Book ID: CBB565460951

Freedom and the Cage: Modern Architecture and Psychiatry in Central Europe, 1890–1914 (2017)

unapi

Topp, Leslie Elizabeth (Author)


Pennsylvania State University Press


Publication Date: 2017
Physical Details: 256 pages
Language: English

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.

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Reviewed By

Review Sarah Marks (2019) Review of "Freedom and the Cage: Modern Architecture and Psychiatry in Central Europe, 1890–1914". Social History of Medicine (pp. 424-426). unapi

Review Ebba Högström (2018) Review of "Freedom and the Cage: Modern Architecture and Psychiatry in Central Europe, 1890–1914". Bulletin of the History of Medicine (pp. 559-561). unapi

Review Sebastiaan Broere (2018) Review of "Freedom and the Cage: Modern Architecture and Psychiatry in Central Europe, 1890–1914". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 202-203). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB565460951/

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Authors & Contributors
Silvano, Giovanni
Topp, Leslie Elizabeth
Faschi, Viviana
Allmond, Gillian
Valacchi, Maria Luisa
Gaspari, Fiora
Concepts
Psychiatric hospitals
Psychiatry
Hospitals and clinics
Mental disorders and diseases
Medicine
Medicine and politics
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
20th century
20th century, early
17th century
Places
Australia
France
England
United States
Italy
Paris (France)
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