The difficult history of buildings for mental disorder

Whether they were called asylums, retreats or mental hospitals, buildings for treating and containing people deemed to have mental disorders have a difficult history. Sharing common roots with prison architecture, institutions built by the state often emphasised security and austerity, while masking these features with architectural imagery that spoke of enlightenment and even freedom. A more therapeutic impulse can be seen in smaller facilities designed by and for grass-roots groups. This talk explores the tensions in psychiatric architecture with reference to a range of examples across space and time.