Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Carla Yanni's history of mental assylums in the United States is well-written and full of great information on the subject. The text is academic enough to effectively tie architecture, history, and psychological theory together neatly without becoming cumbersome. The book also contains excellent illustrations and photographs which really help bring the subject to life.

My only complaint with the book is that it left me wanting more. I would like to have seen more interior photographs on some of the surviving buildings as they are today (like those you can find at [...]). I also wish the author had devoted a little space to Danvers State Hospital, the fascinating building best known from the film "Session 9." There were also a number of cases where the floor plans for various buildings either lacked the key that explained what each room was, or where the key was effectively too small to read.

That said, I found this book to be a very good source of detailed information about the history and philosophy of assylums in the US.

I thought this item was going to be a book primarily concentrating on the architectural study of these buildings. Given the title of the book, one is being led to believe that this would be so. Therefore it was very surprising, and disappointing, to see no colour photographs at all included, and even more surprising and disappointing to find no mention of, or pictures featuring the Danvers State Mental Hospital, which was one of the most impressive and classic examples of Kirkbride's vision. Also, some of the plans shown, do not seem to have precise information and so did not seem complete.

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.

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.

This is a fascinating read for anyone hyper-focused on the history of mental institution architecture. Although it was not nearly as mired in "academic speak" as most books authored by professor types, it might be a little heavy for someone with only a casual interest in the topic. Yanni sticks to her topic and is to the point. I couldn't get enough. I was actually sorry to get to the end of the book. Ms. Yanni's writing was refreshingly easy to digest and I appreciate knowing her research is the real deal -- nice and solid without a bunch of jive filler.

This is a visually fascinating account on American asylums. I have to say that I found the imagery more interesting than the scholarly pursuits of the author. Overall the scope of the book never became clear to me. I was confused whether this was supposed to be an architectural study, or more of an overview of the asylum system in general, or somewhere in between.

The book is a visual treat, and it features numerous pictures of old asylum plans, and photos. Regardless of the lack of coherency in the text, the book is a must-read (or more of a must-look-at) to anyone interested in the asylums of the United States.

Once again, Prof. Yanni has contributed a significant work to the literature on architecture and society with "The Architecture of Madness." Following her well-received study of Victorain museum architecture, "Nature's Museums," her new work vividly depicts the relationship among social views on mental illness, prevailing trends in the treatment of mental illness, and the institutions into which those sufferers were admitted. A reader can only agree with Cotterill and Solomon that Yanni's work is, on Solomon's words, a "masterful job of blending meticulous research and superb analysis with well crafted writing."

Carla Yanni was able to explain more than architecture in this book. She helped me understand the prevailing views on insanity and treatment of such in the time period. Powerful and thought provoking.

I bought 2 copies of this book - one for myself and one for a friend in the Mental Health field as it sounded as if it would be a nice addition to both of our Mental Health libraries.
The book, however, has some fundamental flaws in areas I have in depth knowledge of which causes me to question the accuracy of the areas with which I am less familiar.
The author clearly has a very limited knowledge of Psychiatry and Mental Illness from both an historical and modern day perspective. The book attributes the decline in populations in State mental hospitals from the 1950's on to among other things - the refusal by them to directly admit voluntary patients. This is strange as, at least in New York State - the institutions mentioned in her book were still admitting patients referring themselves directly from the streets well into the 1980's.

There are many other examples too numerous to list which betray her very limited knowledge of the field. The book would have been much better if it had confined itself to architecture and left out the author's almost "grade school need to write a report" attempts to explain mental illness and its treatments.

The author has, by trying to go beyond her knowledge base, turned what could have been a very good book into one which starts out with a great premise and ends with some pitiful speeches on why the author thinks these large facilities declined- decades before they actually did and her belief that psychiatric hospitals are not needed but ones for physical illness are.

Would recommend you borrow this book from the library to read as it is too expensive to own with its flaws.