Schlüsselwörter

Since its inception in 1990 under the administration of the Republican President George W. Bush, both sides of the political spectrum have highlighted the colossal scale of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The orthodox reading highlights the ADA as the most expansive civil rights bill in the history of the United States, with a scope to end discrimination in employment, public services, and public accommodation once and for all. Senator Ted Kennedy, one leading spokesperson, spelled this out by depicting it as the bill to “end the American apartheid.”Footnote 1 At the White House ceremony, many referred to it as a “second independence day”, with Bush himself highlighting the parallels to the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act.Footnote 2 And its acclaim extends well into the present, with disability studies scholar Lennard J. Davis depicting it in his 2015 book on the ADA as “an excellent example of a bipartisanship no longer extant, […] an object lesson to those presently in the halls of power.”Footnote 3 With legislators, administrators, activists, and lobbyists collaborating across political divisions, the ADA appears to come close to what a revolution might look when it takes place within the parameters of a liberal democracy.

On the other side of the political frontline, a similarly imposing picture was being painted, ultimately circulating in the late 1990s as the “backlash thesis.”Footnote 4 Focusing on the dire employment numbers of disabled people—remaining at 20 % exceptionally low while at times even dropping below the pre-ADA rates—it quickly became clear to them that Bush’s legislation had either no or a negative effect.Footnote 5 What these critics focused on was that, in contrast to its 1964 predecessor, the ADA neither involves Affirmative Action nor is it accompanied by a federally funded mandate.Footnote 6 Whenever an employee, a restaurant customer, or a student feels discriminated on the grounds of their disability, filing a lawsuit is the only way to get the ADA enforced. Moreover, even a decade after passing the ADA, employers prevailed in more than 95 % of the cases, thus remaining “among the least successful classes of cases in the US federal courts”.Footnote 7 Whereas there remains disagreement over the causes that prevented improving the living conditions of disabled people—ranging from the ‘political culture’ among the administrators of justice to legislators, who never intended it to succeed in the first place—there is a consensus here that the ADA was a total failure.Footnote 8

As much as this criticism of the ADA strives to grant “insights into the connection between law and politics,” as Ruth Colker put it at the time, it entirely omits the crucial hinge that was connecting the two spheres: design.Footnote 9 More specifically, the critics of the ADA remain silent on the act’s historical intervention into federal code regulating the built environment in the United States. Until that point, each U.S. state had been developing their own governing standards for dealing with disability, thus creating a chaotic patchwork of often diverging regulations that was not only incredibly opaque, but also ripe with easily exploitable loopholes.Footnote 10 In fact, in finally rendering the ANSI A.117.1 design standard (from now on abbreviated as A.117.1) into a federal requirement not just for state-sponsored facilities, but for any place of public accommodation and commercial facility, the ADA was realizing what disability activists had lobbied for decades.Footnote 11

As I will argue in the following passages, it is the way in which the A.117.1 standard was coalescing political commitments and judicial regulation that enabled the economy of abandonment which many of the ADA’s fiercest critics have rightfully identified to be its primary accomplishment.Footnote 12 To do so, I will shed light at the discussions in the late 1970s that led to the drastic A.117.1 reform of 1980, giving disability code the shape that pretty much continues to the present day. The crucial point here is that this reform was not instituting a governing standard nor a regulating norm in the strict sense of the terms. Rather, the A.117.1 reform’s legacy consists in pioneering parametric gradients as “bureaucratic techniques”—transfiguring the world into a grid of scales and sliders, ultimately into an infinite set of numerical equations.Footnote 13

The question of this text is to ponder on how this parametric structure might have become structural, and how the revisioning of disability as “a vessel of knowledge”, as disability scholar Tanya Titchkosky has put it, was contributing to this process.Footnote 14 This question is informed by some of the recent revisioning around the ascendance of neoliberalism since the 1970s, most importantly its somewhat misleading association with ‘deregulation.’Footnote 15 In fact, far from being about deregulation, we get to witness the pioneering of new forms of (judicial) regulation, new ways in which formal rights are mobilized to eventually legitimize the privatization of public life and the accompanying evacuation of the welfare state.Footnote 16

Taking this as a case study in the making of a structure one might ascribe to neoliberalism, it appears to consist of a chain of grids grafted on top of each other, until that whereof one cannot calculate, thereof one must be silent.Footnote 17 In more concrete terms, and as we will see not fully by design, the parametric gradient ended up effectively silencing whatever non-consumerist, public solution there might have been to the regulation of the built environment, instead relegating the market to be the sole arbiter for the management of difference.

