When Room becomes Cell: solitude and isolation in asylum architecture
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Monday 1 April 2019
(6 pm) - The Art Workers’ Guild, 6 Queen Square, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 3AT
- Lecturer: Leslie Topp
Leslie will explore the marked shift in the design of public, state-built asylums in Europe and North America 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 single room. At the end it was the shared dormitory. This shift happened for a range of reasons – which differed across time and geography – but it was never uncontroversial. The shift from single rooms to dormitories certainly wasn’t an unproblematically progressive or enlightened development, nor was it a straightforwardly regressive one. Single rooms could create spaces for oppression and isolation, but also for privacy and the projection of individual autonomy.
Lecturer
Professor Leslie Topp is an architectural historian. BA, Art History and Literary Studies from the University of Toronto; Graduate Diploma in Law from Oxford Brookes University; MA, Art History from Bryn Mawr College & PhD, Art History (1998) from Bryn Mawr College. Professor emerita of Architectural History in the Department of History of Art, Birkbeck College. Her teachingencompasses art, architecture, design and urbanism from 1800 to the present, with a particular focus on Central Europe around 1900. She joined Birkbeck in 2005 and was previously Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University and Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Her research has focused on the connections between psychiatry, architecture and visual culture. Author of a number of books, her latest article Emulation and Distancing: Asylum Architecture and the Prison in Britain and the United States accepted for Architectural History 2025. She initiated and co-led the Compass Project, an award-winning, ongoing programme in widening access aimed at forced migrants. Retraining in the law, in September 2024 will begin the Bar Course at the Inns of Court College of Advocacy with the Stella Cacoyanni Soulioti Scholarship from Gray’s Inn.
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