The manipulation by designers of asylums of the visual appearance of these buildings was used to create a particular influence on a patients mental state. In the nineteenth century this included creating an impression of middle class domestic normality via seemingly small gestures - hanging pictures on the walls, using comfortable furnishings. The thought was that this could, through a version of osmosis, bring 'insane residents back to reason', based on the Quaker idea of mind-body unity. Other deceptions included the visual impression that residents were not confined at all by providing open views of the countryside and designing the layout like a rural village or suburban residential neighbourhood.
German alienist* Friedrich Wilhelm Roller saw the asylum as an 'architecture of visual transparency', to be created through total supervision and spatial organisation. With these things in place, the asylum could function as a giant surveillance system, extricating madness by bringing it into plain view, and exposing it to those committed to its cure...however, this idea was shown as ineffective after exposure of covert violence against the residents by nursing staff (2).
The purpose of surveillance then shifted from the reform of the patient through close long term observation to the classification of disease characteristics through short term observation made possible by Emil Kraepelin's changes to asylums in which increased the scale of scrutiny and surveillance under the guise of scientific symptom classification (3).
To be finished....(surveillance)
(1) Moran, James and Leslie Topp, "Introduction. Interpreting Psychiatric Spaces." In Madness, Architecture and the Built Environment. Psychiatric Spaces in Historical Context, edited by Leslie Topp, James E. Moran and Jonathan Andrews, 1-16. New York: Routledge, 2007.
(2) Sammet, Kai, "Controlling Space, Transforming Visibility: Psychiatrists, Nursing Staff, Violence, and the Case of Haematoma Auris in German Psychiatry c. 1830 to 1870." In Madness, Architecture and the Built Environment. Psychiatric Spaces in Historical Context, edited by Leslie Topp, James E. Moran and Jonathan Andrews, 287-304. New York: Routledge, 2007.
(3) Engstrom, Eric J, "Placing Psychiatric Practices: on the Spatial Configurations and Contests of Professional Labour in Late-Nineteenth Century Germany." In Madness, Architecture and the Built Environment. Psychiatric Spaces in Historical Context, edited by Leslie Topp, James E. Moran and Jonathan Andrews, 63-82. New York: Routledge, 2007.
No comments:
Post a Comment