When Room Becomes Cell
This talk focuses on a contentious issue in the design of public, state-built psychiatric hospitals over the course of the period between about 1830 and 1910. At the beginning of this period, the standard spatial unit for patient care and accommodation was the cell or single room, a room intended for one person alone. At the end it was the large, shared dormitory. This shift happened for a range of reasons—differing across time and geography—but it was never uncontroversial. The cell represented a larger debate on the amount of freedom psychiatric patients should have, the difference between solitude and isolation, and the right to privacy.
Drawing on the rich textual legacy left by both psychiatrists and the people they treated and confined, this talk brought to life floor plans and photographs from historical institutions.
About the Architectural Historian
Leslie Topp is Professor of History of Architecture at Birkbeck, University of London. She has a particular interest in the connections between space, mental health, psychiatry, and in the history and architecture of carceral institutions across Europe and North America. She is currently working on two projects: a study of the role of single rooms, cells and dormitories in nineteenth-century asylums and prisons, and the links between carceral spaces and historic living conditions experienced by poor and marginalised people.