Bathrooms

As much as the legislative analysis of the ADA led its critics to realize that judicial inclusion was a double-edged sword, they somehow lost sight of what both reformers and activists had deemed to be central for the remaking of disability in the 1970s and 1980s: the built environment. This becomes even clearer when looking at the reformist aspirations around the bathroom, “a focal point of the drive to create a barrier-free community,” as the activists Raymond Lifchez and Barbara Winslow formulated in their widely discussed 1979 Design for Independent Living.Footnote 18

Now, it is crucial to contextualize their statement in two ways. The emphasis on the bathroom as the crucial site for change has had a long history in the projects of liberal reform. Not only was it the vantage point from where people like Adolf Loos were plotting world domination such as in his 1898 Plumbers: Baths and Kitchen Ranges at the Jubilee Exhibition. Moreover, it was at least since the mid-19th century one of the central architectural sites from where difference was managed, as “the emergence of gender-segregated public and commercial spaces such as schools, gymnasiums, and bathhouses was closely linked to the influx of immigrants.”Footnote 19 This management of difference mediated by the bathroom extended all the way into the 1920s and 1930s. As Siegfried Kracauer noted derisively in his review of the Neues Bauen exhibition in Stuttgart in 1927 seemingly in response to Loos, “the bathtubs don’t have to be ashamed of the dining room anymore.” For Kracauer, this new appreciation for bathrooms was one of the decisive symptoms of the burgeoning middle classes he would go on to formalize two years later on the pages of the same newspaper (subsequently published as The Salaried Masses, 1930). Similarly, Christina Cogdell argues in her study of functionalist designers like Henry Dreyfuss and inventions like his wall-suspended toilet that the bathroom was central to both class-mobility and racial segregation: It was simultaneously the site for the making of the middle-class—the general promise to design environments which may abolish social difference—while marking the very limits of inclusion, with the “filthiness of slums not only evidenced residents’ inferiority but also ensured their continued degeneracy.”Footnote 20 The bathroom thus appears as the vantage point from where to observe both the management of difference and its conflicts.

But there is a second important way one has to frame their statement, more proximate to the context they were operating in in the 1970s. Closely involved with the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley, a crucial hub of the disability rights activism of the decade, their statement expands on the experience of the famous nation-wide strike in 1977, a turning point both for activists and their bureaucratic counterparts.Footnote 21 Responding to Joseph Califano, freshly appointed Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), the protest was sparked by his proposal to water down parts of Richard Nixon’s 1973 Rehabilitation Act. This was not only infuriating the activists because Nixon’s legislation represented the first federal law against the discrimination of disability. Even worse was that disability rights activists were four years later still waiting for the Rehabilitation Act to be enforced.

The initial idea engineered by the Nixon administration had been to upend discrimination by making every federally funded construction compliant with the accessibility code (or else it wouldn’t receive the funds). The problem, however, was that when the legislation was enacted there was no federal accessibility code in place. So, when Califano proposed a pull-back by allowing more exemptions and waivers for the still non-existent accessibility code, the activists’ frustration clenched into an orchestrated protest, occupying the HEW’s headquarter and eight of its regional offices for almost the entire month of April 1977.Footnote 22 Califano quickly peddled back from his changes and the Carter administration launched a series of research projects which would attempt to write disability into regulatory code. In fact, as much as the built environment (specifically the bathroom) became the focal point of this research, following what many activists in the disability rights movement had pushed for, the subsequent regulations also created the framework for legitimizing the privatization of public services by transfiguring disabled people into consumers. Framed by the state and mediated by the market, we will thus witness the making of a parametric structure, which, by all accounts, cannot be reduced to the making of disability.Footnote 23

