The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States (Architecture, Landscape and Amer Culture) (Paperback)

by Carla Yanni (Author)
Key Phrases: associated dormitories, asylum builders, airing courts, Transforming the Treatment, Breaking Down, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

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.

 

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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1 edition (April 12, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816649405
• ISBN-13: 978-0816649402
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #183,681 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful Scholarship, June 30, 2007

By	Anne Cotterill (Rolla, MO USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The Architecture of Madness is a thoughtful, important, and visually stunning book, which, for the first time, studies the relations between architecture and theories of treating the insane in public institutions in nineteenth-century America. The author is an architecture historian who is interested in relations among architecture, science, and social and cultural history and whose wide-ranging intellect is drawn to topics that open up the importance of architecture within the intellectual culture of early modernity. Like her previous book, Nature's Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display, this new volume is beautifully produced with text and accompanying drawings, graphics, and photography arranged on spacious, larger-than-usual pages which are inviting to the eye and also inviting to be read. Moreover, what characterizes this book, as it characterized Nature's Museums, is the author's clear, exact, highly readable prose. Yanni is a first-rate scholar and writes precisely, but she wears her learning lightly, eschews scholarly jargon. The extensive bibliography and notes are there, at the back, but this is a book designed to interest general reader and scholar alike--anyone who wants to know more about the movement for moral treatment of the mentally ill and the effect on institutional care of early ideas of environmental determinism. Her care and humility as a scholar are evident in what she perceives as the "respectful distance" her subject required: "if I have not performed feats of scholarly acrobatics, that is intentional, and, I believe, appropriate, for this is a book about places that witnessed a great deal of suffering." Finally, one of the most poignant observations Yanni makes in the Introduction concerns a critical disjunction between science and architecture that effected the buildings of her study as the nineteenth century ended. Ideas about care had begun to change: "In many ways, these buildings gave physical form, however, imperfect, to the ideals of their makers. But psychiatry moved on, and by the middle of the twentieth century, Victorian buildings had no medical credibility....This desperate obsolescence is one of the central issues in architecture and science." Her perception captures the delicate balance, in retrospect, of the moment Yanni has chosen to explore, when architecture and science were drawn to each other so fruitfully.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States, June 25, 2007

By	Susan Solomon - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Carla Yanni's book will be the classic text on
19th century insane asylums. She has done
a masterful job of blending meticulous research
and superb analysis with well crafted writing.
Yanni, who is well versed in the history of architecture
and the history of science, tells a compelling,
accessible story.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I agree with sigdragon , August 12, 2007

By	L. Osborn (United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States (Architecture, Landscape and Amer Culture) (Hardcover)

I tend to agree with you sigdragon. Most authors outside of the field who write on this topic do not do the proper research on mental illness/psychology/psychiatry. The reader must be very cautious and hesitant to accept knowledge from a writer who may be writing in their field but incorporating vast data from outside of their field. It is difficult to find well researched and accurate books on history/treatment of mental illness but there are some out there. Two come to mind: "The Art of Asylum Keeping: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Origins of American Psychiatry" by Nancy Tomes. Also "Asylum: A Mid-Century Madhouse and Its Lessons about Our Mentally Ill Today" by Enoch Callaway, who is very well versed in the field. I am still waiting for my copy of the latter to arrive, so hopefully I can post a review on it by the end of the month. Cheers