Banking on Postmodernism: Saving Stanley Tigerman’s Illinois Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (1978)

Abstract:In 2012, the Illinois Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped in Chicago, designed in the 1970s by US architect Stanley Tigerman (1930–2019), was converted into the flagship offices of a regional bank. During its heyday, Tigerman’s library was widely recognized as an innovative example of empathic design that engaged the sensory and mobility impairments of its intended patrons. In its conversion to a bank, however, contemporary architects sought to capitalize upon the library as an eccentric icon of mid-1970s postmodernism. In the process, they jettisoned many notable features of Tigerman’s original design. This essay endeavors to show what was lost in the conversion, since the bank chose to preserve that which is most superficially associated with histories of postmodernism while erasing the library’s material commitments to histories of disability. By recovering the original context and guiding principles behind the library’s design and execution, the essay asserts the importance of thinking about disability within practices of historic preservation while also restoring Tigerman’s library to its rightful place within historical assessments of late-twentieth-century urban architecture.