In 2021, Deaf writer Fiona Murphy published The Shape of Sound, an account of her growing awareness of her deaf sensibility and Deaf self. Over the years, I have found the book a helpful textual companion, cutting through the habitual isolation I feel as someone who was not raised with a Deaf community. 

Most often, however, I have haunted the corridors of Murphy’s book relating to architecture. Murphy, who trained as a physiotherapist, dwells on the permeability of bodies and the world, and how this is reflected in the roots of the English language. 

The tibia (our shinbone), for example, means ‘pipe’ or ‘flute’, and these instruments were once made from bone. ‘Once we know the origins of these words, the boundaries between our bodies and the world becomes permeable’, Muphy observes. She comments on the way we refer to buildings as having good bones, or how a house has a heart, or how roads are arteries.