ANSI A117.1

One of the most ambitious and influential publications in the regulation of disability were Edward Steinfeld’s six reports which he directed between 1978 and 1979 as part of contract H-2200 awarded by the U.S. Department for Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Commissioned by Donna E. Shalala, a young and aspiring Assistant Secretary, it was part of a large-scale cooperation with Syracuse University which drastically revised both the methods to comprehend disability and the ways in which judicial code could regulate it. For Steinfeld, who had just become assistant professor after having worked as a research architect at the National Bureau of Standards, this cooperation was fortuitous as it had also led to his appointment as the Secretary of the Standards Committee for A117.1. This was a powerful position as basically everyone from activist to bureaucrat agreed at the time that reforming A117.1 was one of the crucial cornerstones to finally heave Nixon’s Rehabilitation Act from a political aspiration into a regulatory reality.

The standard had been first established in 1961 through a collaboration between Timothy Nugent, director of the Division of Rehabilitation-Education Services at the University of Illinois, the Veterans Administration and the Americans National Standard Institute. As disability historian Bess Williamson has highlighted, until its reform in 1980, A117.1 was steeped in the landscape of do-it-yourself America, with architectural interventions being both “rugged and improvisational” and a matter of “individual responsibility.”Footnote 24 Similarly, for bureaucrats like Steinfeld A117.1 posed a serious obstacle because it reduced disability to the usage of a wheelchair while its empirical basis was relying only on Nugent’s own campus experiences.Footnote 25 Moreover, the standard’s ambiguous language was further contributing to sow confusion among architects, engineers, and designers.

However, the central difficulty the reform had been facing for years was not so much a powerful old guard blocking any change. Rather, by the mid-1970s it was clear that the regulative landscape itself was in the midst of shifting, with a need to accommodate a radical skepticism towards any form of top-down state intervention. In fact, the writing of these regulations was happening in the middle of a crisis of governance, result of a complicated mix of factors such as the stagflation resulting from the immense costs of the Vietnam War, decreases in productivity, deindustrialization, and an increasingly militant elite, which ultimately “brought to halt the expansionary fiscal policies of the postwar Keynesian state” to replace it with a new monetary policy and a dramatic shift towards an austerity regime.Footnote 26

The pervasiveness of this skepticism towards top-down state intervention can be seen in much of the negotiations around the regulation of disability. As Edward Noakes, chair of the A117.1 committee, highlighted in 1974, it was crucial that “handicapped persons themselves are in charge.”Footnote 27 As much as Noakes formulated an ambition that was going to be rehearsed in the government-issued publications and conferences preceding the 1980 reform of A117.1, it was unclear how such a bottom-up regulation could be conceived.

Stalls

Faced with this problem of a bottom-up approach, for Steinfeld and some of his contemporaries merging science with design was going to solve what to others might have seemed like an unsurmountable contradiction.Footnote 28 As much as this is not the first time for disability and scientific inquiry to intersect, Steinfeld and his contemporaries diverged from their predecessors in their attempt to capture disability not as an inherent dysfunctionality but as a relationship between subjects and their environment.Footnote 29 Or, to use Steinfeld’s words, the “built environment communicates to those who use it. It speaks a kind of ‘silent language’ that transmits messages about appropriate behavior and meanings.”Footnote 30 The question now was how to build a system that could comprehend this language while filtering message from noise.

The starting point to understand this relation was anthropometry, the science of human measurement, most succinctly articulated in the second and longest volume of the series, Accessible Buildings for People with Walking and Reaching Limitations.Footnote 31 In concrete terms, these measurements were not just captured in elaborate tables and charts but also in a series of black and white photographs accompanying the twelve anthropometric studies and its roughly 200 disabled and non-disabled probands. The first photo is telling: An elderly white lady wearing a checked suite is photographed from the side, sitting on a shiny wheelchair, with her hand stretched to reach a square in a numbered grid (Fig. 1). Why is the grid so worn out? Is that the residue of 200 people pointing at it? What do the numbers on the right-side mean? And why are there two rows of numbers stacked on the bottom? In the context of the publication, these captionless photographs function to introduce the reader (Shalala and her bureaucratic peers) to the first chapter “Anthropometrics” as well as visualize the basic elements the research will consist of: The grid (visible in every single photo), an orchestrated series of movements, a retirement-aged white lady in a wheelchair (who will soon turn out to be the protagonist of the publication). In short, the image stages Steinfeld’s anthropometric science in action.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Woman stretching arm while sitting in a wheelchair, photographed part of Edward Steinfeld’s research into the relation between anthropometrics and disability. From: Edward Steinfeld, Accessible Buildings for People with Walking and Reaching Limitation, 1979, p. 16.

