ABSTRACT
Special education schools arose in 1950s US from efforts to extend essential rights to a population gaining visibility in the post-World War II era. However, behind the seemingly progressive discourse of special education lay anxieties about upholding the idealized nuclear family and protecting a healthy national body. Through this architectural type, the cultural imaginary of disability in America was given material form. The Sven Lokrantz School in Los Angeles, California, designed by Sidney Eisenshtat in 1961, was envisioned as the crown jewel of the Los Angeles school district. The architectural style of mid-century Modernism offered the morphology through which Eisenshtat expressed ideals of rehabilitation and happiness. The open, airy classrooms took cues from the period’s progressive pedagogies and wellness ideologies, linking communion with the natural world with intellectual and physical development. In contrast, the innermost therapy room, placed at the center of the building, yet detached from the rest of the school, sought to study and contain disability in an institutional setting. Lokrantz oscillated between rehabilitation and containment, care and control, merging the imperative of universal human rights with underlying anxieties about concealing bodies that did not conform to convention.
