Leslie Topp

Otto Wagner and the Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital: Architecture as Misunderstanding

The Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital, outside Vienna, opened in 1907. Its layout, and its church, were designed by the leader of the modern tendency in Viennese architecture, Otto Wagner. This article analyzes the psychiatric goals of the hospital on the one hand and Wagners architecture on the other as overlapping but distinct languages. I argue that Wagner picked up on aspects of the Utopian psychiatric rhetoric surrounding the institution, while ignoring more subtle and ambiguous tendencies toward integration with the wider world. The result was a mental hospital in the image of a model village.

Isolation, privacy, control and privilege: psychiatric architecture and the single room

Book synopsis: Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture and the Body brings together cutting-edge scholarship examining the myriad ways that architects, urban planners, medical practitioners, and everyday people have applied modern ideas about health and the body to the spaces in which they live, work, and heal. The book’s contributors explore North American and European understandings of the relationship between physical movement, bodily health, technological innovation, medical concepts, natural environments, and architectural settings from the nineteenth century through the heyday of modernist architectural experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s and onward into the 1970s. Not only does the book focus on how professionals have engaged with the architecture of healing and the body, but also how urban dwellers have strategized and modified their living environments themselves to create a kind of vernacular modernist architecture of health in their homes, gardens, and backyards. This new work builds upon a growing interdisciplinary field incorporating the urban humanities, geography, architectural history, the history of medicine, and critical visual studies that reflects our current preoccupation with the body and its corresponding therapeutic culture.

Architecture, Psychiatry, and Lebensreform at an Agricultural Colony of the Insane — Lower Austria, 1903

Abstract In 1899, the Haschhof Agricultural Colony was established on a hilltop as a satellite of the Provincial Insane Asylum at Kierling-Gugging near Klosterneuburg. At the Haschhof, patients and nurses lived in adapted buildings from a previously existing agricultural estate until a striking villa, designed by the architect Erich Gschöpf, opened in 1902. Using as a starting point the descriptions of the colony in the press as well as original photographs, this essay asks how contemporaries understood the Haschhof, and how psychiatrists wished it to be received and understood. It explores for the first time the history of the colony at the Haschhof and contextualizes its carefully conceived architecture, picturesque rural setting, paternalism, and agricultural work within larger psychiatric and cultural discourses. It is argued that the villa’s architecture, as well as elements in the presentation and reception of both Kierling-Gugging and the Haschhof colony as a whole, contained allusions to contemporary German and Austrian Lebensreform. Although heterogeneous and often divergent in their ideologies and manifestations, late nineteenth-century Lebensreform movements and some of the more progressive reform impulses within Austria’s Irrenpflege shared an idealistic belief in the curative potential of the land and labour. Yet, despite some strong superficial similarities between the two phenomena, on a deeper structural level, the Irrenkolonie and Lebensreform were fundamentally different. The Irrenkolonie operated from the top down, and embodied the vision of its founders and designers, which was then imposed on a passive, working-class, population. The Lebensreform settlements, on the other hand, were co-operative movements based on the equal participation of all its members, who were almost always middle class.