#31 Mental health - what does architecture have to do with it?
The difficult history of buildings for mental disorder
Why the talk is inspiring?
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.
12th November, 7 pm, at National Gallery of Art
2024
Speaker
Leslie Topp
How the speaker is exceptional?
Leslie Topp has published widely on the links between architecture and psychiatry, with a specific emphasis on Central Europe around 1900, and on Britain and North America in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She was Professor of Architectural History at Birkbeck, University of London, until 2023, and is currently retraining as an immigration lawyer.
RECOMMENDS TO READ
Freedom and the Cage: Modern Architecture and Psychiatry in Central Europe, 1890-1914
Leslie Topp
Why the book is worth reading?
Freedom and the Cage explores how modern architecture, politics and psychiatry interacted in Vienna and the Habsburg Empire in the years around 1900, with a focus on seven large psychiatric complexes designed by architects such as Otto Wagner and Hubert Gessner.
