Hamraie’s Building Access reframes Universal Design not as a neutral doctrine of benevolent inclusion, but as a contested historical formation in which architecture, disability politics, scientific expertise and citizenship are mutually produced. The book’s central question—“who counts as everyone and how do designers know?”—exposes the instability of Universal Design’s apparently generous promise: to design for all. Rather than accepting accessibility as a self-evident good, Hamraie develops critical access studies to examine the epistemological conditions through which some bodies become legible as users while others remain misfits within the built environment. The Capitol Crawl of 1990 functions as a decisive case study: disabled activists, leaving wheelchairs and crutches behind to crawl up the steps of the U.S. Capitol, transformed architectural exclusion into embodied critique, demonstrating that stairs were not inert structures but material rhetorics of citizenship, power and exclusion. Hamraie argues that the post-ADA celebration of access often conceals continuing inequalities by treating legal recognition as if it had already solved spatial discrimination. Against this narrative, the text shows that access is produced through access-knowledge: historically situated practices of measuring, imagining, standardising and designing bodies. Universal Design therefore emerges from contradictory inheritances: rehabilitation science, ergonomic measurement, civil rights activism, architectural expertise and crip technoscience. Its language of “everyone” can expand accessibility, yet it can also erase disability when inclusion is marketed as merely “good design” for universal consumers. The book’s most significant contribution is to insist that design is never simply technical; it is a politics of knowing-making, where assumptions about normality, productivity, race, gender, age and disability become embedded in walls, stairs, ramps, standards and signs. Consequently, genuine access requires more than compliance or retrofitting: it demands accountability to the histories, bodies and forms of knowledge that conventional design has excluded.