Full size image

This is noteworthy for a series of reasons. For one, Steinfeld’s employment of photography can be understood as the visual rhetoric of the “technical criteria” he set out to qualify through anthropometry in the first place.Footnote 32 Steinfeld follows here the path of another reformer, the industrial designer Niels Diffrient, who had first applied anthropometry to disability in his 1974 Humanscale 1/2/3: Manual to leave behind the fetishization of the average while creating a new unity of the subject along its seeming infinite variability.Footnote 33 Following this trajectory of favoring variation over average, Steinfeld organizes his study not on the principle of proportionate sampling as earlier anthropometric studies, but instead oversamples public housing residents, women, and old age to highlight what appeared to him as the most vulnerable part of the population. It is thus not a coincidence that the protagonist is a white elderly lady. In fact, the photographs allegorize the way Steinfeld conceives his regulatory efforts to operate at large.

A case in point are the pictures in the chapter “Toilet Stall” whose importance is already hinted at in the first volume: Highlighting the “major controversy among consumers, rehabilitation specialists and designers concerning the design of toilet stalls,” Steinfeld identifies regulation to be able to prevent such conflicts from arising, if done right.Footnote 34 The photos help to clarify: The same woman, wearing the same checked uniform, sits on a toilet, with handlebars installed in different heights and taped grids on the three walls she is surrounded by, again reaching out into one of the grids. That same photo is then shown again, this time placed with ten other images on one single page (Fig. 2). It now appears to document only the last step of a four-step movement, repeated in three differently sized stalls.

Fig. 2
figure 2

Probing handlebars with differently sized toilet stalls and different body metrics. Steinfeld, Accessible Buildings, p. 68.

Full size image

The point Steinfeld is arguing through these images, accompanied by graphs and tables, is more ambitious than it might seem. Enabled through his anthropometric experiments, he is the first one to show that it is not just the size of the stall that matters as his predecessors had argued. Rather, its accessibility is based on a variety of parameters which include the body’s height and weight as well as the handlebars which may, if installed correctly, compensate for stalls that might otherwise appear as too tight—one of the many findings that would make it into the 1980 revisions of A117.1. What might appear as a mere technical detail crystallizes the entire ambition of Steinfeld’s bottom-up regulation: Realizing the main parameters involved in a typical situation while ‘using’ the most marginal subject, then formalizing these parameters into a set of possibilities that can finally be translated into design solutions.

Though very much embedded in the regulatory discussions around disability, Steinfeld’s systematicity does appear to diverge here from his peers. This becomes most obvious when comparing the visual rhetoric to its predecessors in government-issued publications. Ronald Mace’s pioneering Illustrated Handbook (1974) is a case point, relying almost entirely on hand-drawn illustrations, an attempt to make the complicated code intelligible to architects and designers and transfigure it from a limitation into a creative opportunity.Footnote 35 This visual form is reproduced in the first federal publication on disability, the 1975 Barrier Free Site Design, whose illustrations almost resemble comics, interspersed with photographs of people with walking limitations venturing the environment. That is to say, Steinfeld’s predecessors are mostly limiting their inquiry into rehashing the relation between standards and solutions, thus lacking any systematic attempt to collect data for revising standards into a parametric gradient.

In fact, there was one publication competing with Steinfeld in terms of devising a new research frame specific to its subject: Lifchez and Winslow’s Design for Independent Living. Again, the visual rhetoric is telling: Employing an even larger amount of photographs, culminating in a “Catalogue” chapter with almost 100 images, they highlight a different viewpoint: dramatizing disabled people not in the gridded laboratory but in real life interactions, with the staging of an apparent intimacy between people on both sides of the camera, Lifchez and Winslow take on the position of the participant observer (Fig. 3). The chapter “How to Research” makes clear that this visual rhetoric is far from incidental. Located somewhere in between psychology and ethnography, they attempt to formulate “a series of techniques by which the designer can approximate, in increasingly accurate detail, the environmental needs his informants have expressed.”Footnote 36 These techniques consist of researching literature, observing the ‘informants’ in their native environment and creating a vast gestural archive through photography and video, to finally develop architectural models. That is, by the end of this four-step process, with disabled people giving their feedback each time the model comes closer to reality, the disabled informants have been transfigured into “user-clients.”Footnote 37 (Fig. 4). The currency of a successful collaboration can thus be understood as a unique, participatory dialogue in which the maintenance of trust is the key resource.

