supposed urban avatars of Piranesi’s viewers—the men standing around in cloaks pointing at architecture—but Gissen is interested in those figures prone or crouching. “[Piranesi’s] images included elderly Romans and, in several cases, amputees—veterans of war—sitting on debris and rubble while pleading with those traversing the spaces depicted,” he writes.

We know these figures, even if they were drawn nearly three centuries ago. They are the folks who camp, sleep, or loiter on the sidewalk. Their very presence is so threatening to the fitness of the modern city that recently elected LA mayor Karen Bass called for a state of emergency over the homelessness crisis and New York mayor Eric Adams plans to involuntarily hospitalize unhoused people who display signs of mental illness. “The Urbanization of Disability” is a reminder that flow is not a synonym for a democratic city.

Instead of seeing accessibility as the solution, Gissen “entangles” disability within multiple urbanisms, such as

those preserving the urban fabric because it offers a familiar, physical support structure; those embracing aimlessness, drift, and trespass; those embracing less mobilized metaphors, such as pulses, leaks, and waves; those reimagining movement in the city beyond a simple valorization of mobility; and those seeking a way out of the idea of a monumental city and its flattened, often militant histories.

Incidentally, one of the more surprising (and great) moments in the chapter is Gissen’s dissection of architecture and urbanism’s precious flaneur and dérive. That conception of the wandering figure self-alienated from the dictates and economies of the city proves dilettantish when considered through race, age, and ability. Garnette Cadogan’s 2016 essay “Walking While Black,” for example, viscerally conveys the perils faced and survival tactics required to walk in an American city as a lone Black man.

But Gissen isn’t altogether ready to abandon the drift, only the idea that it’s the activity of choice for “young, able-bodied, European men.” Through the work of disability scholars David Serlin and Steve Graby he identifies how wandering is a form of urban knowledge practiced by wounded war veterans, blind people, or those with autism. Mobility, however, isn’t privileged.

Some of The Architecture of Disability began life as opinion pieces or theoretical essays in other publications. Gissen corrals together texts with introductions at the start of each chapter—explainers that drift into the didactic—and additional research materials. One guesses that this is in service of uniformity across the volume combined with a historian’s responsibility to reiterate clear positionality, but such an approach cools the urgency of the subject matter. This is especially true in the chapter “A Form of Impairment,” a variation on the e-flux Architecture essay “Disabling Form” published last May, which gets bogged down in a history of architectural form and aesthetics prior to the necessary critique.

I miss the heat of Gissen’s 2018 op-ed for The Architect’s Newspaper, which asks, “Why are there so few disabled architects and architecture students?” The tone of that earlier piece fiercely aligns disabled designers in the field with the struggles for inclusion and equity of other marginalized groups. The Architecture of Disability is consciously not a manifesto, as much as I might desire such a flex. Perhaps a reflective turn better illustrates his case. We valorize strength, both physical and critical. Gissen’s argument is grounded in history and slightly dreamy in its reimaginings of a practice that is not just accessible but also free of alienation. It’s a weaker stance—one that requires interdependencies, not dogma. And that’s the point.