In the early twentieth century Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) contracted polio, which left him paralysed from the waist down. In search of a ‘cure’ he found the mineralised waters of Warm Springs in Georgia, US. In due course, in collaboration with his physiotherapist Helena Mahoney and his architect Henry J. Toombs, FDR founded a polio rehabilitation clinic that established a holistic definition of rehabilitation. In this article, I discuss the role played by Warm Springs in defining rehabilitation that involved physiotherapy and play, towards reconstituting a sense of self for a person with disabilities at a time when disability was less understood and accepted. I argue for the role that architecture played in treatment plans. The article derives from archive research and biographical research to layer the public and private intentions of FDR, describing an alternative reading of the project within FDR’s presidential timeline. I focus primarily on Warm Springs and its design at the time when FDR was directly involved in the project. However I also question the consequences of his celebrity on both knowledge of, and the legacy of, the project.

Since the American Deaf community’s formation in the early nineteenth century, ‘Deaf utopias’ have emerged across a wide range of tangible and fictional manifestations. These utopias have presented, on the one hand, as a fully accessible world in which deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals are integrated into the mainstream and, on the other, as a Deaf-centric world in which all or most inhabitants are Deaf and deafness constitutes the norm. These varied integrationist and separatist orientations have become spatially manifest, most notably, in the cultural narratives of ‘Eyeth’, John Jacobus Flournoy’s 1850s ‘Scheme for a Deaf Commonwealth’, Douglas Bullard’s 1986 novel Islay, and the signing community in Chilmark, Massachusetts, on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.

This article investigates the ‘up-island’ town of Chilmark as a site of cultural fantasy within the American Deaf community, positing its history as spatially expressive of enduring political ambivalences within American Deaf culture - namely, internal debates about the community’s desired cultural position relative to the mainstream. Chilmark’s most definitive spatial artefacts, including buildings in its town center, its transportation infrastructure, rural character, and isolated geography, are here analysed and subsequently compared with parallel Deaf utopias, aiming to situate Chilmark within a broader Deaf-utopian legacy.

Building on existing accounts of Chilmark’s signing community (Nora Ellen Groce, Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language, 1985) and literary analyses of ‘Deaf utopia’ (Kristen Harmon, ‘Beyond Islay: A Brief Literary History of Deaf Utopia and Dystopia’, 2023), as well as the architectural scholarship of Jeffrey Mansfield (‘The Architecture of Deafness’, 2017) and Hansel Bauman (‘DEAFSPACE: An Architecture Towards a More Livable and Sustainable World’, 2014), this article further elaborates on the politically ambiguous meaning of ‘Deaf space’ and ‘Deaf utopia’ by critically examining some of the Deaf community’s most prominent spatial artefacts.

This article develops within the ‘design model’ of neurodiversity that explores how the creative professions have aligned their work with and in contrast to the established ‘medical’ and ‘social models’ in critical disability scholarship. Architects have frequently encountered the limits of dementia-friendly design principles when engaging with them in practice. Buro Kade Architects’ De Hogeweyk project in Weesp, the Netherlands (2008-09), which falsifies everyday life in a small-town environment that masks the mechanisms of surveillance of its older residents, has also raised ethical questions. Such precedents have driven architects such as Níall McLaughlin and Yeoryia Manolopoulou to explore ways of working directly with people living with the condition in the Alzheimer’s Respite Centre in Dublin, Ireland (2009). This experience has also inspired Manolopoulou and McLaughlin to develop collaborative practices of drawing towards more inclusive design processes in co-producing architecture, which have so far been shared only with a limited number of neurotypical peers. Even in such creative approaches, however, the pervasive perception of dementia as a form of deficit frequently persists. This seems to be challenged by the way that architecture is deployed in Florian Zeller’s The Father, performed on stage (2012) and turned into a feature film (2020). Despite being a different form of creative output, Zeller’s staging can expand the imagination of professional architects regarding their creative engagement with dementia. Through its cultural agency, the affective porosity of architecture in The Father plays a positive role in foregrounding and validating the lived experience of people living with this condition by rendering it relatable to neurotypical audiences. If relatability is a first step towards empathy, then architecture can also drive the allyship that counters othering. In so doing, it also aids in expanding difficult discussions around questions of citizenship and political representation of neurodiverse constituencies.