Scents of Sanity & the Architecture of Reassurance: restoring the asylum

(Abstract)

“Good architecture can make a difference ... when the style and content of an institution are

mutually supporting, they can produce the Architectural Placebo.”

 - Charles Jencks

Can the manipulative potential of architecture be used to restore sanity and provide an architecture of reassurance? Can architecture really make a difference? When considered as part of the wider environment, architecture could act as a kind of placebo –  a placebo being something that, while not an active drug, nonetheless has real, measurable effects. This is no ‘fake’ cure.

‘This place will make you better.’ Not from an environmental determinist viewpoint by affecting behaviour, but by influencing your experience to create a sense of reassurance, successfully convincing you that ‘everything will be okay here’. The belief effect.

Mental healthcare architecture has historically been about security and surveillance rather than cure. While modern designs now focus on therapy, security and surveillance is still the underlying rationale for many design decisions. Of all healthcare areas, mental health has the most potential to be influenced by the architecture. Research shows environment, or therapeutic milieu, has a far greater impact on psychiatric illness than other disorders.

The former Kingseat Hospital site, abandoned and infamous for historical mistreatment and hauntings, is the test case for this thesis. The semi-rural setting embraces the original intent of Kingseat as a refuge for patients, away from unhealthy city living. A place to dwell and restore health. The design intervention houses the ‘lost’ population of psychiatric patients with inadequate community support and for whom there is often no architecture, only the streets or sometimes an acute psychiatric ward; many psychiatric disorders are exacerbated by a sense of homelessness.

This prescription for mental health used the theoretical frameworks of phenomenology, particularly Heidegger’s exploration of dwelling, evidence-based design, applied environmental psychology and salutogenics. These were then combined within an holistic framework to create the desired atmosphere of reassurance. Thought experiments in the form of fictional patient narratives formed a significant design tool for exploring experiential effects of design changes.

The design outcome embodies the careful balance of science (evidence-based design, salutogenic theory and neuroscience) with the more intuitive magic of atmosphere and sensory design to produce an architecture of reassurance to restore sanity and well being.