The lecture takes place at The First Congregational United Church of Christ, Second Floor, 945 G Street NW, Washington, DC. Reservations are not required. $10.00 for Latrobe Chapter members, student members (full time) free with ID, $15.00 for non-members.

Enlightenment-era France witnessed the establishment of the first deaf and blind schools in world history – the Institute for Deaf-Mutes, founded in 1760, and the Institute for Blind Youth, founded in 1784. During the French Revolution of 1789, the Constituent Assembly nationalized both schools, assigning the duty of disability education to the state. From being housed in various government-expropriated properties, the two institutions underwent comprehensive renovation and reconstruction projects between the 1820s and 1840s to emerge as modern educational environments. Although commissioned to well-known civic architects of the period, Antoine-Marie Peyre and Pierre Philippon, these projects remain overlooked in the history of modern architecture and design. In an era when public schools were struggling to accommodate modern pedagogical needs in the outdated structures of former monasteries and convents, the renovated blind and deaf institutes showcased an incipient modernism. Incorporating principles of nature, ventilation, hygiene, and movement, they actualized model pedagogical environments aspired to by contemporaneous institutions for “regular” students. This lecture will examine the parallel architectural histories of the blind and deaf institutes, arguing that not only were they at the forefront of contemporary discourses on education and hygiene, but that they also functioned as key sites for working through the social and political project of citizenship.

Sun-Young Park is Assistant Professor of History and Art History at George Mason University. She is a scholar of 19th-century France who studies the intersections of architectural, urban, and medical history. She is the author of Ideals of the Body: Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris (published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2018), and is currently working on a new book project titled The Architecture of Disability in Modern France. Dr. Park received her PhD from Harvard University.