Editorial Review
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.
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Customer Reviews
I agree with sigdragon 
2007-08-12
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
Superb study of intersection of arhitecture, treatment of mental illness, and social norms 
2007-07-26
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."
Beautiful Scholarship 2007-06-30
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.
The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States 2007-06-26
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.
Questionable Value 2007-05-18
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.
