Louis Philip Trutter Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

months old, but was a preemie and they were very proud of the hospital keepiqg this child
except the eyeballs and stuff hadn't developed and mentally handicapped. Sha's still alive.
they started. ..there really wasn't any place that they could send her for blind pnd other
handicaps, mentally and. . .
Q. How did you learn to build a school or building for such handicapped?
A. That was. ..there was nothing to research. One had never been built befort. There was/ one in
England that had been an addition on some kind of an old building there, a do+rutory type Qf
building, and I think there was another one up in Sweden someplace, a very s
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all thing, and none
of them had ever built anything like this. They wanted a "cottage system" th 's out there. I
don't really know anything about it. It's built on a "cottage" theme so that th y were more like
home than being in an institution, and there'd be a. ..
Q. Did they dictate what they wanted rather than you, . .?
A. They dictated what they wanted to do and this gal from England came ov
of good points, For instance to be sure that the glass above child height is
have any sharp edges and make it easy for the attendants, I mean when it
a bath, raise the bathtubs up off the floor so that they don't have to lean
(demonstrates) to lay the kids down in the bathtub, and since so many
and stuff, why we put sits baths in for them and if they got all messed
and turn the sits bath and just sit them in there.
Q. Had they designed the sits-bath by then?
A. Oh yeah. Sits-bath. In all the years I was an architect, I never once installid a bidet. i
(Chuckle) Some place to wash your feet or put your flowers or something lik4 that ( chucde.) I
don't know. But that's. . .
Q. Big wide halls for wheel chairs?
A. They didn't have any wheel chairs there. There were wide hallways, but the main thing was
we had twelve kids to a cottage, this was the cottage system, and with classro~ms. And I hadn't
thought of it but some of these kids could see light and so on. Most of them wre mentally
handicapped too and in the corridors they could ride bicycles and roller skate and stuff and they
do, from cottages to cottages, and we put the cottages like this and so on and hen you have a
corridor that ties them together and here's a fence that ties them off and then they could have a
play yard out here and drinking fountains in the yards. Forty feet apart or somctbing like that.
They've added to it a lot since I did it, but I made the master plan. PCople come from all over the
world to see the damn thing.
Q. I ought to go over to see it myself?
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