Freedom and the Cage
Modern Architecture and Psychiatry in Central Europe, 1890–1914
Seiten
2017
Pennsylvania State University Press (Verlag)
978-0-271-07710-9 (ISBN)
Pennsylvania State University Press (Verlag)
978-0-271-07710-9 (ISBN)
Explores the issues surrounding the architectural design of insane asylums in the late nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire, including the paradox of maximizing individual freedom within an environment of involuntary confinement.
Spurred by ideals of individual liberty that took hold in the Western world in the late nineteenth century, psychiatrists and public officials sought to reinvent asylums as large-scale, totally designed institutions that offered a level of freedom and normality impossible in the outside world. This volume explores the “caged freedom” that this new psychiatric ethos represented by analyzing seven such buildings established in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy between the late 1890s and World War I.
In the last two decades of the Habsburg Empire, architects of asylums began to abandon traditional corridor-based plans in favor of looser formations of connected villas, echoing through design the urban- and freedom-oriented impulse of the progressive architecture of the time. Leslie Topp considers the paradoxical position of designs that promoted an illusion of freedom even as they exercised careful social and spatial control over patients. In addition to discussing the physical and social aspects of these institutions, Topp shows how the commissioned buildings were symptomatic of larger cultural changes and of the modern asylum’s straining against its ideological anchorage in a premodern past of “unenlightened” restraint on human liberty.
Working at the intersection of the history of architecture and the history of psychiatry, Freedom and the Cage broadens our understanding of the complexity and fluidity of modern architecture’s engagement with the state, with social and medical projects, and with mental health, psychiatry, and psychology.
Spurred by ideals of individual liberty that took hold in the Western world in the late nineteenth century, psychiatrists and public officials sought to reinvent asylums as large-scale, totally designed institutions that offered a level of freedom and normality impossible in the outside world. This volume explores the “caged freedom” that this new psychiatric ethos represented by analyzing seven such buildings established in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy between the late 1890s and World War I.
In the last two decades of the Habsburg Empire, architects of asylums began to abandon traditional corridor-based plans in favor of looser formations of connected villas, echoing through design the urban- and freedom-oriented impulse of the progressive architecture of the time. Leslie Topp considers the paradoxical position of designs that promoted an illusion of freedom even as they exercised careful social and spatial control over patients. In addition to discussing the physical and social aspects of these institutions, Topp shows how the commissioned buildings were symptomatic of larger cultural changes and of the modern asylum’s straining against its ideological anchorage in a premodern past of “unenlightened” restraint on human liberty.
Working at the intersection of the history of architecture and the history of psychiatry, Freedom and the Cage broadens our understanding of the complexity and fluidity of modern architecture’s engagement with the state, with social and medical projects, and with mental health, psychiatry, and psychology.
Leslie Topp is Senior Lecturer in the History of Architecture at Birkbeck, University of London, and the author of Architecture and Truth in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1The Free Institution
2Regions, Nationalism, and the Asylum as a Political Project
3“A White City Shimmering”: The Rhetorical Heightening of Control
4Utopia in Process in Vienna’s Hinterland
5Spaces
6Boundaries
Conclusions and Proposals
Appendix: New Psychiatric Hospitals Built in the Habsburg Empire After 1898
Notes
Bibliography
Index
| Erscheinungsdatum | 19.04.2017 |
|---|---|
| Reihe/Serie | Buildings, Landscapes, and Societies |
| Zusatzinfo | 1 Maps; 3 Halftones, color; 114 Halftones, black and white |
| Verlagsort | University Park |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 229 x 254 mm |
| Gewicht | 1315 g |
| Themenwelt | Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile |
| Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918) | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte | |
| Studium ► Querschnittsbereiche ► Geschichte / Ethik der Medizin | |
| Technik ► Architektur | |
| ISBN-10 | 0-271-07710-7 / 0271077107 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-271-07710-9 / 9780271077109 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
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Buch | Hardcover (2024)
C.H.Beck (Verlag)
CHF 47,60
