Freedom and the Cage: Modern Architecture and Psychiatry in Central Europe, 1890–1914 by Leslie Topp (review)

“The media is the message”—these famous words by Marshall McLuhan come to my mind when reading Freedom and the Cage: Modern Architecture and Psychiatry in Central Europe, 1890–1914 by the American architectural historian Leslie Topp. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century and continuing for almost a hundred years, the expansion of psychiatric institutional care—the asylums— carried hopes of better care, treatment, and physical environments. The visibility and grandness of these buildings can be seen as a McLuhanian media designed to convey a message of care, treatment, and perhaps even cure to any person afflicted with mental illness, while at the same time reassuring the public there was enough surveillance and control.

How did these institutions emerge? What objectives, negotiations, compromises, and revisions occurred “behind the scenes” during the design process? By analyzing briefs, building processes, and architectural configurations, the author investigates thoroughly how this “media,” represented by turn-of-the-former-century psychiatric institutions of Central Europe, conveyed messages of care and treatment to people with mental illness. In the center of the story lies rich architectural material comprising drawings, buildings, landscapes, and documents of the building process. This is contextualized by adding two other areas to the story, influential in this institutional development: psychiatry (especially asylum planning) and regional politics. By doing this, the author enhances the richness of detailed accounts of the interplay and interactions of architecture and wider society. This positions the work in the contemporary strands of architectural history where architecture is part of a societal, political, and economic context and where importance is put on what buildings do rather than solely a matter of style.

Freedom and the Cage is an analysis of seven mental institutions established in the Austro-Hungarian Empire between the late 1890s and World War I. The book is divided into eight chapters, with thematic analysis of the seven institutions. Each chapter thus explores an aspect of the paradox of “caged freedom” (p. 11) and how this was represented differently by the institutions. Concepts such as freedom, regional politics, aesthetic rhetorics, utopia, spatial configurations, and boundaries are used as analytical lenses throughout the chapters.

The author argues how psychiatric institutions in the late Habsburg Empire underwent a process of reinvention as key cultural and political monuments. Architecture, urban planning, and spatial configuration were important parts in this process, and architecture especially was used to enhance the asylums’ importance and influence (in terms of material and semiotic impact), under the umbrella of how freedom, through control and design, could be manufactured and instrumentalized. The paradoxes of design are intriguingly shown as promoting an illusion of “freedom” to the patients, while exerting social and spatial control. One aim is to develop more deeply the richness of the interplay between architecture and nonarchitecture (i.e., psychiatry and regional politics). The built environments are here seen as “documents of an interaction” (p. 187) and not as a direct outcome of discussions among psychiatrists. Local and time-specific links between modern architecture and psychiatry in Central Europe are brought to the fore, as well as regional and national links.

The two analytical chapters at the end of the book summarize the investigation very well by highlighting two fundamental asylum features: the spatial configuration and the boundary. Through a spatial analysis (i.e., by looking closely into asylum plans), the author examines different ways of solving the paradoxical and dual problems of controlling the patients and giving them freedom. Ideas stemming from domestic architecture were drivers of the design, leading to other ways of solving the distributional aims of the architectural plan. The corridor was not seen (and still is not) as a device to produce a more progressive asylum architecture. The author shows convincingly how these controversies go far into the discourses of psychiatry and architecture. By...