Fig. 3
figure 3

Social workers and disabled people shown to work together in the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley, California. Raymond Lifchez and Barbara Winslow, Design for Independent Living, 1979, p. 128.

Full size image
Fig. 4
figure 4

Steps involved in developing an architectural model from the bottom up, Lifchez/Winslow, Design for Independent Living, p. 146.

Full size image

This comparison between the bureaucrat and the activists appears to lend itself to a much-rehearsed narrative, most profoundly articulated in Henri-Jacques Stiker’s monumental A History of Disability. In this reading, the administrative reforms of the 1970s function as the final scenes of the grand narrative of enclosure:

“For good or ill, the disabled were exceptions and stood for exceptionality, alterity; now that they have become ordinary, they have to be returned to ordinary life, to ordinary work. […] This act will cause the disabled to disappear and with them all that is lacking, in order to assimilate them, drown them, dissolve them in the greater and single social whole. This desire for fusion, for confusion, is more serious, more submerged than an ideological strategy; it is an index, and an important one, of a slow slide toward a society that is less and less pluralist, more and more rigid.”Footnote 38

Written by bureaucrats like Steinfeld, the administrative reforms of the 1970s thus appear to usurp the last territories of difference, ultimately rendering disability into just another generic category. Now, Stiker sees the only viable alternative to this “violence of mimesis” in the anti-psychiatric movement that was forming around people like David Cooper, Erving Goffman, Jacques Lacan, and many others in the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 39 For him, this movement represents “an effort to forge an integration without easing difference, without wanting to efface or reduce the ‘abnormality’.”Footnote 40 That is, where administrators urge for total integration and the erasure of plurality, activists strive to afford difference.Footnote 41

Seen from afar, one could draw the relation between the activists’ reforms and Steinfeld’s bureaucratic procedures as such an opposition. Accordingly, Lifchez and Winslow refer to Goffman in their bibliography and rebuke any reform of standards:

“Individual solutions are commonly homemade when standard equipment is unsuitable. […] A great deal has been written about the dimensional requirements for an accessible bathroom; while the legally required standards are an improvement over the limited space typically provided, they do not take the wide variations in capabilities of disabled people into consideration.”Footnote 42

In fact, what their approach appears to suggest is that human variation is too broad to ever be captured. Standards thus won’t do because each solution always needs to be developed in a singular encounter.

Looking closer, however, the seemingly clear oppositions between difference (struggled over by activists) and unity (instituted by bureaucrats) dissolve. For one, a contextualization of the individual solutions in Design for an Independent Living would make clear that it is heavily indebted to the kind of stigmatizing do-it-yourself reform of the 1961 A117.1, the very problem of privatized responsibilization Steinfeld and his bureaucrat-peers tried to find a more public solution for.Footnote 43 Moreover, Steinfeld repeatedly references Goffman’s Stigma and Asylums, even using him to summarize the ambition of his research project arguing that environments “will not eliminate the stigma of disability. […] One cannot simply legislate away stigma, because such stigma arises out of interaction between people. We can, however, legislate the design of the physical environment and, by changing the condition under which people interact, we can eventually change the very quality of that interaction.”Footnote 44 In fact, the frontlines appear to run elsewhere, somewhere beyond the matrix of activists versus bureaucrats.

