Description
Book SynopsisLying in the Dark Room: Architectures of British Maternity returns to and reflects on the spatial and architectural experience of childbirth, through both a critical history of maternity spaces and a creative exploration of those we use today.
Where conventional architectural histories objectify buildings (in parallel with the objectification of the maternal body), the bookâin the mode of creative practice researchâpresents a creative-critical autotheory of the architecture of lying-in. It uses feminist, subjective modes of thinking that travel across disciplines, registers and arguments. The book assesses the transformation of maternity spacesâfrom the female bedchamber of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century marital homes, to the lying-in hospitals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries purposely built by man-midwives, to the late twentieth-century spaces of home and the modern hospital maternity wingâand the parallel shifts in maternal practices. The spac
Table of Contents
1. The Dark and Airless Room 2. The Man-Midwife Enters 3. Building Hospitals, Building Bodies: The Hospital for Lying-In 4. Commonplaces—Species of Maternal Spaces
