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

Abstract

Leslie Topp Freedom and the Cage: Modern Architecture and Psychiatry in Central Europe, 1890–1914 University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017, 256 pp., 1 map, 3 color and 114 b/w illus. $99.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780271077109 Leslie Topp's Freedom and the Cage explores seven public psychiatric institutions built between 1898 and 1914 in the late Habsburg Empire, the Austro-Hungarian territories whose major cities included Prague, Vienna, and Krakow. The central idea of the book is that each of these hospitals offered a degree of freedom within a highly controlled environment. Such freedom of movement made the psychiatric hospital seem more “normal.” This paradoxical notion—that one could move about in a seemingly normal way even though confined—comes from Michel Foucault's influential work on the asylum in History of Madness .1 Topp warns that for architectural historians who work on institutions, “there is no escaping Foucault” (13), and thus her six-chapter, generously illustrated book also serves as an example of how to use the French philosopher's work as a historical source rather than as a theory to be wholly accepted or rejected. The seven hospitals at the center of Topp's book range in scale from 350 to 2,200 beds and extend in location from Krakow to Trieste. They exemplify the so-called villa system, a progressive arrangement developed in Germany that overtook the more oppressive corridor or “closed” system of design for mental hospitals by about 1900. A corridor-system hospital was a large, monolithic structure with repetitive floor plans featuring large wards and ubiquitous corridors. Patients were literally enclosed in one building, which gave the …