[David Gissen’s] case studies offer inspiration for design practice, not so much as a how-to guide, but as a distilled and compact set of provocations for thinking otherwise. […]
Disability, as a lens for understanding, points to the stubborn truth of a universal fragile existence, to the adaptive corpus at work in forming culture and politics and the built environment. This body, and this one, and that one—each with shifting and changing needs—add up to a whole demography of disability made visible, if aided by a curious, indeterminate, and open-handed historian’s approach. […]
… The thought that disability invites is the most ordinary but vital combination of imagination and pragmatism. Code compliance is a legal requirement and valuable as such, necessary for enforcing access. But it’s not a substitute for imagination and commitment, for prototyping with lively disability histories in mind. The precedents are out there, waiting to be rethought, revivified for the present day. …
… a very “aesthetics of infirmity,” a poetics of the body, and nature, and the built environment with needfulness preserved, built in to the future.