Physiotherapy and play: The role of swimming pools in FDR’s vision of polio rehabilitation at Warm Springs

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.