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The Architecture of Madness Insane Asylums in the United States Carla Yanni PRESS |
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$82.50 cloth |
A fascinating tour through nineteenth-century America’s asylums. Elaborately conceived, grandly constructed insane asylums—ranging in appearance from classical temples to Gothic castles—were once a common sight looming on the outskirts of American towns and cities. Many of these buildings were razed long ago, and those that remain stand as grim reminders of an often cruel system. For much of the nineteenth century, however, these asylums epitomized the widely held belief among doctors and social reformers that insanity was a curable disease and that environment—architecture in particular—was the most effective means of treatment. In The Architecture of Madness, Carla Yanni tells a compelling story of therapeutic design, from America’s earliest purpose—built institutions for the insane to the asylum construction frenzy in the second half of the century. At the center of Yanni’s inquiry is Dr. Thomas Kirkbride, a Pennsylvania-born Quaker, who in the 1840s devised a novel way to house the mentally diseased that emphasized segregation by severity of illness, ease of treatment and surveillance, and ventilation. After the Civil War, American architects designed Kirkbride-plan hospitals across the country. Before the end of the century, interest in the Kirkbride plan had begun to decline. Many of the asylums had deteriorated into human warehouses, strengthening arguments against the monolithic structures advocated by Kirkbride. At the same time, the medical profession began embracing a more neurological approach to mental disease that considered architecture as largely irrelevant to its treatment. Generously illustrated, The Architecture of Madness is a fresh and original look at the American medical establishment’s century-long preoccupation with therapeutic architecture as a way to cure social ills. “Yanni has produced a fascinating and visually rich survey of this strange territory. Yanni is very successful at linking together architecture and mental medicine.” —Times Literary Supplement “This is a well-written, well-illustrated, and thoroughly fascinating study. A serious and useful study of a time when architecture was thought to shape human behavior.” —Studies in American Culture “Sometimes we run across books that lure us in with simple, straightforward weirdness. Put up your horror novel and read this deal. Spooky and real.” —Blueridge Business Journal “The book makes a valuable contribution to architectural history. Yanni offers valuable comparisons between asylum architecture and forms that more closely approximate the social function of asylums: hospitals and colleges. She also brings a refreshing emphasis on space to medical history, showing, for example, how patients’ ‘progress’ from spatial margin to spatial center—or vice versa—shaped their experiences. ” —The Annals of Iowa “Yanni weaves together the fascinating tale of architecture and psychiatry with readable prose liberally illustrated with historic photographs, plans, and drawings.” —Choice “The focus of Yanni’s hisotry, The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States, is on the 19th-century American asylum, and she does a marvelous job describing and illustrating the buildings themselves and some of the many factors that entered into these buildings’ origins, construction, and decline.” —PsycCRITIQUES “In a well-wrought book, Carla Yanni provides a persuasive overview of the age of the insane asylum.” —American Historical Review Carla Yanni is associate professor of art history at Rutgers University and the author of Nature’s Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display. 256 pages | 90 halftones, 30 line art | 8 1⁄2 x 11 | 2007 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments 1. Transforming the Treatment: Architecture and Moral Management Conclusion: The Changing Spaces of Mental Illness |
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$27.50 paper