Consumer views

Steinfeld’s conclusive publication, Adaptable Dwellings, provides a hint here. Starting off with a rebuke of regulatory paternalism, he urges the reader to focus on the “disabled consumer view.”Footnote 45 This is a crucial, if seemingly slight, deviation: Whereas in Accessible Buildings Steinfeld addressed disability as an objective relationship between human and environment, he now introduces the consumer into the picture. Accordingly, his 200 probands get to test various adaptive devices for the bathroom not in terms of their functionality but in terms of their personal preference, transfiguring the analytic grid from one of objective measurement into one of individual choice. The results are somewhat disarming, Steinfeld admits that the overwhelming majority is not “particularly enthusiastic about visible adaptive design features.”Footnote 46 What disabled people as consumers appear to prefer are invisible solutions, seamless interventions that promote assimilation and effacement.

The crucial point about Steinfeld’s notion of adaptable dwellings is that it responds to this urge for invisibility, functioning as a loose arrangement of possibility which “provides a more responsive setting for exercising highly personal adaptations.”Footnote 47 In concrete terms, this means, among other things, that each housing unit would include a structurally reinforced wall in the bathroom, a wall-hung toilet, and a handheld shower. Installing handlebars could thus be easily realized since the wall was already reinforced. The reality of standards, embodied by the hidden reinforcement, is thus relegated to differences that do not mark distinctions.

Though Steinfeld is adamant in stressing that these adaptations would be very affordable since the overall structure was already in place, it is clear to him that his evidence is making him drift into a direction he did not intend to go: His adaptable solutions lay the groundwork for a system of inclusion for those who can afford it. That is to say, the major difference between Steinfeld and Lifchez, Winslow, and Stiker is not their disagreement over promoting individual solutions. Rather, Steinfeld anticipates much more readily that the retreat from governing standards would only defer the struggle for independence by rendering the market to be the arbiter of allocating accessibility as an always already scarce resource.

This internal conflict is most pronounced in volume four and five, The Estimated Cost of Accessible Buildings and A Cost–Benefit Analysis of Accessibility, which realize the methodological transition from the parametric anthropometry to consumer choices. Citing Gary Becker’s Human Capital (1975) and a collected volume on Benefit-Cost & Policy Analysis (1974) as resources in his bibliography, Steinfeld sets out to conduct the first large-scale study to systematically collect data on costs and benefits where previous publications had simply claimed that benefits will outweigh costs.Footnote 48 Over roughly 200 pages, he attempts to make a case for alterations in the built environment but quickly arrives at a series of dead-ends.

First, for public and non-commercial spaces such as college dormitories, public libraries, and town halls “no positive economic benefits could be calculated.”Footnote 49 This is not because Steinfeld sees costs to outweigh benefits but because he admits being simply incapable of computing the benefits of non-commercial activities such as reading or learning—a problem intrinsic to cost–benefit analysis. Moreover, in almost all instances “homebound services” appear to be much cheaper than actual renovations.Footnote 50 Ironically then, the cost–benefit analysis cannot compute the very buildings to which Nixon’s Rehabilitation Act applied to in the first place, namely the federally funded construction such as libraries and university campuses. And, even worse, (easily privatizable) services would in most cases appear to be cheaper than more structural changes to the built environment.

One may attest a certain tragedy here. The very idea to create an architectural landscape accessible to all variations of the human body provided the analytic grid by which accessibility was transfigured into a scarce resource. That is to say, as much as bureaucrats like Steinfeld and activists like Lifchez hoped to create a frame that would foster independence for disabled people, their thinking was circumscribed by a political climate that allowed no simple transcendence: With no possibility of a fiscal stimulus in sight (most succinctly conveyed in Steinfeld’s ubiquitous grid of the cost–benefit analysis) and a deep-seated internalized stigmatization driving for assimilation (best expressed in the consumer preferences) adaptability became the keyword preparing the specific forms of abandonment culminating in the ADA.

However, one must be careful not to simply consume these reforms by reducing them to what they would become. There is certainly a structural affinity between the parametric gradient of anthropometry and the cost–benefit analysis which, by design (its sheer incapability to calculate certain activities), would function to legitimize the evacuation and privatization of public amenities. But it would be wrong to simply take those two ‘grids’ to be identical. In fact, instituted as a response to Goffman’s famous critique of “total institutions,” the parametric gradient continues to raise the specter of being grafted on non-consumerist, public solutions.Footnote 51 Maybe then, rather than a matter of tragedy or linear progression into increasing enclosure, these publications serve as an example that the conflict between standards and variations, between norms and differences, is far from being resolved.