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Freedom and the Cage: Modern Architecture and Psychiatry in Central Europe, 1890–1914
Ort / Verlag
Penn State University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2017
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Alma/SFX Local Collection
Beschreibungen/Notizen
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.