Description
Book SynopsisExplores 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.
Trade Review“Topp shows how the interactions between architects and psychiatrists were materialized and expressed the formal and ideological developments of a contemporary architectural milieu that included Austrian architect Otto Wagner. Rounding out the book are careful analyses of the architectural forms and layouts of the complexes.”
—L. E. Carranza Choice
“Freedom and the Cage serves as an excellent model for research on institutions beyond hospitals, such as schools, prisons, convents, summer camps, day care centers, dormitories, long-term residential care facilities, and any other typologies that comprise multiple buildings and complex, mixed functions designed to keep people in. The book’s lessons come from broad and clear arguments about institutional design: that building design is often a critique of past buildings, propelling the evolution of the building type; that specialized buildings often work in conversation with each other, almost as if they were participating in an architectural debate; that architecture holds tremendous power in setting the ‘impression’ of how a place works, even from the curb or from the air; and, perhaps most important, that institutional architecture controls its users but not its historians.”
—Annmarie Adams Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians
“Scholars interested in the history of asylums in particular and historians of psychiatry more generally will draw inspiration from Freedom and the Cage. Throughout the book, Topp successfully uncovers the multilayered nature of psychiatric architecture, thereby raising questions about how hospital design played out in other societies, both European and non-European.”
—Sebastiaan Broere Isis: Journal of the History of Science Society
“An impressive and memorable text. . . . The book succeeds in bringing the asylum as a building type into full view, and reinforces the importance of social control as a critical lens for the analysis of modern architecture.”
—Kimberly Elman Zarecor Planning Perspectives
“Leslie Topp has written an important and impeccably researched corrective to widespread assumptions about the relationship between space and power in the design of asylums and in architecture more generally. Her investigation of the villa-type asylum and its relationship to regional identity in the final years of the Habsburg empire deserves to be read by all those interested in turn-of-the-century modern architecture.”
—Kathleen James-Chakraborty,author of Architecture since 1400
“The histories presented in Freedom and the Cage . . . are all the more timely as Central European societies consider the reform of mental health care and the role that institutional hospitals may continue to have into the 21st century.”
—Social History of Medicine
Table of ContentsContents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Free Institution
2 Regions, Nationalism, and the Asylum as a Political Project
3 “A White City Shimmering”: The Rhetorical Heightening of Control
4 Utopia in Process in Vienna’s Hinterland
5 Spaces
6 Boundaries
Conclusions and Proposals
Appendix: New Psychiatric Hospitals Built in the Habsburg Empire After 1898
Notes
Bibliography
Index
