Hide and speak: Childhood deafness, spatial visions, and cultural ideologies in Donaldson’s Hospital, Edinburgh

In this article, I consider the planning, construction, and operation of Donaldson’s Hospital, an early purpose-built residential school for deaf (and hearing) children in Edinburgh. I propose that, from the initial concerted efforts to provide formal deaf education, space was at the centre of debates about what it meant to be a child who does not hear. I show that the architecture of deaf teaching was fiercely contested by educators, legislators, government organisations, financial donors - in other words by those who had the power to organise bodies in space. In doing so, I highlight the shifting cultural understandings of deafness in the second half of the nineteenth century and trace how these became spatial determinants of building designs and architectural discourse. As such, I argue that architecture was not merely a reactionary receptor of ideological currents but that individual buildings actively produced, expressed, and opposed cultural understandings of deafness at the time.