Open AccessThe Drifting Language of Architectural Accessibility in Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris
Author(s) -
Essaka Joshua
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
disability studies quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2159-8371
pISSN - 1041-5718
DOI - 10.18061/dsq.v31i3.1677
Subject(s) - symbol (formal) , normative , beauty , architecture , function (biology) , aesthetics , semantics (computer science) , art , feature (linguistics) , linguistics , art history , sociology , visual arts , philosophy , computer science , epistemology , evolutionary biology , biology , programming language
Buildings often employ visual and spatial rhetorics that both persuade us of their function and determine personal functionality. Architectural language is a defining feature of disability in Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and a universally accessible language. In emphasizing the synecdochic relationship between gothic buildings and the disabled body, Hugo demonstrates that he is not only a pioneer in urban and architectural semantics, but that he also understands the complex symbolic relationship between architecture and the disabled body. Defining beauty as atypicality, through the gothic aesthetic, Hugo presents Notre Dame Cathedral as a uniquely drifting symbol (with its multiple meanings, its transitional status and its cultural miscegenation) with a revelatory function: it expresses disability as normative.